“Ab[intra],” the title of the work that Sydney Dance Company from Australia is performing at the Joyce Theater this week, is Latin for “from within.” But the Latinate words that the dance brings to mind are the ones that start with “circum,” or ”around.” The work’s most remarkable feature is how the dancers wrap around one another.
Rafael Bonachela, the company’s artistic director and the work’s choreographer, has endless ways to intertwine bodies. In a series of duets, two dancers — usually, but not always, a man and a woman — approach each other and entangle, tumbling end over end with limbs hooking on all hookable body parts: legs around waists, ankles around necks. It made me think of scorpions having sex.
This inventive braiding happens in trios, too — usually, but not always, combining two men and a woman. Often, other dancers stand around and watch. Their coming and going gives this 75-minute work its tidal rhythm.
The highly skilled ensemble is the frame for everything. Frequently, the dancers — costumed by David Fleischer in simple tights and leotards in black, white and beige — patrol the perimeter of the stage like soldiers or line up at the back like suspects. Sometimes the stage swirls with more than a dozen independent actors, spinning and sliding with an elastic energy that nearly spills over the edge.
They divide into complex groupings, so that three or four patterns happen at once, then snap into forceful unison; or they all take to the floor and arch up in a bridge shape, balancing on their feet and the tops of their heads. In one section, two groups mirror one another across the diagonal of the stage with machine-like intricacy and exactitude.
This is all an impressive display, but no more than impressive. The plucked strings and staticky electronics in Nick Wales’s spare score match the cold haze of Damien Cooper’s lighting, which dims when the dance softens. When the dancers line up at rear of the stage, a bar of light above them is segmented so that they can come forward one by one, each in his or her own corridor of illumination. This has the feeling of a prisoner’s brief escape into the yard. Nothing quite breaks through the chill.
It’s all quite chilly. When different music enters in, an interpolation of “Klatbutne,” a concerto for cello and string orchestra by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, the more vigorous score gives the dance more direction and drive. But it also seems tacked-on, and the change in music oddly brings into relief a sameness in the choreography. “Ab [intra],” expertly crafted, is ultimately all surface. It conceals rather than reveals what’s within.
Sydney Dance Company
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.