.JPG)
<P>First reviews for the Richard Alston Dance company at the South Bank:<P><BR><B>Richard Alston - New Programme 2002</B><BR>Rating: 1* (out of from -1 to 3)<BR>by Luke Jennings in The Evening Standard<P><BR>Watching an evening of Richard Alston's choreography can be subtly maddening. <P>The work is so impeccably refined - so precisely pitched between narrative and abstraction, between mood and meaning - that it leaves almost no footprint on the senses at all. It's all in the best possible taste, but its seamless discretion denies the watcher any point of emotional entry. An hour or so into an Alston programme I usually find myself longing for some scorching vulgarity, or to see the flow corrupted in some way.<P><A HREF="http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/hottx/theatre/dance_review.html?in_review_id=490866&in_review_text_id=494568" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><P>************************<P><B>Serving up tequila without the worm</B> <BR>Ismene Brown in The Daily Telegraph reviews the Richard Alston Dance Co at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.<P><BR>STEELY-EYED pimps and backless dames in tango's dark dives are not the sort of people you might associate with Richard Alston, the most professorial of modern choreographers.<P>But Touch and Go, which premiered on Wednesday night, is his take on that fabulous dance style, and it has all his usual restrained urbanity. Alston-lovers will find this a well-balanced evening, starting with the jazzy Red Run, calming to the quiet solo Soda Lake and duet Light Flooding into Darkened Rooms, before Touch and Go.<P>If I sound cool and distant, it's because I find Alston just so when he picks music that is little suited to his temperament. If I remind you that he is an Old Etonian, it is because Alston can't take the public schoolboy out of his dances. <P><A HREF="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/03/22/btteq22.xml&sSheet=/arts/2002/03/22/ixartleft.html" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><P>**************************************<P><B>Richard Alston</B> <BR>(3 stars out of 5)<BR>By Judith Mackrell in The Guardian<P><BR>There isn't a single seamed stocking in Richard Alston's new tango piece, nor is it spiked with any of the dance form's traditional flick-knife footwork. But Touch and Go, set to music by Astor Piazzolla, is still identifiably a tango, and it does manage to capture some of the seesawing drama of combativeness and abandon that make the dance unique. <P>Alston's choreographic mission is to find his own ways of releasing and containing the music's energy. In some of the dance numbers - the male duets especially - he sends his couples wheeling out into space, their limbs slicing the air and syncopating the music in taut, flaring lines. In others he keeps them close to each other's chests, but creates an almost wrestling intensity in the way their torsos arch away and fold back in to their partner's embrace.<P><A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4379329,00.html" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><P><BR><p>[This message has been edited by Stuart Sweeney (edited March 26, 2002).]