Sydney Dance Company tours artistic director and choreographer Rafael Bonachela’s Momenta to WA

The freedom found through contemporary dance will forever be its drawcard for choreographer and Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela. Circumstance saw the Spanish-born Bonachela arrive relatively late to dance at the age of 15, his innate joy and ability to move only channelled into “proper dance lessons” once old enough to take a solo 45-minute train journey from his small home town of La Garriga to Barcelona. “It’s different now but, at the time in the 70s, Spain was going through a transition after Franco, so I was the first generation where a big shift in Spain was happening,” explains Bonachela, who has worked with Kylie Minogue through to Paris Opera Ballet. “It was my first opportunity to be taught technique, and there was a rigour and a discipline. When I made it as a dancer, I could not believe it . . . my life has continued to surprise me because so much has happened. I have to pinch myself.” As much as Bonachela values ballet technique, he never had a desire to dance in the role of a prince and all the restrictions such a part would place on him, preferring contemporary dance where he could perform as himself. Bonachela would go on to join London’s Rambert Dance Company, dancing from 1992 to 2004 and choreographing his first work for the company in 1999, Three Gone, Four Left Standing. Remaining based in London, he set up Bonachela Dance Company in 2006 to concentrate on his choreographic career, which included a commission to create a work for Sydney Dance Company after its newly appointed artistic director Tanja Liedtke died from a tragic road accident in 2007. The German-born dancer and choreographer had been due to succeed the company’s founder Graeme Murphy. “Tanja was a friend of mine from London. We were the same generation and the only reason I knew about Sydney Dance Company was because she had been given this role,” Bonachela says. Originally thinking he was only coming to Australia for two months, Bonachela felt at home in Sydney from day one, which is fortunate, given he was soon offered the opportunity to run the contemporary dance company that employs 16 full-time dancers. His vision was to not only continue to choreograph for Sydney Dance Company, along with commissioning Australian choreographers, but to take the company and its works to the rest of the world, its most recent international tour travelling to Barcelona, London, Belgrade, Portland, Oregon, Washington and New York, where New York City Ballet dancers in the audience had high praise for the world-class Aussie company. “They’re not seeing what other companies in Europe are doing, they’re seeing what’s happening in Australia, and when these independent Australian choreographers create work for us, they’re being supported in an environment that they deserve, with incredible dancers who are well-oiled and ready to go,” Bonachela states. “We happen to be called Sydney Dance Company, but we are proudly a national dance company.” Back in Australia, Momenta is Bonachela’s latest full-length work, and first for a while. It premiered in Sydney at the end of May and is touring nationally including WA dates this month at venues in Mandurah, Albany, Karratha and Perth. The physically demanding piece takes inspiration from its title — the force that keeps an object moving — proving fertile ground not only for Bonachela and his dancers, but collaborators Nick Wales on music, set and costume designer Elizabeth Gadsby and lighting designer Damien Cooper. “I always believe there are no guidelines to what the audience will experience, but what I can say about Momenta is that it’s going to take audiences on a journey into the poetry and the physicality of human bonds and I think that’s something that we are yearning for,” Bonachela explains. “Dance, in its essence, is abstract. I mean, you can throw some pantomime in there if you want to make it about something, but it is movement. “The beauty of it is that we’re all so different and I don’t want to tell people what to think. I don’t want to tell people what to feel. The world is filled with enough of that. I want to sit in a theatre, and I want to be able to just relax, open my mind and go on a journey wherever it takes me, and that seems to be happening with this work wherever we’re touring in Australia.” Momenta is at Mandurah Performing Arts Centre, July 20, Albany Entertainment Centre, July 24, Red Earth Arts Precinct, Karratha, July 27, and Heath Ledger Theatre, Perth, July 31 to August 3. Tickets at sydneydancecompany.com.