Advertisement

Richard Alston Dance Company

Fresh from celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, Richard Alston Dance Company returns to Norwich Theatre Royal on February 4 & 5, 2016, with a programme of musicality and sculptural grace.

The company will present three powerful pieces – Stronghold, Mazur and Brisk Singing.

Stronghold is the latest work from associate choreographer Martin Lawrence, creator of Theatre Royal favourites such as Madcap and Burning, and is an extended reworking of his Gambit, a piece which attracted critical acclaim.

Advertisement
nine below zero

It is a ferocious, dark and brooding work for the full company of ten dancers, reflecting the turbulence and tension in the music which is composed by Pulitzer prize winner Julia Wolfe. She wrote the piece for eight double basses with rolling harmonics at the beginning, creating a rich and deep sound which changes so that at the ending there is just one intense long note.

Choreographed by Richard Alston and first performed in June this year, Mazur is a dance for two friends sharing what they love and what they feel they have lost. It is danced to Chopin’s Mazurkas, played live on stage by pianist Jason Ridgeway.

Mazur is another Polish word for the Mazurka in which Chopin again and again expressed longing for his beloved homeland – which he and his friends felt was lost to them and to which they could never return.

Alston’s Brisk Singing is set to the magnificent Baroque music of Jean Phillippe Rameau’s opera Les Boréades, and is a dance of joyous springing rhythms in response to the brilliance of the French composer  who was known in his own time as ‘le dieu de la dance’ – The God of Dance.  Les Boréades were the Hyerboreams, inhabitants of an imaginary kingdom in the back of the North Wind whose lifetimes spanned a thousand years which were entirely devoted to song, dancing and pleasure.

register online
sign in
faq

Advertisement

editors picks
Grapevine Magazine