Brisk Singing, created late last year, opens the program in London. This for me is the most successful work of the three, and it's almost worth going for this alone. It is set on ten dancers to music from Rameau's Les Boreades which provides quite delightful music for dancing. The nearest point of reference in all this is Mark Morris, but Alston is quite definitely his own man. The choreography was cool and assured, polished but lyrical, and fitted to the music with intelligence. I particularly liked a gentle introspective passage, with the dancers lying on the floor under dappled lighting, as if on a lazy summer's day, an image which was returned to at the end. Lovely stuff, and very well performed. Elegant costumes and simple but effective lighting too.

The second piece was Red Run, recently commissioned by the Holland Dance Festival and premiered there in January. Heiner Goebbels' music (played live) is much harder going than Rameau, at least to my ears, and the work as a whole was not so immediately appealing as the opening piece, though it demonstrated a fierce energy at times. The final work was Rumours, Visions, to Britten's Les Illuminations. This was made in 1994 for London Contemporary Dance Theatre. Although it contains hints of narrative of the entwined lives of Rimbaud and Verlaine, it is more concerned with a powerful evocation of moods and emotions than story telling. Again, this was very well danced. My eye kept being drawn to Henri Oguike and Jason Piper - very clean lines.

The house was packed: the audience was much more of a mixture of types than I imagined, there were a number of older ladies who would looked quite at home at the ballet as well as the young in black with an imaginative range of body piercings. The company got a very enthusiastic reception, particularly for Brisk Singing, and deservedly so.