Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney.
22 October 2025.
A single inhalation opens Sydney Dance Company’s Continuum. One dancer stands alone in silence, the first sound of the evening a sharp intake of breath – a spark of life, or perhaps the awakening of the body to motion. Two hours later, William Barton exhales into the space, his final breath reverberating through the Roslyn Packer Theatre like a benediction. Between these two moments, Continuum – a monumental triple bill uniting Rafael Bonschela, Tra Mi Dinh, Stephen Page, and Barton himself – traces the elemental force of breath as the pulse that binds creation, motion, and renewal.
Rafael Bonachela’s Spell begins as if mid-whisper: a body suspended between stillness and ignition. Developed during the company’s residency at Orsolina28 Art Foundation in Moncalvo, Italy, this new work unfolds in “spells” or vignettes, each orbiting around the alchemy between sound and movement. The opening sequence – a series of solos framed by thin bars of light at the back of the stage – conjures both intimacy and ritual.
The lighting (Damien Cooper), sleek and intelligent, slices through the darkness in rhythmic intervals. Costumes (Kelsey Lee) in shades of maroon-ish red, minimal in style, sculpt the body rather than conceal it, emphasising the tensile strength and precision of the dancers.
Bonachela’s collaboration with Bryce Dessner, Ólafur Arnalds, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Alice Smith results in a sonic tapestry of pulse and texture. Always a choreographer of musical instinct, Bonachela here works not solely with the melody, but with resonance – he locates movement in the undersong, the friction between beats. The result is hypnotic: dancers seem to breathe the music, each motion calibrated to its invisible threads.
A trio featuring Sophie Jones with two male counterparts is breathtaking in its clarity and grace. Jones continues to grow as one of the company’s most expressive dancers – commanding yet unforced, her presence seems to draw light toward her. Later, a final duet between Ngaere Jenkins and Sam Winkler rings the work to a quietly luminous close: two bodies in a cone of light, smoke puffing down from the ceiling and swirling around them, limbs entwined in an intimate storm.
In Spell, Bonachela pursues rhythm with new daring – shifting between muscular drive and measured restraint. He explores contrast not as opposition but as texture, letting quietness and stillness register as integral to the score. It is choreography that breathes: the intake before release, the poised moment of creation.
Where Bonachela’s Spell breathes inwards, Tra Mi Dinh’s Somewhere between ten and fourteen exhales. Expanding on her 2023 New Breed work, Dinh transforms this meditation on dusk into a fuller, more immersive experience, from six dancers in the original season to 13 – one that reveals a choreographer deeply attuned to both visual poetry and kinetic logic.
The dancers burst into movement from the first instance, moving across the space in costumes (designed by Aleisa Jelbart) that shimmer through gradients of blue, echoing the deepening hues of twilight. Under a restrained, even light (Alexander Berlage), the effect is painterly – as though the beginnings of dusk itself has settled on the bodies in motion.
Dinh’s program note describes the work as “a study on dusk…harnessing the dancing body to magnify and disrupt our experience of linearity, tension, and expectation.” These themes resonate not only visually but philosophically: her interest in impermanence, presence, and cyclic transformation recalls the Buddhist lens she grew up within. This is dance as meditation – not emotional catharsis, but embodied awareness.
The ensemble work is extraordinary. Dinh has a sculptor’s eye for spatial balance: dancers form clusters, ripples, and waves that move across the stage like breathing organisms. A reimagined canon sequence – one of the work’s high points – unites precision with flow, the dancers shifting between grounded strength and airy suspension.
Though the company has had limited time to internalise Dinh’s unique physical vocabulary – her abrupt shifts in tempo, her play between absurdity and control – which need some time to settle in as the season progresses, the work’s internal coherence and serenity shine through. Dinh’s movement language has matured into something unmistakably her own.
Somewhere between ten and fourteen offers audiences not confrontation, but rest – an act of gentle witness. It invites stillness in an age of over stimulation. Breath out: release, reflection, continuation.
The second half of Continuum belongs to the elements. Unungkati Yantatja – one with the other, choreographed by Stephen Page AO in collaboration with composer and Yidaki master William Barton, is an act of profound listening – to Country, to ancestry, and to one another.
A vast suspended boomerang arcs above the stage, a horizon and a return. Below it, Barton stands in near-shadow, his Yidaki’s low resonance interlacing with strings performed live by the Omega Ensemble. The music, drawn from Barton’s late father’s Kalkadunga songline, carries a vivid sense of landscape – the sweep of birds over desert plains, the breath of wind threading through creeks and tall grasses.
Page’s choreography rises organically from this soundscape. Dancers tread softly, as if moving through sand or air. Every gesture feels ceremonial, charged with care. The connection between Barton’s breath and the dancers’ movement is almost cellular – a living correspondence of inhale and exhale, of vibration and motion.
The vision – of entwined breath, shared sound, reciprocal healing – is what animates Unungkati Yantatja. Dancer Ryan Pearson, himself connected to Country through Biripi, Worimi, Minang, Goreng, and Balardung ancestry, is magneticto watch. His movements carry an unmistakable weight of inheritance – the kind that is learned, not choreographed.
The work ends not with a flourish but with Barton’s exhalation – the breath of the earth itself. It is both ending and beginning, a return to the intake that opened the night.
Special mention must go to Naiara de Matos, who appears in all three works and delivered each with remarkable focus and integrity. A consummate professional, she navigates contrasting choreographic worlds with ease, bringing technical precision and emotional clarity that became a quietly compelling throughline across the evening.
Across its three works, Continuum forms a cycle: inhale (Spell), pause (Somewhere between ten and fourteen), exhale (Unungkati Yantatja). Together, they propose a cosmology of motion – one that encompasses individuality and community, art and ancestry, human and elemental.
Bonachela’s curatorial hand is evident in the symmetry: three choreographers from different generations, each grappling with time, transformation, and the unseen rhythms that govern us. The evening’s title proves apt – not a linear journey but a continuum, and ongoing conversation between bodies and breath.
Sydney Dance Company’s connection – to itself, to its lineage, and to the land beneath its stage – is rather special this season. Continuum is more than a performance: it is a living cycle of renewal, a reminder that to breath is to create, and to exhale is to give something back.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
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