The return of Rafael Bonachela’s Impermanence, made in 2021, also sees the return of the Australian String Quartet at some performances, playing live the score it co-commissioned from Bryce Dessner for this work. What a treat.

Impermanence grew out of discussions between Bonachela and Dessner about two catastrophes caused by fire: the bushfires that devastated Australia in the summer of 2019-2020 and the blaze that roared through Notre Dame in Paris in 2019. The cathedral is due to re-open at the end of this year; the scars from the immense suffering in rural Australia are more long-lasting.

In Dessner’s music can be heard premonition, agitation, flickers of fire, flashes of lightning, sorrow, anguish, action, meditation and, finally, quiet resolve. It’s where the emotion of Impermanence is mostly strongly expressed – there, and in Damien Cooper’s gorgeous lighting with its evocations of passing hours and days, the glint of fire and the darkness it causes.

Impermanence. Photo © Pedro Greig

The dancers look magisterial in a piece that blows them off and on the stage like glowing embers. For the most part they are rarefied beings but from time to time Bonachela brings...