Sydney Dance Company closes 2024 with New Breed, its annual showcase for up-and-coming choreographers. This year’s program is generally strong.

First is Breath by SDC dancer Piran Scott, a work about the ocean and Australian coastal life, inspired by Tim Winton’s novel. It’s set to guitar music by John Butler (of John Butler Trio fame), mixed with ocean and breathing soundscapes.

Breath emanates flowing, feel-good vibes, helped by Butler’s friendly melodies. The dancers dip and turn like cresting waves, before holding each other and turning down to rest as if on the sand, eyes closed against a coastal sun. It’s wholesome, relatable dancing; the kind that makes you smile gently about life.

Next up is Full In/Half Out by Dean Elliott, who also hails from SDC’s dancer ranks. The piece taps into the dance world’s heady mix of perfectionism and athleticism, camaraderie and competitiveness. Demonstrating Elliott’s choreographic maturity, it features a deft use of costume, lighting and music. The movement is intriguing, combining high-octane bursts of physical power, body-bending flexibility and quirky humour. Timmy Blankenship’s solo is impressively swift, his long limbs seeming to blur.

The third piece is Say it again from Melbourne choreographer Siobhan McKenna. A dance about spoken communication, it has no score. Instead, the dancers’ clothing and arm bands are made of a plastic, percussive material that whooshes and rustles as they move. The choreography is clever, but the music-free format makes Say it again initially feel a little academic: not what you’d readily suggest for a friend with no modern dance exposure. This improves as the work progresses and the dancers incorporate spoken humour: a chorus of conversational “ah”, “hmm”, “what?“, and “oh!” exclamations, ultimately building to a satisfying finale.

Last up is leech, choreographed by Amber McCartney, also from Melbourne. McCartney’s work is inspired by body horror cinema, and leech draws from the 1978 sci-fi horror film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The dancers are costumed in shapeless black clothing, featuring a double head. They transform into amorphous, brooding shapes, but the movement doesn’t evolve much further, ultimately losing its disorienting touch and becoming merely repetitive.

New Breed is the last chance to see one of Australia’s most talented female dancers, in peak physical form. This is Emily Seymour’s final performance with SDC before she leaves the company after seven years.

THEATRE
THE HEARTBREAK CHOIR
Ensemble Theatre, November 4
Until January 12
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

Barbara knows one of the dumbest things governments have done is fail to champion music education. Making music improves our intellect, emotional acumen, general well-being and social cohesion. It’s also fun. That’s why Barbara formed a choir in rural Australia and, when that unravelled, formed another.

Barbara (Valerie Bader) is an energetic bundle of contradictions: a psychologist and ageing hippie who never lost her drive to make things happen. She’s treasured by her chums for this, and because she extracts the best from everyone. She is soft-hearted, yet harbours political ambitions, and is wise in a community where wisdom is not the chief commodity.

The late Aidan Fennessy’s play, which sadly premiered in Melbourne after he had died, is peopled with big characters who define themselves inside a speech or two. There’s Totty (Georgina Symes), who’s rich enough to buy her own plane, and whose bossiness can be forgiven, even if her inedible muffins can’t, because she’s generous and occasionally hilariously funny. To be successful in country politics, she explains to Barbara, “you just need to be fluent in ‘boofhead’.”

Aseni (Nancy Denis) is a recent arrival from Zimbabwe, where she was a doctor. Here she works in a deli while awaiting the official OK to practise, is heavily pregnant and exudes good-humoured resilience.

Carita Farrer Spencer plays Mack (christened Marianne), who uses her blue-tinged vocabulary with ample loquacity for two. This perhaps is why her 23-year-old daughter, Savannah (Tyallah Bullock), is mostly non-verbal, instead whispering in the ear of Barbara or her mother, including coming up with the new name, The Heartbreak Choir.

The heartbreak in question refers to a member’s suicide, which caused a schism in the original choir. The dead woman’s husband, Peter (Jay Laga’aia) is the town’s senior constable, and he’s just clinging on. His son, Beau (Jasper Lee-Lindsay) has withdrawn into his headphones and bouncing a basketball.

Ably directed by Anna Ledwich, Fennessy’s warm-hearted comedy only comes unstuck because he tried to make it two plays in one, introducing an intensity of drama at odds with the prevailing tone, as when someone sings sharp in a four-part harmony. The suicide of Peter’s wife, her backstory and its consequences for the choir and the town make the play feel as if it’s been pressure-cooked, rather than allowed to unfold on its own terms, when the dramas would have been smaller, and you’d have continued to sit there smiling quietly at the whimsy.

As it is, the imposed tumult seems to overwhelm the play, rather like a flood occurring somewhere not previously considered flood-prone. Emotions that were shrewdly nuanced in the comedy can become overblown in the drama, and not through the fault of anyone’s performances, with those of Denis and Bullock being especially strong.

The main performative flaw is a vocal one. Bullock is beautifully cast as the reticent Savannah, having a luminescence that’s the opposite of her mother’s genial offensiveness. She’s also supposed to be conservatorium-bound with an angelic voice that elevates the ensemble sound. But Bullock has a more modest voice than some of the others, undermining Fennessy’s divine plan that her singing would be the counterpoint to her social muteness.

Otherwise, the songs they sing work well under Sally Whitwell’s direction. Designer Nick Fry gives us a community hall with parquet flooring and a crooked picture of the queen, and the finale’s surprise is big enough to paper over the glibness of the resolution of the plot line’s dramatic strand.