I’m expecting Richard Alston to be angry, dejected, or at least a little perturbed. The 70-year-old choreographer recently announced he would be closing his company next year, not out of choice, but because of Arts Council England funding cuts. The company had just celebrated its 25th anniversary, and 50 years of Alston being a choreographer, the quality of work as fine as ever. Alastair Macaulay, former chief dance critic of the New York Times, called it “unequivocally the grimmest news for British dance this century”. It seemed utterly sad, at this stage in Alston’s life and career, for him to have the rug pulled from under his feet.
But Alston is not angry. In fact, there was an element of hara-kiri: Alston was part of the decision. His company’s funding is tied to that of the Place, the dance organisation where he is based, and the ACE stipulated that the money allocated to Alston from the pot should be more than halved, effectively killing the company. “I knew that if I didn’t agree to do this, there was a threat that the Place would not get its funding,” he says. “The issue is that, technically speaking, the Arts Council has no method to fund an older artist.”
We meet in an office next to Alston’s dance studio, surrounded by years of VHS tapes of performances waiting to be digitised. He is tall, generously bearded and elegant, although a little less so thanks to the medical boot he’s wearing, having snapped his achilles tendon. It’ll take six weeks to heal, he explains, “so I will definitely be wearing this to Buckingham Palace.”
Ah yes, Buckingham Palace. Around the same time that his funding was cut, Alston was awarded a knighthood – talk about mixed messages. “That really warmed my heart,” he says. “It’s incredibly supportive.” He and Matthew Bourne are the only contemporary choreographers to have been knighted. “I got this letter in my rather scruffy hallway. When I opened it I just screamed.”
Alston is sanguine about his company’s fate. “My energy is directed to making sure we don’t dwindle away. That we have another season as exciting as anything [before]. We started the spring tour in Bath and the audience went wild. Quite elderly people going wild, which was exciting. I think it’s partly because they’re beginning to understand that we won’t be here for ever.”
Alston is also regularly stopped at the theatre for selfies by teenagers who are studying his work. He is an enormously important part of British dance, one of the country’s first homegrown contemporary choreographers. His instinctive musicality (whether using Scarlatti, Brahms or Terry Riley) makes his work easy to watch, but it is also full of rigour, detail and nuance, a sense of line and classical proportion and a lilting, curving grace.
He spent his early years in Paris, where his father worked for the British Council. “We used to go to the Cirque Medrano. I wasn’t interested in the acrobatics per se, but I loved seeing these people moving.” He went to Eton, where the school’s record collection provided his musical education and he excelled in ballroom dancing classes.
Alston dropped out at 16, around the same time his brother bought him tickets to see the Bolshoi Ballet at the Royal Festival Hall in London. “I found it pretty bizarre but I was fascinated.” Mikhail Fokine’s Chopiniana pas de deux “made my heart beat faster” and he was hooked. At Croydon ’’School of Art, he would miss evening lectures to take the train to Covent Garden for cheap seats at the Royal Ballet. “We all knew each other,” he says. “I see people now, distinguished elderly gentlemen, ‘Oh, remember when we were in the gods together!’” The dance obsession became all-consuming. “I decided, this is what I want to do, put my pencil down and put on some tights and get moving.”
This gangly young man took some classes with Ballet Rambert, and soon after, New York’s Martha Graham Company came to London and Alston saw a note in the programme saying dancer Robert Cohan would be staying behind after the tour to teach. Alston went along, and the members of the class became the first performers in London Contemporary Dance Theatre. Six months later, when they needed new choreography, Alston made some. “I am absolutely the arch example of being in the right place at the right time,” he says. The company’s co-founder, Robin Howard, took a shine to him. “We came from the same sort of background. We both got out of public school and wanted to do something very different.”
Alston went on to co-found Strider, Britain’s first independent dance company, and spent two “absolutely wonderful” years in New York in the late 70s studying with Merce Cunningham. For six years, he was artistic director at Ballet Rambert (promptly changing its name to Rambert Dance Company). He was politely sacked from Rambert in 1992, when he was 44. “So there was a very clear sense that there was going to be something new. Whereas at 70, a lot of people think I’ve chosen to retire and that’s that. I haven’t!” He wants to continue making work. “My only nervousness is that I have put myself about so little,” he says, referring to the necessary freelance hustle. “I have never written to companies saying I’m the most marvellous choreographer. I’ve been allowed to get on with being in the back room. But if I stay there I could just disappear.”
For now, there are this season’s performances, and new work to make for the final tour. “I’m trying to make sure there is something joyful,” he says. “When I was younger, I was always the difficult one in the middle. There’d be something jolly by two choreographers and then there’d be me in the middle. And then, when I made pieces like Roughcut [set to Steve Reich’s Electric and New York Counterpoint] and the audiences all cheered, I thought, I rather enjoyed that! It’s not so undermining of your integrity, is it?” He learned a lot from the early work of choreographer Twyla Tharp, who made complicated dance to pop music. “You can be lighthearted about things and be very serious,” he says. “Like Fred Astaire.”
Sometimes, young choreographers ask Alston what he does when he gets stuck. His honest answer is that he doesn’t, because he always has the music. “I say to them, don’t sit on the floor and bite your nails. Make something.”
“I’m not really into deep concepts and things,” he says. “I have a tremendous love of skill. My involvement with youth dance shows me that young people love it too … jumping, turning. It’s only when they go on a degree course that they think, oh, I can’t do that any more, I’m supposed to do something more thoughtful.”
Do Alston’s interests, in fluent dancing, skill, speed, craft and music make him unfashionable? “Yes, probably,” he says. “I have no worries about that. I think the things I believe passionately in are timeless.”
In a cruel stroke of ageing for a man whose life’s work is so intimately tied to music, Alston is losing his hearing. “The upper register is very bad,” he says. “It’s profound.” That must be very difficult, I say. “Yes, but thank God I’ve listened to so much music. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m hearing music or remembering music.” He’s fine working with small groups in the studio, less so in bigger spaces. “When I go to theatres and parties I just practise my most warm, warm smile.” And it means he doesn’t go to concerts any more. Instead, he goes to galleries and reads copiously. “It’s quite hard to see the furniture in my flat because there are books all over the place.” He lives near Hampstead Heath, north London – alone because “I’m an absolute workaholic – I’m like a sort of monk. All those years ago at art college there was a rather impatient fellow student who once said to me, Richard, you’re like a helium-filled balloon tied to the Earth by a tiny string called dance.”
Alston has no intention of cutting that string, hoping that there are companies – and no doubt there will be – “who’d be interested in taking a risk in letting an elderly deaf man loose on their dancers.”
“I’m confident of my own resilience,” he says. “Whatever it is I’m going to find to do, I will find a way of enjoying it.” He knows it’s been a privilege to pursue his passions for so long. “I’m a very lucky, and a very happy man,” he says. “Whatever happens they can’t take that away.”
Richard Alston Dance Company: Quartermark is at Sadler’s Wells, London, 1-2 March. The company is on tour until 21 March.
