The Devil in the Detail (2006)

The ‘King of Ragtime’, Scott Joplin wrote music of an utterly irresistible pleasure. His rags and waltzes are so infectiously joyous, they make it impossible to sit still. In the hands of Joplin raunchily suggestive ragtime becomes infused with a lightness and a finesse. His syncopations brim with elegant detail and a stylish swagger which make them timeless and immediate.

About-Face (2006)

Martin Lawrance’s first commissioned choreography for the Richard Alston Dance Company, About-Face is set to Mavin Marais’ Suite dans un Goût Etranger, and is a subtle maze through which the dancers glide and pluck their way. As one door closes another opens, perhaps taking them in quite a different direction.

Such Longing (2005)

Such Longing is Alston's fourth collaboration with the remarkable young pianist Jason Ridgway. The music is Chopin - not pretty waltzes or virtuoso fireworks but with achingly beautiful meditations of the Nocturnes and Etudes, filled with intense memories of the composer's Polish homeland.

’Alston has an unerring instinct for making dancers look good and a keen musical ear - qualities that come to the fore in his simple but lovely Such Longing... rich in gentle melancholy’ Mail on Sunday

Volumina (2005)

Volumina fills the air with ghostly and subtle rustlings and sudden erupting note-clusters. Ligeti's cavernous organ piece thunders round the dancers, who dart back and forth half-hidden in the shadows - Volumina is both spectacular and mysterious.

"Volumina is breathtaking ... Alston has rarely worked on such an epic scale, creating drama from the work's audacious alternations of scale and from timing so fierce it makes the air shiver" Judith Mackrell, The Guardian