Dance / Twofold by Sydney Dance Company. At Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, until September 28. Reviewed by MICHELLE POTTER.

Sydney Dance Company’s Twofold begins by giving the audience a second look at Rafael Bonachela’s work, Impermanence.

Bonachela, current artistic director of Sydney Dance Company, created this work, in conjunction with composer Bryce Dessner, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was first seen onstage in 2021.

Then follows the thrill of a new work, Love Lock, from Melanie Lane who works across the world as an independent choreographer. Love Lock is Lane’s second major work for Sydney Dance Company, following on from the much-admired WOOF, which premiered in its mainstage iteration in 2019. Lane spent her early life in Canberra and has worked closely in recent years with QL2 Dance, Canberra’s youth dance organisation.

Each of the titles of the two works raises interesting questions in the mind of those watching, but neither really explains unquestionably the nature of the works as we see them. But then it has always been Bonachela’s belief that it is the members of the audience, not the choreographer, who decide on the meaning of any dance work.

Impermanence is extremely engaging and is performed to Dessner’s score played live onstage by the Australian String Quartet. Its choreography shows Bonachela at his most intense and relentless giving rise to the dancers showing their outstanding ability to bend and twist the body into remarkable positions while maintaining a lyricism and a strong connection with others onstage. They work with each other in duets, trios, quartets and often as a whole group in unison.

The work is lit by Damien Cooper and often the dancers and musicians are shadows. At other times they are dark figures in brighter surroundings. Always the lighting influences how we perceive the dancing, which comes to an end with a striking solo danced to a song from singer and songwriter Anohni.

Given Lane’s Canberra connections it is more than tempting to recall the strange role love locks have had in Canberra. In 2015 a growing collection of love locks, that is padlocks that represent everlasting love that are sometimes attached to a bridge before having their keys thrown into the water never to be retrieved, were forcibly removed by the National Capital Authority from the bridge leading to Queen Elizabeth II Island on which is housed Canberra’s carillon.

But Love Lock is a reflection on folk or community dancing, which Lane has said she sees as celebrating what it means “to connect with each other through our bodies and essentially what it means to be human”. In the early moments of the work the choreography is characterised by lines of dancers, dressed in shiny black, largely unadorned outfits, filling the performance space and working in a somewhat geometric fashion.

Slowly, however, this structured format gives way to movement that is more eccentric and as the work progresses dancers begin appearing in remarkable costumes from designer Akira Isogawa. The costumes are of various colours, often made with softly draped material, often quite sharply and unexpectedly protruding beyond the line of the body.

Love Lock was also lit by Damien Cooper and was performed to a driving score commissioned by Chris Clark. The movement continued to appear intense and individualistic with changing physical connections between dancers until the closing moments when a calm descended over the group.

Love Lock is a work for this century. It is brash at times but always demanding of our thoughts about humanity. A triumph for its choreographer and her collaborators.