A creative union at once forceful, sumptuous and dizzying.

With three unique works of scale and fine artistry, Sydney Dance Company presents Ascent, an inspired triple bill consisting of two world premieres from renowned choreographers.

Brimming with physicality, Ascent tempers contemporary classical with futuristic experimentation with three innovative works from local and international talents. Full of electric movement and emotional force, Ascent is an arresting portrait of contemporary dance and its potential to move, excite and activate audiences.

Brought to life by Sydney Dance Company’s superb ensemble, this program is a sensorial delight complete with inventive installations and magnetic musical scores.

Image credit: Pedro Greig

About the work

I Am-ness

Rafael Bonachela’s newest creation, I Am-ness, calls for the convergence of the moving body and creative mind, charting a world in flux where simplicity dominates, and expectations are subverted.

Bonachela revisits the powerful and emotive work of the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks, previously celebrated in the critically acclaimed ab [intra].

Vasks’ Lonely Angel sets a resolute yet hushed melancholy on strings, creating an ode to our shared sense of being, and canvassing the nature of existence with euphoric tenderness.

I Am-ness is an exacting search for the stuff of life.

The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird

Fiction is our new reality, and we devour it frenetically. Old structures are rupturing and the void is being filled by billions of personal stories. This piece poses many questions: the body’s meaning and its capacity to transform; the relationship with technology, and the connection with nature.

The Shell, A Ghost, The Host & The Lyrebird from Marina Mascarell, is the journey of some bodies towards theunknown, as mutant creatures in an oneiric valley. A place where the dancers abandon binarisms and old forms to embrace a transition process from what we were and are to what we will be. Bodies are penetrated by a constantly transforming place, decentralising the human, shifting our focus to still have a chance to survive. Hybridising bodies, containers of information, like shells, adapting to life in continuous transition; as lyrebirds, learning from the natural and the artificial world to survive; as hosts of a finite world, in an attempt to decode the old and understand where those ghosts will go or if we will succumb as well.

Forever & Ever

The Helpmann Award-winning Forever & Ever, by Antony Hamilton, premiered in 2018, laying “siege to the senses with a mighty display of shock and awe” (The Australian). Set to a sonically stimulating score by The Presets’ Julian Hamilton, Forever & Ever fuses a killer mix of dance, techno, high fashion and vivid lighting to hypnotic effect.

Exploring ideas of order, chaos, popular culture and human behaviour, this boundary-pushing work is a bold and thrilling theatrical experience that is not to be missed.

ASCENT - Sneak Peak

A fly-on-the-wall experience for lovers of dance.

Go behind the scenes of the Princess Theatre, and view the Sydney Dance Company’s rehearsals for Ascent:

• View the last 15-minutes of the Company warm-up class;
• Q&A with Sydney Dance Company Rehearsal Director, who will contextual information about the creative processes explored to create the works;
• and view part of a technical or dancer rehearsal.

Register via email rsvp@theatrenorth.com.au