Sir Richard Alston, Pioneer of British Contemporary Dance, Dies Aged 77

Sir Richard Alston, the choreographer whose fast, lucid and deeply musical work helped to build contemporary dance in Britain, has died aged 77.

The Richard Alston Foundation announced that he died peacefully at his home on Monday 7 September after a period of ill health. He had been receiving treatment at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.

His death brings to a close a career of more than half a century in which he founded companies, ran two of the country's most important dance institutions and made well over a hundred works. Tributes from dancers, choreographers and the organisations he led were published throughout the week.

An early start in a young art form

Alston was born in Stoughton, Sussex, on 30 October 1948 and educated at Eton College. In 1967 he enrolled at the London School of Contemporary Dance, then a new institution trying to establish a form of dance that had barely existed in Britain a decade earlier.

His early pieces were made for London Contemporary Dance Theatre, but he soon looked for more room to experiment. In 1972 he co-founded Strider, widely regarded as the country's first independent contemporary dance company. It operated outside the established ballet and modern dance organisations and became a model for the many small companies that followed.

In 1976 he moved to New York to study at the studio of Merce Cunningham. The experience left a lasting mark on his style, which favoured clarity of line, rhythmic precision and a close relationship with music over narrative or theatrical effect.

Rambert and The Place

Alston returned to Britain and in 1980 became resident choreographer at Ballet Rambert, the country's oldest dance company. He served as its artistic director from 1986 to 1992, a period in which the company completed its shift towards contemporary repertoire. He went back to Rambert in 2001 to create Unrest.

In 1994 he was appointed artistic director of The Place in London, the centre of contemporary dance training in Britain, and founded the Richard Alston Dance Company as its resident troupe. Over the next quarter of a century he made more than 50 works for the company and toured them across the country and abroad. The company closed in March 2020 after 26 years.

Honours

His work was recognised on both sides of the Channel. France made him a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995. He was appointed CBE in 2001 and knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to dance.

Tributes from the dance world

The choreographer Akram Khan recalled first knowing Alston as a student at The Place, saying he had looked up to him "as I began to find my own way".

The Place said his legacy could not be measured only by honours or by the dances themselves. "It lives in the dancers who still carry his movement in their bodies," it said.

Jonathan Gray, the former editor of the Dancing Times, described him as one of the finest and most musical choreographers the world had produced.

Those tributes echoed a view long held by critics: that Alston's great strength was his restraint. His dances rarely relied on elaborate designs or storylines. Instead they trusted the score and the dancers, and audiences often left talking about the music as much as the movement.

A lasting influence

Alston's significance lies partly in the structures he helped to create. Strider showed that dancers and choreographers could work independently of the large institutions, and that model still underpins much of British contemporary dance. His long tenure at The Place, which combines a theatre, a school and a company base, tied his choreography closely to the training of successive generations of dancers.

Many of those who studied or performed there during his time went on to form their own companies, carrying elements of his approach into their work.

What happens next

No details of funeral arrangements had been made public at the time of writing. The foundation that bears his name announced his death, and the institutions he shaped are expected to mark his contribution in the months ahead.

Image: Jim Osley via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0