REVIEW: Richard Alston Dance Company at The Dome, Brighton.

Rather than an artist with an idea, hunting for appropriate music, he feeds off music for dance ideas and concepts.

He's been 48 years at it and his richly rewarding approach rubs off on others.

Among the last eight annual national tours by RADC, the choreography of one of his former dancers has been awarded its place alongside his.

And this year, the result is immensely exciting.

Martin Lawrance's To Dance And Skylark opens the evening with such strength, pace and wit, and thrusts all 11 dancers full in our faces, that the audience needs the first interval to recover breath and exchange the reactive fruits of this pulsating excitement.

The title is an ancient ship's crew command to take essential exercise on deck and up the rigging. The music of Bach's utterly exhilarating Brandenburg Concertos No2 and 3 played with dazzling detail and dynamics by period instrument bands. Both the playing and the dancing is of world class virtuosity and bravura.

Alston later has to match this somehow and three-part evening closes with his Overdrive, to Terry Riley's completely different, recorded keyboard music in modern minimalist rhythmical style. The score is overwhelmingly insistent and repetitive.

Alston multi-layers his streams of ideas and his strategically grouped and coloured dancers, in a challengingly sustained high tempo, with utter precision and responsibility, and to ultra-stunning effect.

Like a classical concerto, Alston's evening programme has a central slow movement, his Light Flooding Into Darkened Rooms. It is set for a single couple to 17th century French lute music (Denis Gaultier) and a contrasting modern mandolin piece by Jo Kondo. James Woodrow plays these on stage to subtle effect, as though an artist painting the dancers.

The music's historical context suggested to Alston intimacy between musician and pupil, likewise artist and model, and its unavoidable inner tensions. Alston's French dancing discovery Pierre Tappon pairs poignantly with Sonja Peedo in a depiction of pain and longing constricted by convention and manners.

RADC costumes are always simple, modern and direct, the lighting concentrated, selective and understated. His work (Overdrive, for instance) is in the national GCSE curriculum. And, fortunately for we non-academics, it's enrichingly brought to us here, every year.

Richard Alston Dance Company were at The Dome, Brighton, on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 16 and 17 (8pm).

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