Exultant swansong from the master of modern choreography
Final Edition: Richard Alston Dance Company Sadler’s Wells, London EC1
★★★★★
In 2012, to much astonishment in cultural spheres, Arts Council England pulled its funding from the dance company founded and run by Henri Oguike, one of the most extravagantly musical contemporary choreographers this country has so far produced this century. Six years later, in its still-infinite wisdom, it decided to more than halve its funding for what, as it happens, is Oguike’s alma mater: Richard Alston Dance Company, founded and run by one of the most extravagantly musical contemporary choreographers of all time.
Ever the perfectionist, Alston felt he had no choice but to close his 25-year-old troupe down. So, its performances at Sadler’s Wells over the weekend were the last it will ever give. As of yesterday, Alston, 71, is now once again a freelance dance-maker.
The accurately, even tartly named (and who can blame him?) Final Edition was a generous bill of six pieces: two old, and four (including one by Alston’s longtime protégé Martin Lawrance) getting their Sadler’s premiere. Ideally, it might have delved further back into the RADC back catalogue, and on Saturday night there was a slight sense in the brisk little opener, Bari, of the performers (here, from the London Contemporary Dance School, for which the piece was created) finding their feet in the evening.
But, if their emotions and nerves were perhaps running unusually high, who could blame them either? Besides which, Final Edition showed in the main – happily, tragically – both a troupe of beautiful young dancers, and a veteran choreographer (or two), operating at full throttle.
Set to souped-up Puglian, spiderbite-curing pizzica music, Bari is nothing if not fun. Full of cathartic little hops and kicks, it’s as if the performers are trying to shake the offending arachnids from their toes. By contrast, Isthmus (2012), is a complex, very modern-feeling exercise in unity and disunity for six dancers, with Alston’s steps considerably more lyrical than Jo Kondo’s spikily modern score. A second, very Alstonian change in musical direction took us to one of the evening’s highlights: 2015’s Mazur. With pianist Jason Ridgway and concert grand at the back of the stage, waistcoated dancers Joshua Harriette and Nicholas Shikkis engaged in a bittersweet, platonic but profoundly affectionate dialogue that read like two dear friends catching up after a long time apart.
Playing out to Britten’s setting of Auden poems, this typically elegant whistle-stop tour through lands benign and bracing could almost be a chronicle-in-miniature of Alston’s thoughts from this past year or two. In a similar vein, perhaps, Lawrance’s swansong for the company, A Far Cry, eloquently turns the storm-tossed turbulence of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro into fiery movement.
As in Shine On, however, optimism reigns at the end. And, just as Lawrance’s parting gift to the company has done them proud, you suspect that the late Frederick Ashton – Alston’s greatest influence – would have approved of the evening’s final work, Voices and Light Footsteps. This fullcompany work is set to 10 pieces by Monteverdi: disparate, but here drawn together with such physical eloquence that they might be a single, intact oratorio. Certainly, it is hard to imagine how the company’s existence could have been brought to a fonder, more poetic, or more exultant close.
No further performances