Article by:
Judith Mackrell
Ever since the 1980s, when Michael Clark was a muse to his early career, Richard Alston’s most beautiful choreography has, arguably, been created for men. Now, as he celebrates the 20th anniversary of his company, Alston’s birthday present to himself is a duet for two of his most outstanding dancers, Jonathan Goddard and Liam Roddick.
Mazur is set to a sequence of Chopin piano mazurkas, and, while Alston delves deep into their melodic beauty and exquisite ache, his choreography never wallows. With a movement that’s both sharply incisive and musically surprising, he gives each man a distinctive dance character: Goddard’s has a debonair lilt, his high sprung jumps counterpointed with a languid charm, while Roddick’s is a more stubborn, concentrated force of rapid turns and arrowy lines. Initially, they connect only through a glance or touch, through short, almost instinctive phrases of unison dance. But the heart of the piece is the pas de deux in which the two men, together, seem to sink inside the memory of a shared but wistfully distant past.
Martin Lawrance is another dancer who began his career with Alston. Now he’s the company’s associate choreographer and his five-minute Opening Gambit is a cracker. Driven by Julia Wolfe’s oscillating, percussive score, its 10 dancers cut across the stage in careening lines, swerving through the music’s beats, spinning inside its thrilling clash of drums. The energy is so high, the line of tension so tight you barely draw breath until it’s over.
There are two other new works – Ihsaan de Banya’s Rasengan and Joseph Toonga’s Unease, an edgy, inventive fusion of contemporary dance and hip-hop. It’s good to see Alston giving opportunities to new talent, and, as the evening closes with an exhilarating revival of his own Overdrive, the company has rarely looked on the more optimistic form.
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