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Richard Alston Dance Company, Sadler's Wells, London

Don't tango with me

Nadine Meisner
Tuesday 22 October 2002 00:00 BST
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The large, handsome expanse of the Sadler's Wells stage is a new opportunity for Richard Alston and his company, and they make the most of it. They move with an unexpected sweep and attack that gobbles up space and brings their outlines into even sharper focus. The frieze of four men, buoyant and spiky and fast, that opens the new piece Stampede is like a gunshot, followed by further energetic entries and exits for groups of men and women. Their lilting rhythms are driven by the musicians of the Dufay Collective sitting nearby, their floor patterns pointing to the fact that this is 14th-century Italian dance music.

But how unfortunate that this brilliant dynamic should twice be interrupted, when the action suddenly veers into the clichéd Alston territory of The Duet. Stampede's two duets are – as always – prompted by slow music and accompanied by atmospheric, shadowy dimness, Martin Lawrance and Sonja Peedo subsiding into a single spotlight to close the piece. The lyrical angles and mouldings have become so familiar from the rest of the Alston repertoire that they have become formulaic, virtually indistinguishable from one work to another. Come to think of it, Alston could economise his time by choreographing just a couple of duets that could then be slotted, unchanged, into different pieces.

Equally unfortunate is the connotation of the word "stampede", as a description of the impulse I sometimes have during an Alston programme, although the title is in fact derived from the musical form "istanpitta", which probably originated as a stamping dance. Thankfully, the second piece Rumours, Visions, made in 1993, is one of Alston's best, a perfect fusion of sung music (Benjamin Britten's setting of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Les Illuminations, sadly not played live) and theme (Rimbaud and his relationship with fellow-poet Paul Verlaine), given extra space to breathe by the Sadler's Wells stage. Martin Lawrence returns to the central role with all the linear clarity and concentration of before, and the duets here – with Andrew Obaka as Verlaine – have real dramatic tension and purpose. The group sculpture produced by the cast's eight assembled dancers has a clever ambiguity, evoking either citizens or city buildings. Lawrence's closing solo makes a satisfying ending, a fusion of closure and beginning, as Rimbaud departs for a new life in Africa.

Touch and Go is Alston's tango piece, except that Alston doesn't do tango, not conventional tango at any rate. Searing, let-it-all-hang-out emotion and tempestuous sex are just not in the Alston lexicon. Even Astor Piazzolla has been softened by Roberto Daris's arrangement, and the movement – barefoot tango, deconstructed, gentrified – is even blander. The company may be dancing bigger and better than in past seasons, but this was one piece inviting a stampede – it was touch and go in fact.

Touring to 3 December

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