ABSTRACT
Initially, his decision to eschew the current ‘contemporary dance’ form was most marked in theme rather than content. Whereas the evolving Graham-influenced genre sought out expressionistic subject-matter, Alston chose to create works about dancing itself. In 1971, his choice of title for END which is never more than this instant, than you on this instant, figuring it out and acting so. If there is any absolute, it is never more than this one, you, this instant, in action, which ought to get us on was an intended criticism of the narrative works that increasingly typified the repertories of London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert
Alston, however, was no enfant terrible. His emphasis on movement-on motion, not emotion-links his choreography to the work of George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Frederick Ashton in his plotless ballets. All four choreographers find expression in formal elements. There is a close correlation between subject and structure, and as Alston became more experienced in developing the dance elements themselves as themes, his structures became more complex. In Nowhere Slowly (1970), Windhover (1972), and Blue Schubert Fragments (1974), for example, the main choreography was organized as solos and duets. These occurred predominantly sur place, with simple walking and running sequences moving the dancers from one place to the next. A decade later, his organization of movement around ‘nuclei’ (Alston’s own term) had evolved into largescale, multilayered structures in which transitional phrases were as complex as the nuclei themselves. Two works that best illustrate this are Dangerous Liaisons (1985) and Strong Language (1987). The subject of both is the realization of their sound accompaniments in dance terms. In the former, Alston analysed the ticks, clangs, and chimes of Simon Waters’s electronic tape in order to find its rhythmic progression. The accompaniment is
linear in structure: there are five major sections, which are repeated (with the fourth and fifth reversed), and the tape ends with a new sound section and coda. Similarly, the dance follows these larger sections and, within each, there is an aural-visual correspondence between the timbres and tensions of Waters’s tape and Alston’s movement phrases. Also, through their various groupings, the six dancers (four women and two men) echo the varying intensities of sound.
