★★★★½ Bonachela’s Lux Tenebris proves the perfect foil for Ekman’s Cacti.

Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay, Sydney
February 29, 2016

It was a stellar 2015 for Rafael Bonachela and Sydney Dance Company, packed with new work, (including Bonachela’s own inventive Frame of Mind) which saw them winning awards and garnering praise left, right and centre. For SDC’s new double bill, aptly called CounterMove, they look set to remain firmly on course with a winning combination that, on the one hand provokes and entertains, and on the other confronts and moves its audience in a dazzling evening of dance.

In a double bill of old(ish) versus new, light versus dark, classic versus contemporary, Alexander Ekman’s Cacti is the known quantity. Created in 2010 for Nederlands Dans Theater, it has been in SDC’s repertoire for a few years now and, with its prickles as sharp as ever, shows no signs of losing its appeal. On the surface, a witty lampooning of contemporary dance criticism and our need to understand and explain the abstract, it takes aim at the pretensions of ‘those in the know’ – or more importantly, ‘those who pretend to be in the know’.

The brilliantly fragmented score is made up...