Getting a dance company up and running is a daunting task. But when you can call on the talents of some of the best dancers in Britain you are already halfway there. The remarkable thing about Rafael Bonachela’s new enterprise is how cohesive it already feels. This is a company with strong dancers and a vivid sense of personality.
As a choreographer, Bonachela has a glamorous CV: working with Kylie Minogue (he choreographed her Fever world tour); former associate choreographer at Rambert; winner of the inaugural Place Prize in 2004 (he used the £25,000 prize money to set up the new troupe). So it’s not surprising that the birth of Bonachela Dance Company has generated the kind of buzz that can guarantee substantial touring.
Its first production, seen at the South Bank this week, is a double bill inspired by the human voice. Ahotsak (it’s Basque for voices) is set to music by Berio, his Naturale, composed for violin, tam-tam and taped voice (and performed by two members of the London Sinfonietta). The mood is a million miles away from Kylie: slivers of mournful sound, dance that shimmers with despair.
Bonachela’s style is to insinuate movement so that it takes a while for the risk of its construction to become self-evident. His language, gender-blind and fuelled by disparate energies, has a muscularity that ebbs and flows.
There are three men and three women on stage but their pairings constantly shift allegiances, as does the choreography’s dynamic: confrontation and support; aggression and retreat. Bonachela loves to ignite his dancers like firecrackers, suddenly connecting them to a communal purpose, but he’s just as happy to place them in self-absorbed isolation.
Advertisement
Ahotsak is discomfited, on the edge, but like so much of Bonachela’s work there is an underlying sexuality that gives handsome physical presence to the jagged emotional intelligence.
Set Boundaries is more specifically placed. It opens with a video projection of Korean border guards (filmed in secret) and draws on the grim words of Sherzad Marco, “a Kurdish asylum seeker currently awaiting deportation in the UK”. The programme note also tells us that “all percussion sounds are taken from used or inert Israeli rounds and used Tornado shells from Iraq” (is there a point being made here?). The dancers are in underwear, looking like prisoners, or victims of torture. The choreography is blatantly violent, abusive and inconsolable. But its physical shape is too similar to Ahotsak’s, the text is often inaudible, and the film is so compelling that it’s hard to keep your eye on the dancers. And when you have Amy Hollingsworth, Antonia Grove and Theo Clinkard on stage, who wants to be distracted?