Sydney Dance Company’s wildly popular Somos returns in 2025, rekindling choreographer Rafael Bonachela’s heartfelt paean to his Spanish origins. With a Melbourne premiere in The Show Room at Arts Centre Melbourne, followed by a return to Sydney at the Neilson Studio, the production is a tender but powerful expression of dance in its rawest and most moving form.

After selling out in 2023, Somos has been recharged with a new energy for its upcoming shows, though its passionate essence remains. Here are five reasons to make sure you’re in the audience for this landmark dance experience.

Radical intimacy

If there is one abiding theme of Somos, it is undoubtedly “intimacy”. In grand performance halls, it can be difficult for audiences to get a real sense of the physicality of dance – the grappling weight of bodies in motion. Somos places dancers in such proximity to the audience – in the relatively small space that is the round, with seating to all sides of the stage – that it is almost confronting, bringing a visceral immediacy to the performance and subverting the traditional divide between performer and viewer. During Somos, audiences will experience the minutest details of choreography, and the sheer elegance and precision of what the human form can achieve in the throes of dance.

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Bonachela’s bond with Spain

A world-renowned choreographer, Bonachela was born in Catalonia and has been Sydney Dance Company’s artistic director since 2009. Somos (which translates as “we are” in Spanish) is his sensual tribute to his homeland. The show’s music is defined by a strong Latin flavour, as is the choreography, a series of overlapping solos, duos and trios. This is the first time in his 25-year-long choreographic career that Bonachela has so explicitly created work that responds to Spain. As well as paying homage to the nation’s culture, he draws on the dance styles and traditions that informed his early career as a dancer there. This production can be seen as a biographical work of sorts, covering the life of one of Australia’s most charismatic arts leaders.

The spirit of Almodóvar’s “cinema of women”

As part of his embrace of those Spanish influences, Bonachela has taken cues from one of the great directors of world cinema, Pedro Almodóvar. Specifically, Somos emphasises strong women through its cast of elite dancers and the Spanish and South American musicians that feature on its soundtrack. From Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) through to Volver (2006) and Parallel Mothers (2021), Almodóvar has created what’s been described as a “cinema of women”, presenting multidimensional, resilient female characters across his films. The spirit of Almodóvar running through Somos will be clear to anyone familiar with the director’s oeuvre – and it must have been quite a moment for Bonachela when Almodóvar attended two Madrid performances of an early version of Somos in 2023.

Visual innovation

Somos may be informed by Bonachela’s life story, but he is far from the only key creative mind behind the production. Set and costume designer Kelsey Lee is central to the work’s visual character. Her approach has been to view the dancers’ costumes as a “collection” informed by the runway looks, boutique labels and contemporary trends of the fashion world. The resulting costumes have a striking sense of minimalism, which only adds to that sense of intimacy cultivated by Bonachela’s choreography. Also crucial is lighting design from Damien Cooper, which again is simple but highly effective in heightening the feeling of close physicality.

New music, new dancers

Somos was developed during a Sydney Dance Company tour of Spain in 2023 and premiered in Sydney later that year. The 2025 iteration sees the production evolve in critical ways, including new music whose selection was overseen by Bonachela. The 12 Spanish-language singers on its soundtrack range from pop star Rosalía, to South American folk singers Chavela Vargas and Lola Beltrán, to flamenco artist Estrella Morente and composer Sílvia Pérez Cruz. There is also a line-up of new dancers: Mathilda Ballantyne, Mali Comlekci, Sonrisa Hubbard, Eka Perunicic and Sam Winkler, all recruited this year and performing with the company for the first time. The shows offer audiences an intriguing opportunity to witness some of the country’s most accomplished talent, as well as dynamic new interpretations of Bonachela’s vision.

Somos runs at The Show Room, Arts Centre Melbourne, from March 13 to 23, and at the Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company, from March 27 to April 6.

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of Sydney Dance Company.