Richard Alston’s new work is ostensibly a story about music, about the journey that took Domenico Scarlatti from his Neapolitan home to the courts of Portugal and Spain and exposed his still modest baroque talent to the free, fierce and vivid rhythms of Gypsy music. Ten of the resulting sonatas, bright and clamorous, accompany An Italian in Madrid. Yet Alston also uses Scarlatti’s music to tell a story of his own, casting the kathak dancer Vidya Patel among his 10 contemporary dancers and creating a new hybrid dance out of their very different styles.
Patel is an astounding stage presence – spinning soundlessly across a flood of Scarlatti notes, collecting herself into a resonating stillness.
Her dark expressive glance is an instrument in itself and she has clearly inspired Alston, who is at his choreographic best when playing with the two styles, inserting air and light into the gravity-bound footwork of kathak, using the latter’s courtly constraint to give classical definition to his own language.
Alston is becoming a rarity in modern dance, not simply because his choreography is so profoundly shaped by music but because it relies so little on extraneous effects – elaborate lighting or stage design. His two companion works, Mazur and Brisk Singing, have a similar focus, their emotional effects wrought out of a deep, intimate engagement with their Chopin and Rameau scores. But the same is true of Alston’s co-choreographer Martin Lawrance.
In his latest work Stronghold, Lawrance builds a primal urgency out of pummelling moves, careering spins and runs, yet his choreography remains meticulously pinned to its Julia Wolfe score. A duet unravels to near stasis, a line of dancers explodes suddenly from the back of the stage – and it’s the precision timing of that moment that makes your heart turn over.
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At Sadler’s Wells, London, 30 March. Then at Churchill theatre, Bromley, 21 April. Box office: 020-3285 6000.
