Sir Richard Alston obituary

The choreographer Richard Alston, who has died aged 77, was a landmark figure in contemporary dance. He began his career in 1967 at a foundational point in British dance history, with the establishment of the London Contemporary Dance School and Theatre that year. He played a leading role in developing the independent dance scene through the 1970s and early 80s, before going on to direct Ballet Rambert for six years from 1986, and then the Richard Alston Dance Company from 1994 to 2020. He developed and refined a signature style, a combination of lyrical elegance, compositional refinement, musical inspiration and spacious design, as well as a distinctive movement quality that melded flow, breath, sweeping lines and fleet-footedness; dance students and teachers continue to use the word 'Alstony' as a shorthand to describe a certain style of motion and phrasing. Alston was already thinking of choreography when he began dance classes at the age of 18 with London Contemporary Dance School. His aptitude and enthusiasm were quickly spotted by the artistic director, Robert Cohan, who staged some of Alston's workshop pieces for London Contemporary Dance Theatre (LCDT), and commissioned his first company work, Combines, in 1972, followed by Lay-Out in 1973 and Blue Schubert Fragments in 1974. By then, Alston had already set up an independent dance group, Strider, a flexible collective that presented 60 short works by various members between 1972 and 1975, influenced in ethos by New York's avant-garde Judson Dance Theater. Experimenting with various artistic approaches, he was particularly influenced by the American choreographer Merce Cunningham – more abstract and more matter-of-fact than the sculpted look and dramatic feel then prevalent at the main companies LCDT and Ballet Rambert. Alston's style was also marked by release technique, a way of moving that emphasises alignment, breath, flow and floorwork that had been introduced to the UK by the American teacher Mary Fulkerson at Dartington College of the Arts, in Devon, where Strider made frequent visits. A formative group in the alternative dance scene and a forerunner to the New Dance movement in Britain, Strider toured nationally and internationally. It closed in 1975 as its own members dispersed, including Alston, who left for New York to take classes at the Cunningham studio, to study ballet and to immerse himself in the city's postmodern dance scene. It was a decisive period, and Alston returned to the UK in 1977 with a stronger sense of his own voice, integrating music and design with an elegant efficiency of motion and composition, and with a more visibly balletic influence. Alongside creating new works for LCDT and English National Opera, he set up his own group, Richard Alston and Dancers, and in 1980 made his first work for Ballet Rambert, Bell High, becoming resident choreographer the same year. His own group merged with Siobhan Davies and Dancers and the Ian Spink Group to form Second Stride in 1982, named in homage to Strider and equally pioneering in the independent dance field. Alston left in 1984, having begun working increasingly with Ballet Rambert, where he was appointed artistic director in 1986. (It was renamed Rambert Dance Company in 1987; now simply Rambert). This was a major shift in resources, structure and status: he could now draw on a resident music ensemble and work closely with set, costume and lighting designers. He curated a repertoire that included works by the American choreographers Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Cunningham himself, commissioned new pieces by British choreographers including Siobhan Davies (associate choreographer, 1988-92), Michael Clark, Ashley Page and William Tuckett, and revived historic works such as Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies (1937). But the backbone of the repertory consisted of his own works; notable among them were the neoclassical Pulcinella (designs by Howard Hodgkin) and the taut, bold Strong Language from 1987, both adapted for television, and Roughcut (1990), a freewheeling, crowdpleasing response to Steve Reich's New York Counterpoint (1985) and Electric Counterpoint (1987). If the artistic canvas that Rambert offered suited Alston well, the administrative and financial burdens did not, and there was an increasing gulf between his directorship and the Rambert board, who dismissed him abruptly, and painfully, in 1992. Then in 1994, the closure of LCDT led to a restructure of the Contemporary Dance Trust at the Place in London. Alston became the trust's artistic director (until 2018), and was invited to create a new resident company of 10 dancers. The Richard Alston Dance Company toured extensively, both nationally and internationally (it was particularly well received in the US), and it became his creative garden, where he cultivated more than 50 works. Stylistically, it continued the work he had developed at Rambert, refining, maturing and extending his art rather than changing it, through works such as Beyond Measure (1996), Red Run (1998), Overdrive (2003), Isthmus (2012) and An Italian in Madrid (2016). Music – highly eclectic in range – remained his constant touchstone, encompassing the western classical canon, folk music, contemporary sound experiments, traditional and free jazz. While Alston also created work for other companies including the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, Ballet Black, Phoenix Dance Theatre, Scottish Ballet and New York Theatre Ballet, he remains best known through the body of work he made and toured with the Richard Alston Dance Company (which eventually closed because of funding cuts in 2020), as well as for the stylistic legacy he left on dance and dance training. Gentlemanly in manner, independent in thought but not rebellious in spirit, Alston lived his adult life through dance and with dancers. Born in Stoughton, West Sussex, to Gordon Alston, a British Council officer, and Margaret Alston (nee Whitworth), a nurse before marriage, he attended Hill House in central London and then Eton college. He left school early, wanting to pursue a creative career, and enrolled at Croydon College of Art in 1965. During his early days as an art student he happened to see a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet and was captivated, characteristically, not by their more boisterous ballets but by the lyric poetry of Chopiniana (known in the west as Les Sylphides). Within days he was watching the Royal Ballet perform Giselle, but it was Frederick Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardée that he pinpointed as sparking his desire to choreograph. Alston was inspired by the dancers he worked with, and he had an intuitive eye for talent (the young Clark was an early example of the many outstanding dancers who worked for him). In the studio, he preferred an environment of creative flow rather than creative tension, and he would consider his dancers and colleagues as a kind of family. His elder brother Michael did the lighting for some of his early pieces, and he maintained a lifelong friendship with Davies, whose career in many ways paralleled and intersected with his own. Alston remained committed to young people's dance, through his own company's outreach work, as a former chair of Youth Dance England, an ambassador for the U.Dance programme, and through other educational projects. During his later years his hearing deteriorated, which as an artist so connected to music he found particularly difficult. Even as his overall health declined, he remained an avid creator, teacher and mentor right up until his final months. He was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995, appointed CBE in 2001, and received the De Valois award for outstanding achievement at the 2008 National Dance awards. He was knighted in 2019. Alston is survived by his cousins Gill, Gay and Heather. Richard John William Alston, choreographer, born 30 October 1948; died 7 September 2026