A disintegrating dance duo depicts the erosion of time with music from The National’s Bryce Dessner

Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela invited director, designer and illustrator Clemens Habicht to create a film for the occasion of a new dance work, Impermanence. The concept for the piece came from a new cello composition titled “The Forest” from Grammy Award-winning musician Bryce Dessner, a member of American alt-rock band The National.

“The transience and fragility of human relationships, the world, and life became even more significant”

Dessner’s composition is a response to the fire that broke out in the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris last year, where thousand-year-old oak beams were destroyed in a matter of hours. The film depicts the temporality of all things through the transfiguration of a dance duo into marble torsos. While we are enthralled by their sculptural physicality and beauty, their bodies progressively deteriorate into a grey void.

“Having had to postpone the world premier of Impermanence in the face of the global pandemic,” says Bonachela, “the transience and fragility of human relationships, the world, and life became even more significant.”

The convergence of the recent devastating forest fires in Australia and the global pandemic has compounded the sense of the ephemeral in nature and beauty. “Laden with meaning and relevance in a new world,” he continues, “this film has evolved to face the frailty of an unknown future.”