Two terrific scores, one with onstage string quartet, are the bedrock of Sydney Dance Company’s new double bill.

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.

The Music of Impermanence

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.

The Choreography of Impermanence

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 them closer to earth in ones and twos. A powerful duet for Dean Elliott and Luke Hayward that emerges from a searching solo for Elliott burns bright in the memory.

The ASQ – Dale Bartrop (violin) Francesca Hiew (violin), Chris Cartlidge (viola) and Michael Dahlenburg (cello) – was tremendous on opening night although will be seen at only a few more Sydney performances. The Partridge String Quartet steps in for most of the Sydney season then the ASQ returns for SDC’s Brisbane shows.

Love Lock: A Different Light

The known quantity of Impermanence is paired in Twofold with Melanie Lane’s new Love Lock, which shows the SDC ensemble in a very different light, although a no less demanding one. Bonachela’s clean-limbed, classically informed, super-fast movement gives way to something in which off-kilter folk dance mates with uninhibited rave.

Lane’s choice of composer, the British musician Clark, is impeccable. Less so is the decision to have the dancers layer sounds of their own over the recorded score. Apart from being mostly baffling the vocalising isn’t committed to confidently enough for comfort.

Lane’s imagination otherwise takes her and us to stimulating places.

An Ensemble Piece

Love Lock is very much an ensemble piece built on connection. When there are dances in unison, and there are a lot, they feel like dances everyone knows. They just don’t look like what your grandparents might do on a Saturday night out.

Clark’s score excitingly pulls together all manner of sounds and rhythms that then find their way into the bodies of the dancers, who pulse, bend, lunge and sway to the music. You could argue that Lane over-uses prancing around on the demi-pointe, something that’s not a new idea and has little to say, but that apart Love Lock is actually rather endearing.

A Tribal Vibe

The feel is tribal, high-spirited, free-wheeling and not without touches of tenderness alongside the bacchanalia. Best of all is when everyone joins hands for circle and line dances in the timeless way.

There’s a lot going on but it all happens in what feels the blink of an eye. Love Lock is little more than 20 minutes in length, heightening the hallucinatory atmosphere.

A Tough Industrial Look

The look – set and lights by Damien Cooper – is tough industrial and as far away from folk as you can get. After a flirtation with shiny, tight black outfits, costume designer Akira Isogawa adds colour, volume and texture with skirts, drapes, fringes and capes that look as if they were found in one of the more reckless op shops.

There’s also a bit of face jewellery. It all looks fabulous.

Twofold is at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, until September 28, before playing the Brisbane Powerhouse, October 17-19.