Richard Alston is not a fashionable choreographer, he doesn't grapple with any hot issues beyond the constantly evolving challenge of fitting together music and dance. Yet in a programme of new work that encompasses the eerie, thunderous drama of Gyorgy Ligeti's Volumina at one extreme, and Scott Joplin's piano rags at the other, Alston proves that the mainstream is a pretty interesting place to be.
Volumina is, in fact, breathtaking. Ligeti's organ score (which is coupled with two other shorter works) impacts on the stage like an electric storm, creating an atmosphere that alternates between ominous, sulphurous tension and a hectic, dazzling light. In the face of the music's elemental power the dancers scatter like lost souls, sometimes facing off the universe in defiant, whiplash moves, sometimes pressed close in consolatory duets. Choreographically this piece is spare, even minimal, yet Alston has rarely worked on such an epic scale, creating drama from the work's audacious alternations of scale and from timing so fierce it makes the air shiver.
In Devil in the Detail Alston follows a much more obvious path, tempted as so many others have been by the seductive strut and frolic of Joplin's rhythms. Yet amazingly he not only manages to avoid all the usual cocky ragtime cliches but even to make the music vivid, zeroing in on tiny specifics of rhythm, and bright nuggets of character. I loved the lazy, slutty woman's solo that opens the work, and even better the two guys who track each other throughout the rest of the piece, competing for the most dandified footwork, the most elegant cool.
For the past 11 years Alston has created virtually all of his company's repertory, but this programme unusually features a commission from dancer Martin Lawrance. Compared with the rest of the programme Lawrance's score for About-Face may seem a thin-blooded choice, a suite of baroque viol music by Marin Marais. But Lawrance (a talent to watch) finds a surprisingly passionate pulse within it, connecting lines of abstract movement into sudden, emotional encounters and knotting his dancers into vivaciously-articulate ensembles. The cast are superb. Blithely at ease they're the clinching reason to see a company that's never stopped believing that dance can fill and transform a stage.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0870 737 7737 Tour continues at Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury on April 7
