“Raf had not even been to a pop concert before working with me”, said Kylie Minogue, “so it was even harder for him to think up a choreography lasting two hours. I adore him, his ideas and the freshness with which he interprets music. I was inspired on seeing his work, his movements and his choreography take shape. Avant-garde movements within a pop context; it was exactly what I hoped to find”.

When two years ago the idea of founding his own company was still a project, no less than 24 theatres in Britain and Europe booked his future shows. At the same time, he was appointed artist in residence at the South Bank Centre. And after just one year from its foundation, the Bonachela Dance Company was nominated for the 2007 National Dance Awards Critics Circle prize for the modern repertoire section.

Square Map of Q4, the last work by the Spanish choreographer, expresses all his fascination for movement. Using memory as a starting point, Bonachela explores the world of childhood memories, the force with which they shape our lives, causing something intimate to collide with the intensity of physical movement and a powerful imaginary high tech that plunges the choreography into a deluge of decibels.

The main backbone of the show is the “soundtrack” of Square Map of Q4, which bears the signature of Marius de Vries – producer and author of the greatest successes of recent times (Bedtime Stories and Ray of Light by Madonna), friend and collaborator of Björk, of Massive Attack, of Rufus Wainwright, as well as musical director of the film Moulin Rouge and author with Nellee Hooper of the soundtrack of Romeo + Juliet, both films that have established Buz Luhrmann as a director of worldwide fame.

“With my staff”, affirms Bonachela, retracing the genesis of the work, “I have tried to draw a map of memories, places, emotions, sensations and colours, everything we have experienced in our lives. Each of us has then used this map to intervene personally and to give life to the performance – dance music and video images.”

Presented two months ago at the South Bank Centre in London, the critic for The Guardian wrote: “Over the last ten years, the choreographers have been at the forefront of the digital revolution to test how much of their extremely human form of art can be combined with the new technologies. It is common nowadays to see dancers work alongside virtual products, or see live bodies transformed by video projections into atoms of luminescent pixels without gravity. But Rafael Bonachela has transformed the first line into a battlefield, with a piece in which he exposes six dancers to a violent storm of high-tech sounds and images. In choreographic terms, Square Map of Q4 could not be more human, since movement becomes the deposit for fragments of dreams, memories, emotions. At times, Bonachela’s dancers fold themselves into childhood forms, as though seeking shelter in a tender past. Others are crucified by desire and torment in a desperate attempt to survive” (Judith Mackrell).