The first contemporary dance I really loved was made by Richard Alston. In the 1990s, I was going to dance class a few times a week and watching the smattering of companies that would tour to Newcastle, where I grew up. There was dance that was pretty or provocative or intellectually stimulating, which I enjoyed or appreciated, but the dance that really had my heart was by Alston, who has died aged 77.
I was a pianist, too (and later a music student at Sussex University, with its on-campus theatre where Alston toured) and it was Alston’s deeply musical instincts that got me. They were honed in the gramophone library at Eton, where he’d pull out records by Bach and Billie Holiday or surprise the grazing cows with a blast of Wagner. We had different backgrounds, but musical alignments: a love of baroque, late Romanticism, 20th-century modernism.
I saw his work performed by London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Rambert and his own company, formed in 1994. In the late 90s, Alston made two pieces to the music of Brahms, Waltzes in Disorder and A Sudden Exit, the latter set to piano pieces Opus 118 and 119, including some intermezzos that I’d played myself, or at least was trying to master. Alston’s dancers illuminated the music for me in ways I hadn’t heard myself, even though I’d played the pieces hundreds of times. There’s a deliciousness in seeing music you know so well becoming embodied before your eyes: all the neurones in your brain firing like mad in anticipation of what’s coming and the satisfaction of the response, but with the discovery of new layers and ideas thrown in. It’s a physical, visceral experience, and at the same time one where you can dissolve into an exquisite merging of the senses.
Alston also brought out something beautiful in his dancers, especially the men, in particular Martin Lawrance, Jonathan Goddard and Liam Riddick. It wasn’t about flashy virtuosity from the outside, but the ability to adjust the volume and retune frequencies within each step, the effect like the nuanced touch of a pianist, the bow strokes of a violin. His dance, with its clarity of line, lilting curves, elegant poise and sleek flight, wasn’t matchy-matchy with the music, or a visual version of the score. For him, music was an equal partner in creation. He was deeply respectful of the score, once telling me about being intensely irritated after seeing some dancers “frolicking around” to Steve Reich, with no sense of the music’s own history or intention. “You really have to treat music better than that,” he said.
Watching Alston’s work I always felt relaxed, even if the music was fast and flying (in busy baroque counterpoint in 2000’s The Signal of a Shake, say, or his own dance to Reich, 1990’s Roughcut), because of the sense of rigour underpinning the choreography, and the certainty and clarity of Alston’s craft, which allows the viewer to be fully in the moment knowing that everything’s taken care of. Yet although Alston may have come to be seen as safe, tasteful, restrained, he was actually a radical, especially as one of the first intake of contemporary dance students in London in the late 60s, at the forefront of forging this new art form in the UK. And he was also radical in his work and his bold musical choices: composers such as Ligeti, Boulez and Birtwistle – sometimes tricky music which he could make sense of, and give shape and grace.
When I met Richard, he was just as warm and graceful as his dance; a lovely man of thoughtful intelligence, curiosity and enthusiasm. For this would-be dance writer all those decades ago he was an inspiration, and he will be greatly missed.
