Alston Dancers Return to London Looking Crisp and Defiant

United Kingdom   Various composers, Alston At Home:  Richard Alston Dance Company, The Place, London, 10.06.2015 (JO’D)

Opening Gambit

Dancers: Elly Braund, Oihana Vesga Bujan, Jennifer Hayes, Eilieh Muir, Nancy Nerantzi, Ihsaan de Banya, Nicholas Bodych, Simon Donnellon, James Muller, Liam Riddick
Choreography: Martin Lawrance
Music: Julia Wolfe – Dark Full Ride Part 1
Lighting: Zeynep Kepekli

 

Brisk Singing (duet)
Dancers: Maeve McEwen and Michael Parmelee

Choreography: Richard Alston
Music:         Rameau – Entrée from Les Boreades
Lighting: Zeynep Kepekli
Costume: Jeanne Spaziani recreated by Laura Brinker

 

Rasengan
Dancers: Ihsaan de Banya, Nicholas Bodych, Oihana Vesga Bujan
Choreography: Ihsaan de Banya with input from the performers
Music: Ryoji Ikeda
Lighting: Zeynep Kepekli

Costume:Inca Jaakson

 

Unease…

Performers:  Ihsaan de Banya, Elly Braund, Oihana Vesga Bujan, Jennifer Hayes and Nancy Nerantzi
Music: Orin Norbert of Soul-hop – Celesta’s Interlude
Lighting: Zeynep Kepekli
Costume: Inca Jaakson

 

Mazur
Dancers: Jonathan Goddard, Liam Riddick
Pianist: Jason Ridgway
Choreography: Richard Alston
Lighting: Zeynep Kepekli
Waistcoats:  Peter Todd

 

Overdrive
Dancers: Ihsaan de Banya, Nicholas Bodych, Elly Braund, Oihana Vesga Bujan, Simon Donnellon, Phoebe Hart, Jennifer Hayes, James Muller, Nancy Nerantzi, Liam Riddick
Choreography: Richard Alston
Restaged by: Martin Lawrance
Music:         Terry Riley – Keyboard Studies # 1
Lighting: Charles Balfour
Costumes:  Jeanne Spaziani

 

Lined up at the back of the stage for the start of Martin Lawrance’s Opening Gambit, the dancers of Richard Alston Dance Company (at home after a five-month tour celebrating its twentieth birthday) look almost defiant. With very bare arms and legs, some of them arranged contrapposto, they seem to be stamped with a label saying ‘New’, or ‘Improved Formula’. It is an impression that lasts the whole evening. Across six dance pieces of different styles (four of them premieres and most of them brief) the company and its guest dancers show remarkable degrees of crispness, clarity and confidence.

Under Zeynep Kepekli’s overhead lighting the Richard Alston dancers as a group make their eight-minute long, opening gambit on a smooth, grey floor. Lawrance, the company’s Associate Choreographer and Rehearsal Director, sets them leaping and spinning and throwing movement from their bodies to the clashing cymbals of Julia Wolfe’s nervy score. For Brisk Singing (duet), a work by Richard Alston from 1997, Kepekli’s lighting is softer, and from the side. The costumes gesture towards the fashions and fabrics of the eighteenth century, but the focus is on the dancers’ arms which are again left bare. Maeve McEwen and Michael Parmelee, from the University of Michigan, received several cries of ‘Bravo!’ for their assured lifts and balances in these five, gentle minutes of movement to the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Rasengan, the second premiere of the evening, is the first work to be choreographed by Richard Alston Dance Company member, Ihsaan de Banya. He has chosen to make it a trio, danced by the interesting combination of Oihana Vesga Bujan (a dancer you might call ‘hard’), Nicholas Bodych (a dancer you might call ‘soft’) and de Banya himself. As a first work Rasengan has its uncertainties, and the ending is rather flat, but it shows the ability and the desire to explore the way bodies move. It begins with its three performers swaying as a group on the spot to the sound of electronic beeping, buzzing and crackling. Bodych’s malleable torso will later adopt a concave form. Vesga Bujan will place her head on his chest as if to listen for vital signs. Zeynep Kepeli’s lighting places the piece in the abstract context of a red on black or black on red, Mark Rothko painting.

The movement that Joseph Toonga, co-founder and Artistic Director of Just Us Dance Theatre, brings to the Richard Alston Dance Company is, above all, movement that does not flow. Unease… consists of stop-start gestures and freeze-frame poses, stamping feet and juddering arms. It, too, presents an interesting combination of dancers: four women (Elly Braund, Oihana Vesga Bujan, Jennifer Hayes, Nancy Nerantzi) and one man (Ihsaan de Banya), all dressed in a rather queasy shade of olive green. The women start off standing still in the background, but later perform duets at the front of the stage. If there is one thing that lets the piece down, it is a too frequent use of the slow-motion walk.

Bare, male arms are to the fore again in Richard Alston’s premiering Mazur, a duet by guest dancer Jonathan Goddard (winner of the Critics Circle Outstanding Male Performance [modern] and Best Male Dancer awards in 2014) and Liam Riddick (a nominee for the former award in 2012, 2013 and 2014). Accompanied by the pianist Jason Ridgway at an onstage baby grand, the waistcoat-wearing men dance a dance of longing to a series of Chopin mazurkas. The almost competitive display of the start is followed by ‘variations’ in which each man dances alone. If Jonathan Goddard is the more expressive, the more flexible of back and waist, Liam Riddick has the ‘feet of Mercury’ (as someone says of someone else in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline). Both, in their subsequent dance together, show musicality.

When Liam Riddick and Ihsaan de Banya, having entered from opposite sides, met at the front of the stage to begin the final work (Richard Alston’s Overdrive of 2006), the smile they exchanged seemed to express satisfaction at the way the evening had gone and excitement at the flourish with which it would end. Overdrive brings the Richard Alston Dance Company together, in flowing costumes of pink and grey, for twenty minutes of crisp, clear, confident movement to Terry Riley’s pulsing Keyboard Studies # 1. Exhilarating and coherent, the piece sheds its dancers one by one or in pairs to leave Riddick and de Banya, side by side where the dance began.

John O’Dwyer