Sydney Dance Company’s double bill Forever & Ever pairs two wildly different but thrilling works – with the dancers showing that they can take pretty well whatever is thrown at them and nail it with precision and flair, be it Antony Hamilton’s almost mechanistic movement or Rafael Bonachela’s more lyrical contemporary choreography.

Forever & Ever by Antony Hamilton. Photograph © Pedro Greig

The program takes its name from Hamilton’s new work Forever & Ever, commissioned for SDC. As the audience take their seats after interval for the world premiere, Jesse Scales – petite and shaven headed – is already on the unlit stage going through a series of moves. Many of the audience don’t tune into her, but what she is doing is intriguing. Wearing a loose grey and black tee shirt and black shorts, with some black markings on her legs, she moves individual parts of her body in separation, establishing the vocabulary for what is to come.

Then the lights snap on and the audience snaps to attention as the solo continues in silence; elbow bent, arms lifted, head thrown back, hips shifted, legs flipped. At one point, she lies flat on...