Richard Alston Dance Company/Britten Sinfonia: Phaedra, Barbican - dance review

Phaedra physically and artistically meshes music and motion to the max
Lyndsey Winship7 November 2013

Richard Alston is one of the most musical choreographers out there, and a lifelong fan of Benjamin Britten, so he was the obvious choice to open the Barbican Britten season celebrating the composer’s centenary. The centrepiece of the programme is a new work, Phaedra, which physically and artistically meshes dance and music to the max.

With the Britten Sinfonia forming the backdrop on stage, mezzo soprano Allison Cook plays the tortured Phaedra, moving among the dancers and addressing her rich lower register to their mute dancing forms. The effect is of a tour inside a woman’s creeping hysteria; the dancers in chorus, like moving scenery, or the waves of her emotions. There’s a featured role for new apprentice dancer Ihsaan de Banya as her stepson and taboo love interest and his big-cat-like power and elegance make him an exciting recruit.

Alston’s dedication to Britten’s music is in no doubt, but it’s an odd match, in a way, for this extreme tale of incest and suicide. Alston’s choreography is polite, contained, a land of innocence and lack of consequence. It’s pure, classically inclined beauty, as demonstrated well in the slow, sparse movements of another new piece, Hölderlin Fragments, and in the joyful, youthful revival of Les Illuminations, sung by tenor Robin Tritschler and led by the excellent Liam Riddick, a dancer of purpose and sensitivity.

Attaching dance so intently and unselfconsciously to music is, these days, rather unfashionable, and as we can see here from two 1994 revivals and two new works, Alston’s language hasn’t radically changed over the past 20 years. But what he does, he does so beautifully. Revel in it.

Until Nov 9 (0845 120 7511/barbican.org.uk)

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