Sadler’s Wells, London
June 16, 2017
David Mead
Dance that’s about superb Cunningham-influenced technique and pleasing movement, and that’s wonderfully musical. Dance that’s not drowned in hi-tech projections or other whizzy supposedly special effects. Dance that doesn’t feel the need to resort to having the performers vocalise. Three cheers for Richard Alston. Unfashionable to some that sort of work maybe, but he and his company gave the full-house at Sadler’s Wells a truly enjoyable evening. Alston may have been making dance for almost 50 years, but he still a master of his craft.
The evening opened with Glint, a short piece made by Alston on the second-year students of the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. After a duet in silence in which the two dancers seemed to be feeling each other out, it bursts into colourful life, the young performers embracing well Alston’s very particular, very technical, style. Just a shame the unison was occasionally out and some of the straight lines not quite straight.
Photo Chris Nash
Martin Lawrence’s Tangent takes essential elements of tango – the relationship between two people, the closeness, the emotion – and fuses it with his own Alston-influenced style. It’s a dance for four couples who love, tease, fight and make-up to Astor Piazzolla’s Las Quatros Estaciones Porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aries), played live by Jason Ridgeway on piano. Having the piano on stage somehow presents as greater dialogue between the player, dancer and the music itself that is ever the case when it’s hidden away. If I had to pick a favourite couple, it would be Oihana Vesga Bujan and Liam Riddick in Winter, a dance that suggests a relationship that is less than smooth; a dance of icy distance that finally comes together at the end.
And so to Alston. Chacony takes its title from a form of musical composition particularly popular in the 17th-century. The work is actually a combination of two pieces, Purcell Chacony, to his Chacony in G minor from 1680, and Britten Chacony, to that composer’s String Quartet No.2 from 1945.
The Purcell sees the dancers in Peter Todd’s strikingly elegant burgundy frock coat-style dress. Reflecting the dance of the period, the choreography is most courtly and polite, perfectly ordered and perfectly structured. Think baroque masquerade. While the cast of ten occasionally come together in an outward-facing semi-circle, and perform as couples, for the most part the men and women dance separately, although their movement very much reflects one another.
Photo Chris Nash
The arrival of the Britten brings a brings a complete change of mood. Again, Alston visualises the music in a way so few seem able. Gone are the burgundy costumes and gone is the formality of court. Now clothed in simple off-white and pastels, the dance is fractious. Instead of being upright, bodies stretch and bend and dip to the floor. freer While there’s sometimes a decidedly edgy, uncertain feel to things, most noticeable is a recurring mournful, reflective tone. That’s all hardly surprising when one remembers that Britten composed the music shortly after travelling with Yehudi Menuhin to give a series of concerts in the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps. Bringing things full-circle, it ends with a return to that semi-circle, a return to order, and a reassertion of the human spirit.
Rounding things off, Alston’s Gypsy Mixture is one of those full of colour, full of energy, send-you-home-happy pieces. Pulsating dance meets the pulsating music of Electronic Gypsyland (Balkan folk meets techno meets DJs/mixers and more) in a joyous mix that makes you want to get up and join in. The ensemble sections are especially heady. The whole company danced with joie de vivre, none more so that the effervescent Nancy Nerantzi.