_{Cover Image: Sydney Dance Company. Image supplied.}

Engine

Sydney Dance Company

Heath Ledger Theatre

5-8 August, 2026

Wow – the dancers are seemingly effortless in their trajectory, a human engineering marvel. It’s possible watching them fly through the air that they could give the fastest steam engine the world has known a run for its money. It was the LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard, in case you’re wondering, and it reached 126.1 mph (202.9 km/h) on 3 July 1938.

On this opening night performance, you could well imagine steam coming out of every pore of the SDC dancers, thanks to choreographers Rafael Bonachela, Fran Díaz and Melanie Lane, who no doubt would have fought to drive the Mallard had they been alive at the time. They certainly drive their dancers and the dancers seem to love it, as did the audience.

Melanie Lane is a much-acclaimed Australian choreographer, and her Love Lock opens the evening with a lone dancer glimpsed here and there amid low-lying fog, accompanied by the occasional birdsong. It’s a dreamlike opening which soon widens to include the 17 dancers who perform recognisable snippets of folk rituals from the past, which Lane confessed had so captured her imagination.

Love Lock, she says, was created to capture a speculative folk dance of the future, performed to song riffs and love lyrics compiled by her and composer Clark, with a collage of recorded percussion, cello, synthesisers, voices and flutes. This strong rhythmic soundscape so imbued the masterfully strong dancers you could imagine them to be the actual music notation swept from their staves across the stage.

Recurring motifs found them tiptoeing hand in hand in a long line, touching mouths and later thrusting hips. As the dance progressed the sparse black clothing was replaced here and there by Akira Isogawa’s colourful swathes of familiar cultural attire, such as feathered skirts and large chest ornaments, while being adorned by Damien Cooper’s penetrating lighting. Lane’s idea of a folk dance of the future is certainly compelling.

Fran Díaz is a Spanish choreographer who cites The Mass Ornament as seminal in his career. It was inspired by Siegfried Kracauer’s essay of the same name, which likened The Tiller Girls’ synchronised dance routines to what we would now probably call McDonaldization.

Well, after watching this 13-minute, physically demanding creation, exacting the utmost precision, force, strength and control from the SDC dancers, I think The Tiller Girls had it made.

The collectivity Diaz is said to be captured by is evident in the strong, army-like drills, sharp turns and formations, and exacting synchronisation of his choreography. Dressed in dark green long trousers and shirts and seemingly controlled by the hypnotic sound design of Tom Foskett-Barnes and Tanja Rühl’s quick-changing lighting, the 13 dancers snapped their limbs, bent their bodies, lifted knees, turned their heads and kept in line, as if not doing so would lead them to a quick court-martial. It was impressive.

Rafael Bonachela, inspired by the works of the 17th-century sage Matsuo Bashō, chose Bashō’s well-known haiku poem on which to base his work The Journey Itself is Home.

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon beholders.

Although Bonachela’s creation, which wrapped up the evening, didn’t give the SDC dancers much rest, it certainly captured their beholder status, caught up as they were in the moon’s magnetic pull.

Clothed in white, the loose materials fluttering and swirling, the dancers spin their bodies, lift their arms high, join together or dance in solitary splendour before it; as well they might, since set designer Kelsey Lee’s huge half-moon takes up 80% of the backdrop. Lit by Cooper’s shadows of night-time blues, it seems to wax and wane in its blend of glimmering silver and gold tinsel.

Well, the Mallard might have been fast in its day, but by this time of the evening, and in Bonachela’s concluding choreography, we’d have to be thinking of the speed of present-day bullet trains.

In the fastest and most fluid finale you may have ever seen, perhaps will ever see, dancers flew across the stage in obvious physical attraction to each other, performing passionate and death-defying duets, one after another, and then all in close proximity across the boards. The sight of such speed made you gasp, fear for their safety, and wonder at the trust each dancer gave to their partners. But their precision made it flawless. It was quite brilliant – like those engines. An exhilarating evening all round.