Richard Alston's choreographic imagination tends to be kindled by music that harbours some secret strangeness or trauma, and his new work Stampede is no exception. The collection of medieval Italian dance pieces (played live by the Dufay Collective) that make up its score, clamour with the leaping, stamping rhythms of European folk tradition. Yet insinuating a seductive thread around that beat is the tremulous wail of north African music. The effect is hot, dark and a little dangerous. The most exciting moments in the work are, paradoxically, those where Alston roots his dancing in moments of stillness, and you can almost see the music stirring a fever in the performers' blood.
All through Stampede the drama lies in small-scale solos or duets, in which the choreography is charmed and teased out of the dancers' bodies by the music. What is less effective are the larger group sections, which ride with more exuberant straightforwardness along the music's beat. Not only are the steps themselves a little predictable here, but the costumes worn by the dancers harden the familiar into the obvious. Fotini Dimou's peasant designs make Stampede too much of a folksy period piece. It should have been costumed in a starker, modern mode, not to make the music and dancing appear contemporary, but to underscore their alien, anarchic distance from us.
It was a glint of anarchy that gave the edge to Tuesday's performance of Touch and Go (created earlier this year). The key to this piece lies in Alston's very personal reinvention of the tango, his expansion of its flick-knife footwork into a full-bodied dance form that has couples feinting and diving at tumbling speed within each other's orbit. Jonathan Goddard, a recent addition to the company, has Alston's fluid, freewheeling style to a T, but he moves with a snake-hipped wariness that carries a whiff of bars and barrios to the piece.
For London audiences it is a long overdue treat to see this work expand into the dimensions of the Wells stage, given the cramped conditions of the company's previous venue, Queen Elizabeth Hall. Alston's masterly Rumours and Visions (1993), set to Britten's song cycle Les Illuminations, also grows handsomely into the larger space. Martin Lawrance and Andrew Obaka as the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine dance from a passionate core that projects to the back of the auditorium, while Alston's expressive choral sections take on a sculptural richness in the space. This is a fine company, made even better-looking by the scale of theatre it deserves.
· At Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon, on November 1. Box office: 01874 611622. Then tours.
