The first contemporary dance I really loved was made by Richard Alston. In the 1990s, I was going to dance class a few times a week and watching the smattering of companies that would tour to Newcastle, where I grew up. There was dance that was pretty or provocative or intellectually stimulating, which I enjoyed or appreciated, but the dance that really had my heart was by Alston, who has died aged 77.
I was a pianist, too (and later a music student at Sussex University, with its on-campus theatre where Alston toured) and it was Alston’s deeply musical instincts that got me. They were honed in the gramophone library at Eton, where he’d pull out records by Bach and Billie Holiday or surprise the grazing cows with a blast of Wagner. We had different backgrounds, but musical alignments: a love of baroque, late Romanticism, 20th-century modernism.
