Richard Alston Dance Company review – stillness, serenity and funk

Fifty years ago Richard Alston was a fierce, skinny boy with an arty fall of black hair who believed that dances should be choreographed with the same compositional rigour and purity as abstract art or music. His first piece, Transit, was four minutes long and it took four months to create.

Now approaching 70, Alston has long graduated to a more prolific mode of production. Yet over the years, as dance has fashionably merged with theatre and performance art, he’s never lost his belief in the potency of pure, undiluted movement. In Mid Century Modern, the last item in his company’s current programme, Alston collates extracts from five decades of work, and it’s touching to see – even as his dance language and musical choices have grown progressively more expansive – how faithful he has remained to his purist creed.

The earliest of the revivals, Nowhere Slowly, sees Alston occupying the compositional high ground still: every movement of this 1970 solo is etched strongly and sparely in space – precise circular runs that drill into tightly centred spins, leggy balances that drop into sudden, weighted stillness. A decade later, in his setting of Charles Amirkhanian’s sound poem Dutiful Ducks, Alston was widening his palette, floating long witty lines of dance that somehow managed to combine the hiccupping, anarchic rhythms of Amirkhanian’s text with a quasi-classical serenity. From there Alston’s language blossomed into the flamboyant, funky eclecticism of Gypsy Mix (2004), with its plundering of Indian, Latin and Balkan motifs, into the brightly resonating, choral architecture of Proverb (2006) and the gently farouche romanticism of Syrinx, his newly-created solo for Vidya Patel.

If Alston always trusted in dance to speak for itself, he’s also had an acute and loving eye for dancers – Siobhan Davies, Michael Clark and Jonathan Goddard are among those indelibly imprinted on his past works – and for his latest piece he channels the talents of Liam Riddick, Nicholas Bodych and Elly Braund into a quietly profound portrait of the composer Robert Schumann. 

Some sections of Carnaval are pure expositions of the music (played live by pianist Jason Ridgway), yet Alston has rarely been more humane and more subtly observant than in the sections where he choreographs the two contrasting sides of Schumann’s temperament – the yearning lines of Bodyche’s solos reaching into darkly troubled spaces while Riddick, as his professionally assured alter ego, scatters the shadows with fast loquacious footwork. Braund as Clara Schumann is sweetly pitched in the middle – alternately flirtatious and uncertain – but the best of the work lies in the duets between the two men; the questioning quality of their touch, their glances of complicity and interrogation sensitively conveying the composer’s internal drama of creativity, self-doubt and self-examination.

Opening the programme is the latest work from Martin Lawrance, formerly one of Alston’s favourite dancers and now his associate choreographer. I’ve always admired the “joinery” in Lawrance’s work, the fine, inventive detail with which he connects individual movements.

Here, working with two frenetic scores by Michael Gordon and Damian LeGassick, Lawrance appears to double the heart rate of the music, creating duets of slicing, dicing complexity, and solos that kick and buck from the sheer compression of their energy.

Cut and Run feels true to its title, a work constantly one step ahead of itself as it races towards its very satisfying finish.