At the end of PPY23 Revealed there were huge shouts of joy from the young dancers who had just performed. For about half of them – and there were more than 50 in total – it was a graduation performance, their two years as participants in Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year program now done and dusted. They are undoubtedly relieved, excited and full of both hope and trepidation. Now comes the hard bit.

What careers some or all of them will have is in the lap of the gods. I won’t be assessing their chances here because it is extremely bad form to review performers who are not yet professional. They’ll get enough of that later, if they’re lucky. These are not the sunniest of times for dance criticism as space and budgets dry up, but that’s another story.

What can be talked about here is the choreography made for the occasion, all of it by professional dance-makers. PPY23 Revealed was a program of six works with nothing lasting longer than 22 minutes. The closer to Act I was a bit of an outlier, being an excerpt from an existing work, Anima, by SDC artistic director Rafael Bonachela. It’s the kind of glamorous contemporary dance SDC is known for and added gloss to the bill.    

The others were pieces made expressly for the more than 50-strong PPY1 and PPY2 cohort by Gabrielle Nankivell, Charmene Yap, Rachel Arianne Ogle, Jenni Large and the duo Lee-Anne Litton and Alejandro Rolandi. Litton and Rolandi used the smallest number of dancers – 10 – and their Desencuentro had the virtue of looking entirely unlike anything else on the bill. A point of difference was Trevor Brown’s score, created live by playing, recording and looping wind and percussion instruments. It’s not Brown’s fault that this process tended to pull focus. Desencuentro used contact improvisation as a way into looking at how family members interact and was perhaps a little more rewarding to do than to watch. The beginning, with dancers and musician in an inward-facing circle, knowingly and effectively excluded the audience and that sense of being shut out of the action continued to Desencuentro’s detriment.  

The works by Nankivell, Yap, Ogle and Large were made for very big groups, and understandably so. Their reason for being was to make something for lots of people so they could be shown to advantage. Each of the four was danced to an electronic score, no doubt providing invaluable experience in learning how to find and keep your place in a restless sound world. 

It was too much of a good thing really. Despite differences in approach to group dynamics, the deployment of individuals within the pack and how each choreographer’s movement language looked on the bodies, there was inevitably a sense that one was seeing variations on a theme rather than strikingly different works. And you really did have to read the program notes.

Nankivell’s Pretend That You Live Here concerned itself with time “and how we choose to stand in our world”. Yap’s Cymatics was impelled by how sound can transform and trigger. Ogle’s Into Forever was succinctly and entirely described as “Between this world and the next …” All looked terrific (bravi Bronte Hilder for costumes and Alexander Berlage for lighting) but their meaning wasn’t easily given up.

Large’s Synthetic Seduction was more forgiving in that sense. It did exactly what it said, which is perhaps how it earned its place as the program’s final flourish. Large explored “the seductive influences of media and popular culture” and did it very well indeed. It was an idea that was self-evident, soundly constructed and forcefully presented. 

For the students the experience of working with all these choreographers must have been powerful and I’d be happy to see all the dances again – just apart from one another.