Acclaimed choreographer Richard Alston is bringing his company on a rare visit to Oxford next week. He talked to David Bellan

‘If someone had told me at school that my life would be working with dancers”, says Old Etonian Richard Alston, “I would have been astounded.” Alston was attending Croydon Art College in the mid sixties, with completely different plans about his future, when he went to a performance of Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée, and was instantly hooked on dance.

“I was obsessed with it. I started cutting lectures at college and going to see everything I could, and I realised that I wanted to be moving my whole body, not just my arm with a pencil on the end”

At the age of 19, it was of course far too late to start on classical ballet, but Richard was also enthusiastic about contemporary dance, and joined the newly formed London Contemporary Dance School. This was the first introduction of contemporary dance to this country, and was led by the American Robert Cohan, a former partner of the legendary Martha Graham, the founder of modern dance as we know it.

From the school he moved on into the company, which at the time was a revelation to British dance goers. I saw him dance many times, and I‘m sure he would be the first to agree that, having started so late, he was passable, but never going to be a great dancer. Fortunately another avenue opened up.

“I was in the right place at the right time. In those days it was a case of ‘does anyone want to have a go ?’, and I was the only person who put their hand up, so I started making work right away.”

Forty years on, what a body of work it is! Alston has created over 45 dance works, he is internationally renowned as a choreographer, has been a director of Rambert Dance Company, and is currently celebrating 20 years with his own company. He has dancers selected to understand his way of working, and talented enough to do justice to his creations. In all Alston’s work, music has been the initial catalyst, but, unusually, he is bringing to Oxford three works by the same composer – Benjamin Britten.

“The first piece, Rejoice in the Lamb, is danced to Benjamin Britten’s superb setting of 18th-century poems by Christopher Smart. He was a rather sad man. He became more and more strange and never fitted into society. He was what we would call manic depressive, or as we say now, bipolar.

When he was up he went into a religious mania, and ran around pulling people to their knees to pray with him. Eventually he was put into an institution, and it was there that he wrote Rejoice in the Lamb. It’s both completely mad and absolutely brilliant — it’s got the most wonderful words. It disappeared for centuries, and was only published for the first time in the 1930s.

It’s about all forms of life being part of God’s kingdom. There’s a long, much-loved poem about his cat Geoffrey, and he goes through all sorts of animals. Britten’s setting is actually quite easy to sing — I sang it myself at school. But it’s one of the warmest pieces I’ve made, and it very much takes its cue from the humanity in the words and the music.” The second piece, Hölderlin Fragments, is an intim-ate cycle of songs for voice and piano set to the lyrics of Friedrich Hölderlin.

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“It’s more introverted. I’ve loved this music by Britten for years. He seems to have had a thing for people who went mad, because Hölderlin went crazy too. The sad thing about Hölderlin was that he had this wonderful view of Hellenic beauty, and was very much inspired by ancient Greek poetry. But, later on, his poetry was taken over by the Nazi party, as it was all about beautiful blond people, and they pretended it was about the Aryan race.

The dance is for just five dancers, and it’s about solos and duets which portray absolutely what’s in the poems. They were obviously written in German, but we have short notes that tell you quite clearly what each poem is about. My third Britten piece is Illuminations, and it centres on the turbulent relationship between the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine. The extraordinary Rimbaud wrote his poems between the ages of eight and about 17. They were way before their time, and Britten set them just as he was beginning his relationship with Peter Pears.”

Also in the programme is a work by Martin Lawrance, formerly one of Alston’s most brilliant dancers. It concentrates on the great composer and pianist Franz Liszt, and his deteriorating relationship with the mother of his children, the married Countess Marie D’Agoult. Burning received a standing ovation when it was premiered last autumn. It’s full of passion, with the pianist pursued by hordes of women. Burning is danced to Liszt’s Dante Sonata, and you can expect a marvellous performance of the work by Richard Alston’s regular collaborator, Jason Ridgway.

Oxford is the last stop on a long tour of these pieces, and Richard Alston is looking forward to his visit.

“It’s always a pleasure coming to the Playhouse. It‘s a nice little theatre, but it’s also a really brilliant audience — they look so hard, and they appreciate so much.”