Fingerprint, The Devil in the Detail, Red Run, Brink

Published Thursday 29 March 2007 at 14:15 by John Percival

The luckiest member of the Richard Alston Dance Company’s show at Sadler’s Wells is the pianist Jason Ridgway. Seated at a grand piano on stage, he gets to play two youthful works by Bach, Capriccio in B Flat and Toccata in D Major, to accompany Alston’s new ballet Fingerprint, then after an interval the selection of rags and waltzes by Scott Joplin that go with last year’s creation The Devil in the Detail. Two appealing but contrasting scores are both very attractively played.

The dancers in those ballets and indeed all evening, are pretty good too, but what Alston gives them to do leaves something to desire. Why, to this music, does he rely so much on steps that are straight from classical ballet although performed barefoot? The entrances and exits in the Joplin work have an apt swagger but once the actual solos or duets start, the movement becomes less suited, although the big shaven-headed Australian Peter Furness, recruited only this season, provides a lively twinkle.

The programme note of Fingerprint tells of sadness, humour and wit, but I didn’t see much of those qualities in the dancing. Time was when Alston used to work more closely with what the music is saying. However, I must admit that I was glad he didn’t relate too much to the noises by Heiner Goebbels for Red Run, revived from 1998. Another new work, Brink by company member Martin Lawrance, was a lukewarm response to tangos by a Japanese composer Ayuo. And to see so many empty seats at a premiere in this theatre is distinctly alarming.