Sydney Dance Company’s vibrant 2022 season gets underway with a bang when it opens the Sydney Festival with Ohad Naharin’s Decadance (January 6–9), a shape-shifting work that’s now more than 20 years old but looks different each time a different company performs it. Batsheva Dance Company premiered Decadance in 2000 and at the time it featured 10 excerpts from Naharin works from the previous decade. Over the years the excerpts have changed but it’s still, in the words of this highly celebrated Israeli choreographer, “an opportunity to look at our work from different angles”. The piece is open-ended, always evolving and audiences never fail to be thrilled by it.

Rafael Bonachela. Photo © Pedro Greig

Some festival-goers will have seen Batsheva itself in Decadance when the company came to Melbourne in 2015. Now the baton passes to the 17 members of SDC.

“I’m proud we will be opening the festival at the Opera House,” SDC Artistic director Rafael Bonachela says. New festival Director Olivia Ansell has an extensive background in dance so it’s an obvious match and Naharin is a choreographer Bonachela has always...