Following on from this year’s Helpmann success, SDC will offer two Bonachela world premieres in 2016.

2015 has been a spectacularly successful season for Sydney Dance Company, crowned by its clean sweep at this year’s Helpmann Awards, winning every gong it was nominated for. Such a consummately accomplished year has set the bar very high for the company, and a determination to meet the stratospheric expectations of its audience has clearly been front of mind while planning for 2016’s offering, announced today.

Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela cemented his personal reputation at the Helpmanns, not only for being a savvy and brightly inventive curator but also for being one of Australia’s most visionary choreographers. Off the back of 2015’s award-winning critical smash-hit Frame of Mind SDC are hoping to add to this year’s trophy collection with two world premieres by Bonachela in 2016.

Opening the season Lux Tenebris, meaning Light and Darkness in Latin, is described as following “deep, unexpected, visceral beats to discover a dark place where there is space for beauty and light.” Bonachela’s dance will be set to a newly composed “soundscape” by well established SDC collaborator Nick Wales.

Part of a double bill titled CounterMove, Lux Tenebris is joined on the programme of the company’s season opener by Alexander Ekman’s irreverently gleeful parody of the cliches of modern dance, Cacti. A prodigiously talented enfant terrible of the European dance scene, the 31-year old Swedish dance maker is known for his witty, tongue-in-cheek creations. The combination of Bonachela’s more emotionally earnest aesthetic with Ekman’s iconoclastic work should make for an illuminating and highly entertaining evening.

Alexander Ekman’s Cacti

In October, Untamed is another double bill featuring the second Bonachela world premiere of the year. Still in its creative gestation this work is yet to find a title, but draws on the choreographer’s affinity for music – a common starting point for Bonachela. For this piece Bulgarian composer Dobrina Tabakova’s Concerto for Cello and Strings will be the score. Completing the bill is Gabrielle Nankivell’s Wildebeest, which explores the primal concept that within us all are the ancient echoes of our wild, animal forebears. Nankivell, the sole female choreographer featured in 2016 season, is an alumni of SDC’s New Breed programme, which nurtures the next generation of Australian choreographers. Originally staged at Carriageworks in 2014, Wildebeest will now be re-worked for its debut on the main stage of the Roslyn Packer Theatre, but will still feature a driving, high-octane, elemental score by Luke Smiles.

In addition to its domestic programme, which features 78 performances at 19 venues across Australia, Sydney Dance Company will once again be flying the flag for Australian dance overseas. In April next year the company will revive the 2014 triple bill, Interplay, at Switzerland’s prestigious STEPS Festival before beginning one of the most substantial foreign tours ever embarked upon by the company, visiting seven European cities in total. Works by Bonachela, Australian choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, and Italian Jacopo Godani combine in this dynamic evening of contemporary masterworks.

Full details of Sydney Dance Company’s 2016 season can be found on its website.