© Asya Verzhbinsky Alston 'Rumours' reviews Alston 'Stampede' reviews recent Alston reviews more Jane Simpson reviews

I find Alston such a frustrating choreographer: he chooses wonderful music and writes about it in his programme notes with perception and strong feeling - but that simply doesn't translate on to what we see on stage. The centrepiece of this programme, his Rumours, Visions set to Benjamin Britten's Rimbaud settings Les Illuminations, is all too good an example of what I mean. It's a dazzlingly brilliant piece of music, vivid, incisive and passionate, and from what he writes about it, it clearly means a lot to Alston. But what comes over on stage is, yet again, orderly and temperate. The love scenes between the dancers representing Rimbaud and Verlaine are reticent, almost timid, culminating in the chastest of embraces - where are the boldness, the passion that music and words are telling us about? It looked to me a lot more like Britten's own love story, which might indeed make an apt subject for Alston - though not, not to this music.

Richard Alston's Stampede
Photograph by Asya Verzhbinsky ©

Both the new works suffered to some extent from the same problems. Stampede is inspired by mediaeval Spanish music, played live on stage by the Dufay Collective. The first two sections are choreographed for the whole company, and could do with a bit more of a down-to-earth feel to them; the third is qute different, being set as a duet for Sonja Peedo and Martin Lawrence. They are presumably working out some emotional scenario, but it's impossible to tell exactly what.

The evening ended with Touch and Go, another tango piece to music by Astor Piazzolla. Shortly before the end one of the dancers, Jonathan Goddard, had a very brief solo - only a few seconds - which showed almost cruelly what was missing in the rest of the evening: life, in a word.

I really wish I could write more positively about the evening. There were, as there always are with Alston, many moments of tranquil beauty, but they are not enough to sustain a whole programme. I should say, though, that from the reaction of the audience I was in a small minority - there were cheers and whoops at the end from an almost full house, and many obviously found a pleasure and excitement which eluded me.