Dance finds a perfect partner in Venice

Italy's scattered, underfunded contemporary dance scene may struggle to survive, but it can still lay claim to one of the world's best dance festivals. Venice's Festival Internazionale di Danza Contemporanea, which has been running since mid-May, was set up through the largesse of the larger Art Biennale, and it continues to be subsidised handsomely from crumbs that drop from an entourage of art world sponsors. Being funded by the visual arts doesn't make this festival feel like it's a poor relation, though. In the 2010 programme alone it's showing Bill T Jones, Crystal Pite, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Sydney Dance Company and William Forsythe, plus a dozen or so other companies taken from this year's featured regions – Canada and the Pacific Rim. Aside from being a ridiculously lovely place to find yourself in, Venice is an ideal festival city. Performances are divided between eight venues, most of which you can walk to. And in all the surrounding bars and restaurants you can end up bumping into most of the festival regulars – dancers, choreographers, punters, critics, theatre programmers – including several talent-scouting Brits. On Saturday afternoon, on the pavement outside the Teatro Piccolo, William Forsythe was having a quiet solo lunch while a crowd gathered outside the box office for the choreographer's big appearance (he was receiving the Venice Golden Lion Award for a lifetime's achievement in dance). And if the audience ended up being disconcerted by Forsythe's thank you speech – a list of gnomic speculations on the epistemology and politics of dance practice — they were more than compensated by the work that followed it, a performance of NNNN, the male quartet made by Forsythe back in 2004. At 19 minutes this was almost a sketch, constructed out of a casual-looking lexicon of slapping, patting and stroking , which the dancers made with their own and each other's bodies. But as the piece intensified, and they began to interlock their limbs into a kind of tangled cat's cradle, the rhythm, placing and timing turned hair-raisingly virtuosic. That was Saturday afternoon in Arsenale. Friday night's show was closer to the centre of the city at the pretty little Malibrand theatre, near Rialto, where Sydney Dance Company were performing Rafael Bonachela's We Unfold. This is the first work of Bonachela's I've seen since he was invited to Australia to direct SDC, and there's no question that he's risen to the challenge of having his own large-scale, fully funded company. It was an unbroken 60 minutes of pure dance, created for a cast of 16 and set to Italian composer Ezio Bosso's First Symphony. Against Daniel Askill's video backdrop of stars, and galaxies, burning flame and falling water, Bonachela's choreography appeared to travel through masses of time and space, accumulating an astonishing variety of visual and emotional perspectives. If there's a weakness in the piece it's Bosso's tendency to over-write, and, combined with the lushness of the choreography and video, the effect can be overwhelming. But I've never seen Bonachela so confidently in charge of his own choreographic inventions, handling both large ensembles and small duets like a master. Star of the company was Amy Hollingsworth who followed Bonachela out to Sydney. But sadly for everyone, especially for her, the enormous bouquet that was handed to her at the end of the show was SDC's version of the Golden Lion: something to mark the end of a career. Hollingsworth, who is just 34, has packed a lifetime of extraordinary dancing into her short career. But she's about to retire; her body can't take the pain any more.