Up close is right. It’s likely you’ll never get nearer the spectacular Sydney Dance Company bodies than this. 

SDC is usually seen in the conventional 900-seat Roslyn Packer Theatre just across the road from the company’s home in Sydney’s Walsh Bay. Up Close: Somos is staged in SDC’s Neilson Studio for a maximum of 150 people. Intimate? You bet.

The low rectangular stage with little banks of seating on each of the four sides has a whiff of the boxing ring about it. It’s there in the way dancers enter and leave the space via a narrow strip between audience and stage. It’s in the forensic observation of a hard-breathing body strenuously at work for the gratification of others. It’s in the skin-on-skin contact between those bodies as they grapple with one another, holding, releasing and going back for more.

SDC artistic director Rafael Bonachela has gone to his Spanish roots for Somos (it means “we are” in his native language). The dozen songs by Hispanic artists that drive the work have the unmistakably sensual, earthy sound of the Iberian peninsula and give full-throated voice to desire and sensation.

These are the impulses that give form to Bonachela’s intense, muscular suite of dances. It’s a loose shape to be sure, but clocking in at only 50 minutes Somos has no time to feel baggy.

It’s arranged speedily into a series of duos and trios – men with men, women with women, men with women – punctuated by a few larger numbers. There’s a peppy unison quintet for women and a quieter interlude with the 14-strong company seated at the edge of the stage, spaced so each person gives a kind of private performance for the audience members closest to them.

The one solo, for luminous SDC veteran Jesse Scales, is a lovely interior meditation to Loca. It’s sung with gorgeously transparent tone by Silvia Perez Cruz and draws the audience in with emotion and vulnerability not greatly found elsewhere.

Somos feels essentially voyeuristic, a situation given a big assist by Kelsey Lee’s costumes. It’s a given there will be lots of flesh but Lee ups the ante with fishnets, lacy knickers, peek-a-boo holes and, arrestingly, a pair of briefs with cut-outs in the back that comprises Riley Fitzgerald’s entire wardrobe.

Damien Cooper’s elegant lighting design apart, the look says Somos is mostly about sex. Bonachela’s choreography says sex is mostly combative. The title number, sung by whiskey-voiced Chavela Vargas, is for two women (Naiara de Matos and Sophie Jones) who can’t be together and can’t be apart. Another duo (Madeline Harms, Emily Seymour) is to Volver, Volver, a love song of abject desperation.

Bonachela’s taste in singers, it must be said, is formidable. Volver, Volver will introduce many for the first time to the extraordinary Buika, whose soulful, husky instrument is transporting.   

The lustrous Perez Cruz is heard again in Gallo Rojo, Gallo Negro (Red Rooster, Black Rooster), the soundtrack to a sexy – and yes, combative – face-off between Piran Scott and de Matos. 

De Matos, a standout in a no-weak-link cast, looked all the better for being dressed by Lee with restraint, a quality that might have been useful in Bonachela’s closing.

Danced to Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas (sung by Estrella Morente to keep to the Hispanic theme), the duo for Fitzgerald and Dean Elliott has Women in Love-style machismo that takes the program’s people-in-love trials up a notch too high. 

Somos ends on November 18. This review first appeared in The Australian.