Richard Alston Dance Company
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
FOUR STARS
Musically, this triple bill is rooted in the past. Choreographically, it is vividly of the moment, with works by Richard Alston and Martin Lawrance reminding our eyes (and ears) that some energies, emotions and experiences are timeless.
Brisk Singing (1997) is actually Alston revisiting his own past – not that there’s anything dated about the lithe spring and snap of dancers whose purple, red or grey costumes add another visual element to the patternings on-stage. Rameau’s jaunty musical impulses are met with flashes of courtly, even balletic, brio spliced into a context of airy pastoral merriment. As the music shifts into grander mode, Alston responds with a final duet of tender sinuosities that simply luxuriate in the sounds.
Franz Liszt’s tendency to luxuriate in the attentions of his copious female followers caused the love of his life, Marie D’Agoult to end their relationship. This emotional tug-of-passion takes on a cataclysmic physicality in Martin Lawrance’s Burning, with Liam Riddick and Nancy Nerantzi in visceral thrall to an attraction that matches the intensities of Liszt’s Dante Sonata (played live, with wonderfully nuanced attack by pianist Jason Rirdgway).If their parting is harrowing, there is earlier poignancy when Nerantzi becomes one of Liszt’s adulatory harem – a sublimation that neither love, nor pride, can sustain.
Alston’s Nomadic is new in intriguing ways: it’s his first collaboration – choreographer Ajani Johnson-Goffe provided some of the movement for this bold foray into hip-hop forms – and it’s his first encounter with the Urban Gypsy Music of the Shukar Collective. Pulsing electro-backbeats, raw, almost keening vocals of long ago lyrics – and Alston celebrates his company’s 20th anniversary by hanging loose, his dancers’ elastic bodies throwing cool shapes. The way of the new stepping out with the past.
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