Dance

‘How could my life get any more surreal than to have Tina Turner send me an email?’ Rafael Bonachela is recounting how he ended up spending a month in Turner’s company last November.

‘She was putting together this private performance and she wanted a choreographer. I was supposed to go work with her for seven days.’ However, after their first day together, she pronounced: ‘I want him here all the time.’

Bonachela could hardly say whoa. ‘To be alone in the same room with Tina Turner, to see such a positive energy, was fantastic. I made every effort to give her everything I could.’ Feature continues

Unexpectedly, and much to his own surprise, Bonachela had first been lured into the pop world via an invite from Kylie Minogue in 2002. At that time he was a member of Rambert Dance Company, where he danced for 14 years. He hardly knew what Kylie sounded like, but her ‘people’ had seen a show at Sadler’s Wells that included one of Bonachela’s dances and they instantaneously insisted on co-opting him.

‘Are you sure I’m what you want?’ he asked. ‘You know,’ he explains, ‘successful pop choreographers find a formula, make it work and use it again and again. Why not? But that’s not me. I can’t do that.

‘I think, in the end, that’s why people like Kylie and Tina – and believe me I turn down thousands of other offers – want to work with me. They want a part of me that is different from any other commercial choreographer.’

That’s the glitz and the big bucks, but there’s also a totally different side to him, to be revealed on June 13. That’s when he unveils BDC – Bonachela Dance Company – his new six-member troupe at Queen Elizabeth Hall. Born in Barcelona in 1972, Bonachela started training when he was 15. ‘I’d been making dances since I was little with kids in the street, but I didn’t know that it was called choreography’. He moved here when he was 19 to train at the London Studio Centre.

A year later he was hired by Rambert. In 1999, Rambert’s director Christopher Bruce was choreographing a dance that involved only half of the company. Bonachela asked if he could take the other half down the hall and try to come up with a piece of his own. Bruce agreed. A couple of weeks later it was ready for an audience. That turned out to be the first of the nine dances he would create for Rambert. In September 2004, Bonachela scooped the inaugural Place Prize. Sponsored by Bloomberg, it netted him £25,000. ‘When I won, I knew I could pay everyone who was involved and I could get a manager two days a week.’

The prize also got him thinking about founding a company of his own. Of course that meant abandoning the security of a job with a major company. There are plenty of precedents: Tetsuya Kumakawa dumping the Royal Ballet, Michael Clark walking out of Rambert, Henri Oguike leaving Richard Alston.

Bonachela’s choreography has a full-throttle intensity that pushes dancers to extremes. ‘It’s very physical what I do,’ he says – that’s one of the century’s understatements. BDC’s debut programme is called ‘Voices’ because both of its new works revolve around scores that contain singing. Luciano Berio’s ‘Naturale’, a score for viola and tam-tam (played live on the stage), is melded with a tape-recorded singer. The other dance is to a commissioned score from Matthew Herbert. ‘I asked him what have you never done that you would like to do? I wanted him to be what I want to be – challenged forever.’

An indication of Bonachela’s top-dog status is that even when his new company was nothing more than a blueprint, nearly two dozen UK and
international theatres opted to book it for performances this autumn. Reflecting on the gains from Kylie and Tina, he says, ‘I still wear the same clothes, I haven’t been to the Seychelles, I don’t have a car, I still live in the same flat, but my life has changed; I’m able to fulfil dreams, and that’s a better payment for me than any amount of money.‘I’m scared to death about my own company, but I couldn’t be more excited. I’m happy to be challenged. Yeah, this is what I need to do.’