REPORT: Inside Richard Alston Dance Company

"They have a 90-minute class at the start of each day of the week. Three of those days it will be contemporary dance, two days ballet. Although we do no pointe training, overall it helps us create stronger dancers' bodies.

"We have 10 dancers, five male and five female '” in contemporary, we call them men and women whereas ballet refers to them as girls and boys.

"We have two French, two German, a Columbian with Belgian citizenship, an Australian and the rest are British. We look for musicality, a high degree of technical excellence and we look to them to fit into a team. We have 17 people who have to work together on tour.

"We are based in Bloomsbury, with a theatre of 300 seats, where also the educational establishment, The Place, has 150 students doing a BA, and from where 50 graduate each year.

"Richard Alston's work is distinguished by the importance of the music. Some choreographers have only a tenuous relationship with music and are more concerned with the abstract. Richard, as you can see, has a very catholic taste '“ and that is shown typically in tonight's programme of Stravinsky, Philip Glass and JS Bach.

"Martin Lawrance came to us from the London Contemporary Dance School. He's been a dancer with us since 1994-95. He's now 30, and his works sits very well alongside Richard's in the company.

"Our back-cloth in Movements From Petrushka has a local link. The originals from Les Ballet Russes were owned by a man who lived at Lewes, John Drummond, the former Edinburgh Theatre and BBC Proms and Radio 3 director.

"We actually use two but because The Dome has no on-stage 'flying' facility, tonight it has to be just one of them.

"Blow Over is to music from the mid-1980s by Philip Glass and is a celebration of the New York disco boom."

"Skylarking is the term sailors give to shore leave. You know, when they leave the ship at port and spend the evening ashore. But we won't go too much further into that . . . "

"I hope very much you enjoy the evening."

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