Rafael Bonachela - Harper's BAZAAR November 2022
As soon as RAFAEL BONACHELA learnt how to do a plié, the dance world came calling. Now the artistic director of Sydney Dance Company, he credits his international success to having an insatiable creative curiosity
In a school playground in the tiny Spanish town of La Garriga, 40 kilometres north of Barcelona, a well-worn cassette of Michael Jackson’s new hit “Thriller” plays on repeat from the tinny speakers of a small boombox. Ten-year-old Rafael Bonachela is teaching his friends the moves: claw hands to the left, right, left; walk for three; claws right, left, right; walk back for three.
Bonachela is now an internationally renowned choreographer and the artistic director of Sydney Dance Company, but back in 1982, little Raf had no idea that this game, which he called Make A Dance, was an indication of how he would spend the rest of his life. He’d never even seen a live performance. “There was no dance school; there were no musicians or dancers in my household,” he says. “I was just a kid who absolutely loved dancing and singing. I didn’t know that what I was doing was called choreography.”
Born in 1972, Bonachela is the oldest of four sons to textile worker parents. “They worked to give us the best they could,” he says. “If there had been a dance school [in town], my parents would have sent me there. They really supported it.” When he was 15, his father drove him to Barcelona for his first dance lesson. “Learning the steps — ‘This is a plié, this is a chassé’ — I was like, Oh my god, I want to become a dancer.” Bonachela’s parents let him enroll and from there, success came fast: two years later, despite not being fully trained, he got his first job at Lanònima Imperial, a contemporary dance company in Barcelona. “I didn’t know what a contemporary dance company was,” he says. “Suddenly, I was performing in Paris, in Hungary, in Italy, doing these really weird things with weird music.” As he toured Europe, Bonachela was exposed to other international companies and decided to pursue a scholarship with London Studio Centre. Again, success was quick: upon his graduation in 1992, he joined London’s Rambert — one of the world’s leading contemporary dance companies.
For the next 12 years, Bonachela rehearsed and toured with Rambert, performing for some of the most accomplished choreographers of the time: Merce Cunningham, Ohad Naharin and Christopher Bruce, to name a few. In 1997, the company director gave Bonachela the opportunity to choreograph a work, which was immediately taken into the company’s repertoire. “That was the beginning of becoming absolutely obsessed with choreography,” he says. In 2003, he was appointed resident associate choreographer.
Bonachela credits his success to hard work and luck, but mostly to having an open mind and incurable curiosity — which is exactly what led him into the world of pop music. “I got a phone call from Kylie Minogue and her creative director, William Baker. That was something I never expected, but that became 10 years of an incredible relationship,” he says. Bonachela choreographed the video for “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”, as well as two of Minogue’s world tours, Fever and Showgirl.
He also never expected he would be living in Australia as artistic director of Sydney Dance Company, a role he has held for the past 15 years. He had been living in London for 20 years when SDC invited him out as a guest choreographer. Coincidentally, they were in the midst of a global search for a new artistic director. He decided to go for it. “When we’re talking about dance, I’ve been everywhere,” he says, “but when you walk into Sydney Dance Company, you’re like, What is this? You’re on the ocean — there is nowhere like this in the world. Now, the fact that I’m running this company that can keep inspiring audiences and also challenge the expectations of what dance can be is a big part of what I love doing and who we are.
“Choreography is about all of the theatrical elements coming together into a whole,” he continues. “You structure the movement in time and space through dance, but I’m always thinking about how that will interact with all of the other elements: I’m thinking about the feeling, the lighting, what the dancers will wear. The success of that is what connects with an audience.”
The creative process is different every time: sometimes it starts with existing music, sometimes it’s a poem, sometimes it’s a conversation, sometimes it’s a movement. “The journey is different, but there’s as much [intuition] as there is discipline and routine,” he explains. “If I’m in rehearsal and inspiration is flowing, that’s fantastic, but I also have a process I follow in case it doesn’t.”
Bonachela’s works usually incorporate two signatures: mercurial movement and unexpected collaborations. One of his greatest influences is Merce Cunningham, who, he says, “was a leader in collaborative choreography”. Cunningham worked with the composer John Cage, the painter Robert Rauschenberg, and the musician Björk. “How he brought the visual arts and music together … It was always a a sensory showcase,” Bonachela says. “That’s always influenced me.”
Bonachela has long held an affinity for fashion. For his current work-in-progress, titled Summer, Bonachela is collaborating with Romance Was Born; for a film created during the pandemic titled Years, the dancers wore costumes by Bianca Spender (the work was dedicated to her mother, Carla Zampatti, a great patron of the arts); and earlier this year, he was named Cartier’s first Australian friend of the maison, with the French jeweller flying in pieces for a duet performed at Sydney’s Phoenix. “Cartier was looking for a way to get involved with the arts in Australia — they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years in Europe,” he says. “There’s so much of what I do as a choreographer and as an artistic director that’s what Cartier is about — they really value individuality and curiosity.
“I really believe that contemporary dance is one of the most moving experiences audiences can have,” he adds. “For me to be able to get more and more people to share that transformative experience is really my driving force and what keeps me going.”
This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.