The Patterns Beneath Us: Sydney Dance Company’s Engine Makes the Invisible Visible.
- Jun 25
- 4 min read
The most revealing moments in dance are often not the ones you remember seeing.
They are the ones you remember feeling.
A shift in atmosphere. A sudden tightening of attention. The inexplicable sense that something has changed on stage before you can identify precisely what it is.
Sydney Dance Company's Engine, which opened at the Sydney Opera House this week, is full of such moments.
Not moments of spectacle, although there is plenty to admire. Not moments of technical bravura, though the dancers possess that in abundance. Rather, moments when the choreography seems to expose an invisible structure beneath ordinary experience.
A relationship.
A crowd.
A ritual.
A memory.
Something usually hidden suddenly becomes visible.
The title initially suggests machinery. Motion generated through force. Yet as the evening unfolds, another interpretation emerges. Human beings are constantly creating formations around themselves - social, emotional, cultural. We organise ourselves into partnerships, communities, traditions and stories. We inherit patterns, abandon them and invent new ones.
The three works that comprise Engine approach this phenomenon from different directions, but each returns to the same fundamental subject: the space between people.
Melanie Lane's Love Lock, the evening's most unpredictable work and arguably its most pleasurable.
Lane has described the piece as a kind of folk dance for the future, though what unfolds feels less like futurism than cultural archaeology conducted in reverse. The work imagines traditions that have not yet happened.
Akira Isogawa's costumes are extraordinary. Richly textured and impossible to place within any single historical moment, they transform the stage into a world suspended between ceremony and invention.
Clark's electronic score pulses beneath everything with relentless energy.
The choreography borrows from ritual while refusing nostalgia. Gestures recur, mutate and reappear in altered forms. What begins as communal celebration occasionally acquires the atmosphere of courtship, then worship, then something closer to collective dreaming.
The work's great insight is that traditions survive not because they remain unchanged but because they remain useful.
Every generation inherits a collection of gestures and stories before deciding which to keep.
Lane captures that process beautifully.
Nothing here is preserved.
Everything evolves.
Fran Díaz appears less interested in what a single body can express than in what becomes visible when many bodies begin thinking together. In The Mass Ornament, choreography functions as a form of social cartography, mapping the invisible forces that draw individuals into patterns of belonging, resistance and mutual dependence.
Inspired by Siegfried Kracauer's famous essay, the work examines the patterns that emerge when bodies move together. Yet unlike many works dealing with collectivity, it avoids treating the group as either utopian or oppressive.
Instead, Díaz observes it.
Groups gather.
Groups disperse.
Groups reorganise.
What stays with you is not the discipline of the formations, impressive though they are, but the moments when the choreography allows tiny fractures to appear in the surface - brief reminders that every collective pattern is ultimately composed of individuals carrying private histories. What lingers are the tiny deviations.
A dancer arriving a fraction later than expected.
A body resisting complete synchronisation.
A momentary hesitation rippling through a formation.
These details become meaningful because the work understands something fundamental about human behaviour.
Perfect unity is rarely the goal.
Negotiated unity is.
The stage begins to resemble a social organism continuously adjusting itself.
At various moments the dancers evoke religious processions, protest movements, sporting crowds and urban commuters. Different contexts, perhaps, but remarkably similar physical behaviours. The work becomes less about choreography than about coexistence.
How do we move together without becoming the same?
It is an old question.
Díaz gives it contemporary form.
Rafael Bonachela's hypnotic The Journey Itself Is Home begins from a vantage point inspired by the musings Matsuo Bashō's poetry, though it would be a mistake to think of the work as a dance about travel.
It is more accurately a dance about transition.
About those stretches of life where nothing has quite settled into place.
The choreography unfolds with a remarkable lack of urgency. Not slowness exactly, but patience. Bodies draw together and drift apart. Encounters occur without obvious consequence. Pathways emerge and disappear.
What is striking is the absence of destination.
Most narratives are structured around arrival. Someone wants something. They pursue it. They either succeed or fail.
Bonachela seems uninterested in that architecture altogether.
Instead, he focuses on what happens in the middle.
The uncertain territory between departure and arrival where identities loosen, assumptions dissolve and perception becomes unusually acute.
Bryce Dessner's score contributes enormously to this atmosphere. It expands and contracts like weather, creating conditions rather than emotional instructions. The dancers do not appear to perform to the music so much as inhabit it.
Watching the work, we found ourselves thinking about Bashō's observation that every day is a journey and the journey itself is home. It sounds simple until one realises how rarely contemporary life allows for such a perspective.
Bonachela's choreography insists upon it.
What ultimately distinguishes Engine as a Gesamtkunstwerk is not the quality of its individual works, impressive though they are.
It is the conversation that develops between them.
Lane explores inheritance.
Díaz explores coexistence.
Bonachela explores transition.
Together they map a surprisingly complete picture of contemporary life.
How we change.
How we belong.
How we remember.
Leaving the theatre, we found ourselves thinking less about choreography than about patterns.
The patterns we repeat.
The patterns we resist.
The patterns we carry without realising.
Dance has always been uniquely suited to revealing such things because it deals in relationships rather than objects. A painting can depict a crowd. A novel can describe a ritual.
A painting can preserve a moment. A novel can reconstruct one. Dance asks us to inhabit it while it disappears. On opening night, Sydney Dance Company did precisely that - the invisible became visible.
And that remains one of the most extraordinary things art can do.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Sydney Dance Company.
