Alston Nash by Allan Parker

A VISUAL HISTORY OF THE RICHARD ALSTON DANCE COMPANY

ALSTON

Nash

ALSTON NASH ISBN: 978-1-8380868-0-0 Published by Fiat Lux, London © Fiat Lux 2020 Editorial Director: Chris Nash Editor: Sue Lancashire Design and Production: www.pureland.co.uk With special thanks to Isabel Tamen (Executive Director, RADC) Printed in the UK All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the publisher. www.richardalstondance.org www.chrisnashphoto.com Front Cover: Darshan Singh Bhuller and Isabel Tamen

A VISUAL HISTORY OF RICHARD ALSTON DANCE COMPANY

ALSTON

Nash

RICHARD ALSTON DANCE COMPANY WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE FOLLOWING FOR THEIR GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THIS BOOK: Cockayne

Kate Coyne & Alannah Homes

The Tezmae Charitable Trust

Celeste Dandeker-Arnold OBE & Trevor Arnold Siobhan Davies CBE

Val Bourne CBE

Nelson Fernandez OBE

Sheila Colvin

Betsy Gregory

Tony Dyson

Nigel Hinds OBE

Janet ‘Mop’ Eager MBE

Sue Hoyle OBE

Nick & Helen Elam

Richard Jarman

Lizzie & Tim Fargher

Linda Jasper MBE

Ruth Glick & Jonathan Green

Professor Stephanie Jordan & Howard Friend

Jo Hedley-Ghiglione

Sir Tim Lankester KCB

Sir Sidney Lipworth QC & Lady Lipworth CBE

Bob Lockyer

Dame Monica Mason DBE

Alison Morris

Jane Pritchard MBE

Colin Nears CBE

Lord & Lady Russell of Liverpool

Gillian Newson

Julia & Bill Wallace-King

Mike Rappolt Graham & Jane Reddish

Jane Alexander

John Robinson

Dr Tzo Zen Ang

Chris Rowland

Dr Henrietta & Richard Bannerman

Francis & Paddy Seymour

Marian Bell CBE & Richard Adkin

Prue Skene CBE

The Rt Hon Baroness Tessa Blackstone

John G Stewart & Margaret L Ford

Judi Britten & Sophie Blake

Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp CBE

Douglas Campbell QC

Richard Worts

Pernille Charrington Robert & Carol Cooper

And other donors who wish to remain anonymous

Richard Alston Dance Company is also grateful for funding support from Arts Council England, for the unfailing support of Clare Connor, Chief Executive of The Place, for long-term support from Dr Haruhisa Handa, founder and chairman of IFAC, and for the generosity of John Pemberton who made possible the filming of so many Alston works.

Chris Nash and Richard Alston at the final Richard Alston Dance Company photoshoot. The Place, London, November 2019. Photo by Georgette Purdey.

Biographies_8-10 Overview: Judith Mackrell _15-17 Publicity Shoot 1995_18-23 Tremor_24-25 Fever_26-29 Publicity Shoot 2001_30-31 At Home_32-33 Nomadic_34-35 Red Run_3639 A Far Cry_40-43 Brahms Hungarian_46-49 Grey Allegro_50-51 Tangent_54-55 Beyond Measure_56-59 Lie of the Land_60-61 Shimmer _62-65 Cut and Run_66-67 Gypsy Mixture_68-73 Detour_74-75 Carnaval_76-79 An Italian in Madrid_80-81 Touch and Go_ 82 -85 Chacony_86-91 Overdrive_92-95 Stronghold _96-99 Hölderlin Fragments_100 -101 Shine On_102-103 Repertoire_104-105 The Company_106-107 Rejoice in the Lamb (2014) Choreographer: Richard Alston Costume Designer: Peter Todd Dancers: Nathan Goodman, Jennifer Hayes and the Company

Choreographer

RICHARD ALSTON Richard Alston choreographed his first work in 1968 as one of the twelve students of the newly formed London Contemporary Dance School, graduating in 1970. He went on to found the UK’s first independent dance group Strider. In 1975 Alston went to New York to study at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio. On his return two years later he worked throughout the UK and Europe as an independent choreographer and teacher. In 1980 Alston became Resident Choreographer with Ballet Rambert and later was appointed Artistic Director, a position he held from 1986 to 1992. In his time there he created 25 dances for the company and was also commissioned to create work for the Royal Danish Ballet (Kingdom of Pagodas, 1982) and the Royal Ballet (Midsummer, 1983). In 1992 Alston was invited to create a full evening of his own work, including Boulez’s Le Marteau Sans Maitre, for the Ballet Atlantique in France. He made another full evening for London Contemporary Dance Theatre at the 1994 Aldeburgh Festival before going on to form his own company when he became Artistic Director of The Place later that year. Over the past 25 years Alston has made over 50 dances for his own company. Commissions from other companies have included Ballet Theatre Munich (2006), Ballet Black (2008), Scottish Ballet (2009), New York Theatre Ballet (2011), Holland Dance Festival (2012) and Phoenix Dance Theatre (2013). In 2020 Alston was named Resident Choreographer with New York Theatre Ballet. In 2001 he was awarded a CBE and in 2019 he was knighted for his services to dance. Portrait of Richard Alston by Hugo Glendinning

Associate Choreographer

MARTIN LAWRANCE Martin Lawrance was born in Leicester and began dancing with Leicester Youth Dance Theatre under the direction of Sue Rosenbloom. He trained at Coventry Centre for the Performing Arts and then at London Contemporary Dance School. He first worked with Richard Alston when performing with the postgraduate performance group, 4D. He danced with the company from 1995 to 2007 and Alston created over 25 works on him in that time. In 2007 he became the company’s Rehearsal Director. In June 2003 Lawrance presented a full evening of his work at The Place and in 2004 his piece Charge was commissioned for The Place Prize. It was subsequently taken into the Richard Alston Dance Company repertoire along with Grey Allegro, created for the State School of Dance in Athens. Lawrance has since created a further 14 works for the company: About Face, Brink, Stealing Poison, Body & Soul, To Dance and Skylark, Lie of the Land, Other Than I, Madcap, Burning, Stronghold, Tangent, Cut and Run, Detour and A Far Cry. He has also created five works for London Contemporary Dance School, two for the State School of Dance in Athens, three for Ballet Black, two for Scottish Ballet and six for Ballet Manila. Portrait of Martin Lawrance by Hugo Glendinning

Photographer

CHRIS NASH Since graduating from Goldsmiths School Of Art in 1980, Chris Nash has built a reputation as ‘our most imaginative interpreter of dance’ (The Guardian). He has held over 70 exhibitions of his dance photographs around the world including at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the JF Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, Washington. During his 40-year career Nash has worked with numerous choreographers and companies including Michael Clark Company, Lea Anderson, The Royal Ballet, Rambert, Frauke Requardt, Protein, Phoenix Dance Theatre, New Adventures and Shobana Jeyasingh Dance. His work has had such an impact on contemporary dance in England that he is the recipient of a Dance Umbrella/Time Out Award, the inscription on which reads: ‘For helping to make the face of dance more recognisable, this award is made to photographer extraordinaire Chris Nash’. Aside from his dance photography, Nash’s pictures can be found on advertising billboards, fashion catalogues, CDs and book covers. Portrait of Chris Nash by Edgar Olsen Nash

Rumours, Visions (2002 revival) Transparencies from photo shoot Dancers Martin Lawrance Andrew Obaka

Brisk Singing (1997) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Jennifer Hayes Liam Riddick Costume Designer Jeanne Spaziani

Overview JUDITH MACKRELL Dance as an art form has the power to make the human body both more visible and more mysterious. Choreographers can conjure extraordinary immediate beauty simply from the lines, curves and rhythms of a body moving through space. But they can also evoke the deep, unspoken hinterland of memory, feeling and experience that the body carries within it. The greatest of all dance photographs are surely those which capture this dual aspect; photographs which not only overcome the impossible challenge of distilling a dynamic, three-dimensional movement into a static image, but which articulate both the physical clarity and emotional resonance of the choreographer’s vision. This elegant record of the Richard Alston Dance Company marks a collaboration between two men who are outstanding in their professions. Alston himself is nothing less than the father of British contemporary dance, his first work created back in 1968 when UK choreographers were only just beginning to learn their craft. Back then Alston was a joyously earnest iconoclast, experimenting with a language of witty and radical fundamentals that tore down the artifice of more traditional forms. But over the years he has enriched and enlarged his choreographic palette, using a variety of musical scores to inspire dances that have ranged from sublime lyricism to quirky populism to stark expressive drama. If Alston’s mission has been to focus on pure dance, and on the finessing of his own choreographic voice, Chris Nash’s career has been more eclectic. During the mid-1980s he became associated with a generation of post-modern choreographers whose work played on the edges of dance, theatre and performance art, and drew freely on movement that ranged from classical and contemporary to folk and street. Much of Nash’s photography sought to replicate a similar playfulness – his images manipulated post-production to create surrealist collages or visual puns. An early publicity shot for the allfemale dance group, The Cholmondeleys, replaced the performers’ bodies with dancing, waggling fingers, capturing the wayward energy of the group’s approach. A shot from Immaculate Conception by their brother ensemble, The Featherstonehaughs, portrayed the men gazing down at their earthly selves from the vantage point of heavenly clouds. Those images also typified the freedom with which Nash has referenced visual traditions in his work – Renaissance art, Soviet propaganda, film noir, Brahms Hungarian (2018) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Monique Jonas Elly Braund Melissa Braithwaite Ellen Yilma Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

surrealism and, of course, the history of dance photography itself. An art student who took his first dance photograph in 1977, Nash has looked back over a history fuelled as much by changing technology as by shifts in the aesthetic zeitgeist. It was only just over a century ago that the long exposure times required by slow film and static cameras meant that dancers could only be photographed in long, stiffly held poses. By 1909 when Baron Adolph de Meyer did a studio shoot of Vaslav Nijinsky, he was able to use soft-focus lenses and theatrical lighting to convey something of the deep muscular

Overview power and plasticity of Nijinsky’s body; but the great Russian dancer, who was known for his legendarily soaring jump, had nevertheless to remain rooted to the floor. In the late 1920s however pioneers like the Dresden photographer Charlotte Rudolph were able to get their subjects moving in a photoshoot and, over the following decades, with the advent of lighter cameras, faster shutter speeds and increasingly sensitive film, each successive generation of photographers has been able to accelerate their own new ways of capturing the fleeting marks made by bodies in space. The range of dance photography is extraordinary now. We take for granted that cameras can capture a dancer suspended in the heart-stopping apex of a jump, locked in the dizzying whirl of a pirouette, working in the sweaty heat of a class, slumped in a moment of grainy exhaustion. We take for granted the clever jolting transformations that can be created by double exposures, strobe lights or saturated colours. Yet even in this brave new world of dance photography it is still those who have the closest relationship to dance, the keenest eye for movement and the most sympathetic imaginations who make us, as viewers, feel the visceral magic of live dance. This collection of images with which Nash records the 26-year history of the Richard Alston Dance Company may be more classical in style than some of his photography, but it deploys all of his knowledge and sophistication and craft in capturing not only the qualities of the dances Alston has created but also the presence and personalities of those who performed them. My own favourite image – it hangs in my study – captures a solo moment from the 1998 work Red Run (pages 36-39). It is a strange, savage and thrilling piece, set to the harsh discords, zig-zagging jazz and keening laments of Heiner Goebbels’ titular score. Nash communicates so much of the work’s energy in this single shot of dancer Olcay Karahan, the lines of her body held within thrumming tension, her weight folding fiercely inwards, her arms flung back in a wild counterthrust. But it is also his volcanic use of colour, the dark green exploding into orange that amplifies the power of the movement and the unheard forces of the music. By contrast, the duet from Touch and Go (pages 82-85) reflects Alston’s ability to refine dance into moments of reflective, tender intimacy. Martin Lawrance and Patricia Hines may be looking away from each other, but we can still sense the line of connection that sparks down the length of their bodies, and sense the trusting accord that holds them in this moment of subtle symmetrical balance. Again, Nash frames the dance image with split-second accuracy, and again he uses colour to intensify it – a chiaroscuro of dark brown and silver that shades from a deep-earthed physicality to a nervous sensitivity of touch, qualities that also reflect the tango influence of its accompanying music by Astor Piazzolla. One of the hardest effects for a camera to communicate is the visceral excitement of group dances, a mass of bodies moving together to the same rhythm and pattern. Nash’s shot of Roughcut though (pages 44-45)

Overview is masterly. This 1990 celebration of the music of Steve Reich is as fast and furious as its title suggests and this image of ten dancers breasting the stage in the same wild leap encapsulates the collective energy and exuberance of the work so well that we can almost sense the whiplash displacement of air as the company fly past. Alston has always used these moments of unison dance to sparing but brilliant effect, building up to those climactic highs when dance can hint at forces so much larger than the sum of actual bodies on stage – the flocking of birds or crowds, the abstract geometries of physics or maths, the universal beauty of pattern. There is a very different power in the group shot from Chacony (pages 86-91) in which the ten dancers are united in a moment of almost ritual contemplation, holding hands and leaning gently outwards as if better to catch their accompanying music. The image bathed in very quiet, twilight colours, but the cross hatching of the shadows on the floor plays a beautifully nuanced role in the shot, suggesting trace echoes of the movements that brought each of the dancers to this collective moment of stillness. These examples are almost taken at random. No less arresting is the watery reflective light that amplifies the atmosphere of Fever (pages 26-29), the burnt umber sunset and moonlit romance of Gypsy Mixture (pages 68-73) and Stronghold (pages 96-99). The interior intensity of Darshan Singh Bhuller (page 20) and the sense of epic tragedy in Beyond Measure (pages 56-59) are no less fine. There is, inevitably, a certain elegiac tone to this collection given the closure of the Richard Alston Dance Company. Yet it is not a book of mourning. The works portrayed here will live on, some of them in memory, others in revivals and restagings while Alston, of course, will be out in the world making new work. But the superb dancers who have passed through RADC will also be very central to the company’s legacy. Inspired by the meticulousness of his vision, his unwavering trust and passion for dance, so many of Alston’s early protégés are now forces in their own right, enriching the dance world with their teaching and performing and with the creation of their own new works.

Judith Mackrell has been writing about dance since 1980, contributing to Dancing Times, Dance Theatre Journal and many other publications. She was appointed dance critic of The Independent in 1986. In 1995 she moved on to The Guardian where she remained as chief critic until 2018. Mackrell has broadcast regularly on the arts for radio and television, and has written numerous books including Reading Dance, Bloomsbury Ballerina, Flappers and The Unfinished Palazzo. She is currently working on a group biography of women who were war correspondents during WWII. She was appointed honorary fellow of Trinity Laban in 1995. In 2018 she was awarded the One Dance UK inaugural Dance Writing Award.

Publicity Shoot 1995 CHRIS I think this might have been the first shoot that we did.

RICHARD Yes, this was from 1995 because we have a poster using these images from that session. We knew so little about each other then. You had been photographing dance for years but this was the first time that we had worked together.

CHRIS I remember that I wanted to take a graphic approach with very hard shadows and accentuated highlights. Partly because my impression of your work – up to that point – was that it was quite soft and partly because this was the first shoot we were going to do together so I wanted to do something different. I thought if I take this hard graphic approach that will shake things up a bit.

RICHARD The collage you made from some of those pictures gives the impression when you first look at it of a Rorschach image (page 104-105) – totally symmetrical. It’s not though, because the photographs of Henri at either end are different.

CHRIS When we’re photographing we do several shots of one movement and then you get these little changes between each shot. I thought if I do this symmetrical composition but use different shots of the same moment then there will be these subtle nuances and that will be really nice.

RICHARD And they have become very painterly marks, they’re like Japanese calligraphy and sometimes I think about my work as being these huge great brushstrokes making marks in the space as on an empty canvas.

CHRIS It’s about composition, about how dancers occupy space relative to each other and to the space around them, about foreground and background, about all those things. In many ways the decisions that I made while putting this together are similar to the way that choreography is put together. The solo picture of Darshan (page 20) was used on the poster too. It’s an example of a technique where you have a combination of flash and continuous tungsten light combined with a slowish shutter speed, so you get a little bit of blur as well as a crisp outline from the flash on the backdrop.

RICHARD He was such an expressive dancer and you captured that quality completely. Polaroids from publicity shoot (1995) Dancers Samantha Smith Darshan Singh Bhuller Henri Oguike

CHRIS One thing I’ve always appreciated about your company is that the dancers are incredibly well-trained and brilliant to work with. There is always a lot of respacing and tweaking of the choreography in the photoshoots and when the choreography is in the dancer’s body, in the muscle memory, those little details can be hard to change.

Publicity Shoot 1995 RICHARD Well Darshan was very special, he had all those years of experience working with a lot of different photographers and he was absolutely clear in the way that he focused in on a photoshoot. That’s why there are always such remarkable photographs of him. And this is a particularly beautiful image.

CHRIS It’s not every dancer that can perform well in front of the camera. It can be, very literally, exposing...

RICHARD Sometimes I’m quite ruthless in a photoshoot. If I see somebody hasn’t got the right imagination I simply move on. Sometimes the dancers haven’t yet acquired that skill, to be able to focus for the camera. But I can see when there is that line of electricity between you and the dancer, when they connect with you, you start taking photographs quite quickly and become very focused and animated and then I always know, okay, this is working.

CHRIS Well I know from having photographed thousands of dancers at different stages in their careers, and students too, that some people are more comfortable in front of the camera than others. In the typical performance space for a dancer, ie on stage, they are usually very removed from their audience. They’re separated, in control of the space and their performance. When they’re in the studio being photographed, they are right up close to the people looking at them. And those people are looking very intently and specifically at what they’re doing. And there will be things that they are doing that are ‘wrong’ so it can be intimidating for the dancer. In the studio there is no hiding.

RICHARD It’s exactly the same when something is filmed. Dancers can feel like they are under a microscope. In ordinary performance, afterwards I can say ‘well, you went a bit wrong there but it doesn’t really matter’, but when you are filming it does matter because it’s going to be there forever. It’s the same with photographs. And for me it’s important that they are wonderful photographs, not just records of the choreography. If something works in the studio and makes a beautiful photograph but it’s a change from the actual choreography, then that’s fine. I thought it was interesting when we were talking to Martin (Lawrance) and he said that when we have the photoshoot before he has started making a piece and he sees something that works well Publicity image (1995) Dancer Darshan Singh Bhuller

in the photograph, then he makes sure to put that in the choreography.

Publicity Shoot 1995 CHRIS It’s possible to be quite impressionistic about how you use a photo to represent a piece. It can be about the feeling you get looking at the photo – and then that feeling comes back when you watch the work. It may not literally be the same but it gives you the same emotion. With these photographs I think we’re making things that have the same production values, the same ingredients that you see on stage, often the same bits of choreography, but we are free to mix things around. The elements might be in a different order but they are all there. In any case, Darshan was such an amazing dancer, he had an incredible presence on stage. He was always so easy to photograph.

RICHARD Well he was a great inspiration to me at the beginning of the company. It was wonderful to have all his experience from having danced for so long with London Contemporary Dance Theatre. He was a beautiful dancer and an extraordinary looking man. It was really important to me to have him there right at the start.

CHRIS I remember one of the first big dance jobs I had was photographing LCDT. I had blagged my way into the press office and they agreed to commission me to photograph the company in a big theatre, in Bristol I think, doing Tom Jobe’s Rite Electric. I had the whole company on stage before the show and I was really ill-equipped. I had no idea how to run the shoot so I just asked them to run 20 minutes of the piece rather than picking sections out and I didn’t cope very well at all. I ended up with only two or three pictures that were any good, one of which was of Darshan. I remember going back into the office the next day feeling like I’ve just completely fucked this up and being so sad to have wasted everyone’s time. But I was also thinking I can never, ever let this happen again. That was such a big day for me. I had so much pride to swallow, but it made me a better photographer.

RICHARD What a steep learning curve!

Publicity image (1995) Dancers Darshan Singh Bhuller Samantha Smith

Tremor RICHARD This is a remarkable picture of a truly remarkable dancer – Martin Lawrance. He was very probably the most important and inspiring dancer I ever worked with and we worked together for a long time. You took many pictures of Martin because he was always so completely focussed in photoshoots. This is an extremely off-centre moment from Tremor, a dance in which I tried to explore the troubled life of Shostakovich. This image completely captures the idea of the composer going to the edge in his music (particularly in his string quartets – this dance was to no 3) but also being a very introverted character trapped within the terrifying cage of Stalinist persecution. It’s all there – the movement has wonderful daring…but it’s carefully judged. That was Martin.

CHRIS It was taken in Studio 8 at The Place and I remember being apprehensive about using this lighting set up because of the lack of a proper blackout in the studio. It’s one focussed flash unit with a gobo attached, making a very directional light with strong shadows and a limited area for Martin to work in. We were working in essentially daylight which swamped the modelling light from the flash unit, making it difficult to see where the square of light fell on both floor and dancer. The camera is set for the flash and when that goes off it outputs a lot more light than the modelling light and the daylight in the room. It wasn’t until we looked at the initial Polaroids that we could see how it was working, where the cut-off points were, where the shadows were. When I’m taking pictures of dance, I’m not only looking for the right physical moments, I’m looking for the moments where the figure is lit beautifully. There was a fair bit of guess work involved with this session…

Tremor (2000) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancer Martin Lawrance Costume designer Elizabeth Baker

Fever RICHARD This image has stayed with me for years. Whenever I see it, I’m always struck by the way you managed to capture Pari’s energy in a very unforced way – that’s what I love about it. It’s a picture to me of a dancer in freedom. She was a very special dancer, very feisty, sometimes she almost seemed to be punching the air like a prizefighter. I love the shadow so that you can see the shape of her leg on the floor behind. It’s a picture that I’ve always felt strongly about, I would say that it’s damn good Alston and quintessential Nash!

CHRIS Often when we work together, we look for something that reflects your style on stage which is very clean and fluid. I try to mirror that in the lighting quality or in particular shapes, moves or moments that can be read beautifully and easily, that are elegantly composed – just as your work is. With this image, for the reasons that you just mentioned, there’s more freedom to it, it’s a more carefree moment and so there is a bit more edge to it.

MARTIN It’s kind of timeless as well, isn’t it? That was taken in 2001, we are in 2020 and it’s still very much of now…

CHRIS … and equally it could have been taken in, I don’t know, 1950.

RICHARD I remember how fond I was of Pari – she had this powerful determination. She came from a dance college where there wasn’t enough class work to get her to the level that she wanted to reach (and indeed did) so she arranged with like-minded students to give each other extra classes. When she danced with the company it was really fantastic to have her there because she had this incredible attitude and unusual background (she is half Irish, half Iranian) and all of these things were part of her character and part of her as a dancer. This solo is being danced by the company now but when I see it I still think of Pari dancing so you’ve captured somebody for me who is special. When I look at a dance photograph I don’t just look and see how beautiful it is, it records very strong feelings for the person that I’ve worked with and you give me that.

CHRIS Well it’s funny you should say that because I’ve always thought of the dance photographs that I make with all of the companies I work for as being portraits. They go across genres but part of what they are is a portrait. They reflect the characters of the people who are in front of the camera and Fever (2001) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancer Pari Naderi Costume designer Elizabeth Baker

they allow those people to speak in a physical way about who they are.

RICHARD Over the years that we’ve worked together I now know when a switch goes and you’ve made a particular contact with the dancer that’s in front of you and there’s something really working between the two of you. I’ve seen that time and time again, not just with Pari but with lots of dancers.

Fever Just as with performing, it’s to do with more than just timing and focus and projecting, it’s using your imagination in a very different way.

CHRIS Exactly – because the dancer has to pour all of those things into one concentrated moment.

MARTIN It is daunting as a dancer…

CHRIS And I absolutely understand and appreciate that. It should be a threeway conversation between choreographer, dancer and photographer and everybody should be on the same page. That’s not always the case and the inhibitions that can be brought up in a photoshoot can stop that conversation happening. It is also very difficult in that you’ve only got two or three hours to have that conversation, to make the magic happen…

MARTIN And sometimes it doesn’t happen and then you’ve got to move on. Or battle.

CHRIS So trying to find those shortcuts, to find what the dancer is responding to or what their strengths are and where they are going to be at their best – that’s very much part of the process.

RICHARD I know that what I expect from a photoshoot has changed a lot over the years and I have let go of the fact that there should be images of my favourite moments in the choreography. Because my choreography is about music there are a lot of things that are unphotographable, you can’t photograph a musical phrase. So I’m really intrigued each time we get together to see what works for you.

CHRIS That’s something I constantly come up against, where choreographers are thinking of the performance, of the continual flow of movement and the impact that it has during the show…

MARTIN But that it doesn’t necessarily have in a photograph.

CHRIS So what I’m looking for are those clear physical relationships between dancers that create the shapes and lines that in turn create the composition of a Fever (2004 revival) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Jonathan Goddard Francesca Romo

photo. That’s what we work with. It’s a graphic thing – literally the lines that cut across the rectangle of the frame – but it’s also about how those elements describe what’s happening in that moment. If something’s not clear, if you can’t see what’s going on because of the positions that people are in, arms are foreshortened or a back leg’s obscured, then we’ll change something.

Costume designer Elizabeth Baker

Publicity Shoot 2001 CHRIS There’s an interesting psychology with publicity pictures, they can do a number of things. They can set up people’s expectations so when they start to watch a piece they already have something in mind, a flavour, an emotion, and that then influences what they see. Or it can work the other way round. A photo in a programme can encapsulate what they’ve seen on stage and then becomes the trigger for them remembering a performance. But if there is a disassociation there then that’s a different thing again…

MARTIN When I am sitting in the theatre with Richard he often does the shutter release click motion with his fingers when those moments in the performance come. The picture moment…

CHRIS People wait for the poster moment, they absolutely do that. And if it doesn’t come sometimes people are disappointed – ‘oh, I was so looking forward to that moment’ or ‘this is not what I thought it was going to be’.

RICHARD Sometimes the deadline for a new poster image required what you and I would call a generic photoshoot. Two particularly good examples are the cover of this book from your very first shoot with us which set a clear image for the early company, and a series of pictures of two physically striking dancers, Amanda Weaver and Andrew Obaka. These were taken for when the company reopened The Place Theatre in 2001. Without the need to capture particular choreography, this shoot seemed to inspire you to an even more graphic approach and an overt celebration of the dancers. I found that very exciting, and loved the way you emphasised Amanda’s really beautiful head shape and her long elegant limbs silhouetted against such an intense colour. It worked perfectly.

CHRIS When I was looking at the transparencies from this shoot I remembered that we’d shot this as a duet initially but then I thought that this movement from Amanda would work well if I got in closer with a wide-angle lens, which is what is helping to stretch her limbs out. I lit it with just a little shaft of light raking across and I was trying to make up my mind where on Amanda that should fall, normally it would be on her face. We did shoot some like that but because we were going for images that represented the company in general, I ended up picking this one because it had a kind of anonymity. And the colour palette Publicity image (2001) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancer Amanda Weaver Costume Elizabeth Baker

worked really well, with the red and black then the blue and white nicely counterbalanced.

At Home MARTIN I know Richard wanted these two dancers, Ihsaan and Oihana, for this shoot. It wasn’t for a specific piece so he told us we could just play around as long as it had a kind of funky street vibe. I think we took a couple of things from one of my pieces but then we went off on a tangent.

CHRIS And that was different because normally we have fairly set things to look at that Richard has in mind, but this time we had to improvise some stuff.

MARTIN That’s why this one was exciting – because it wasn’t typically Alston but at the same time it was.

CHRIS As I remember it, the brief was that we needed a poster for the At Home season at The Place and I thought that the name implied a sort of intimacy which led me to thinking about cropping in, something we rarely do.

MARTIN Yes, so it’s up close and personal. Those two dancers worked so well with each other and they weren’t afraid to fling themselves around. We got lots of images from that photoshoot.

CHRIS It can be a bit of an ask sometimes for people to improvise on the spot in front of the camera, some people can freeze up.

MARTIN Yes, they can start off a bit cold.

CHRIS It’s the look on Ihsaan’s face that is important. It’s so engaging and it helps you follow the line from his back foot, through his back leg, through his body and face and through to her – and then the implication of her arm coming out towards us. His eyes are so central in the picture and that’s important for the composition. I remember playing around with different crops to find the right emphasis. You have to retain the energy flow around the picture because it has to reflect the energy flow around the stage.

MARTIN Another thing that I like about this picture is the honesty in it. You can imagine that she is looking at him in the same way he is looking at her, even though you can’t see her face. And with all the movement in her hair, there is something very spontaneous and of the moment. At Home (2015) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers Ihsaan De Banya Oihana Vesga Bujan

Nomadic CHRIS Often when we are taking pictures, I shoot the full figure so we have the choice to crop in or leave the figure with space around it so that you can overlay text and so on for posters. And sometimes the thing that gets lost when you’re doing that, especially when you’ve got more than one person in the frame, is the connection. And maybe some of the emotion that comes from dancing or the exertion that you see more of when you get closer in. I always love really close-in details – you can get all of the flow and energy and still have the possibility of beautiful compositions.

Nomadic (2015) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancer Oihana Vesga Bujan Costume Designer Peter Todd

Red Run RICHARD Red Run was the most performed piece in RADC’s entire history. Quite soon after it was premiered (at the Holland Dance Festival in 1998) we took it to the first International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Moscow. When we arrived we discovered that the image of the three dancers flying in the air (opposite) had been chosen for the poster for the whole festival. These posters were hung up high on literally every lamp post from the Bolshoi Theatre to Red Square. An amazing sight! The original cast included a truly special Turkish dancer, Olcay Karahan. Whilst dancing (so so beautifully) with my company she became increasingly melancholic with home sickness for her own country. An elegiac solo I created to close the piece was specially made for her and I think it captured something of her deepening sadness. Scarcely a year later I realised that she needed to go home to Istanbul and before she left she came to thank me for this dance which had allowed her to outwardly express something of her own inner feelings. That’s exactly what your photograph (page 38) conveys and that’s why this image is so powerful. When we brought back Red Run last year, I asked you if you’d be interested in revisiting this image and it became the ‘icon’ for our closing tour.

CHRIS It is a really striking image – there is something very introspective about that moment for Olcay and the swirl of colour and shadow around her just seems to emphasise that. When we came to redo the pictures (page 39), I wanted to make it the same but different so I used the original lighting technique (gelled flash lights with one tungsten lamp plus a longish shutter speed) but without the swirl.

Red Run (1998) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Angela Towler Christopher Tudor Jason Piper Cotume Designer Elisabeth Baker

Red Run (1998) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancer Olcay Karahan Costume Designer Elizabeth Baker

Red Run (2019 revival) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancer Elly Braund Costume Designer Elizabeth Baker

A Far Cry CHRIS A lot of the pictures that we do are very composed, very carefully put together. Whereas this one has got more energy and more carefreeness, more of that human contact.

MARTIN

I think we did this shoot before I had started on any choreography, but I knew I wanted to feature three dancers – Shikkis, Joshua and Elly – in the actual piece. In the end Joshua and Shikkis never actually had a duet. What I love about this was that it was a one-off. We did several shots where they were holding on to each other and then I think I asked Joshua to let go and this is what happened, it wasn’t planned, Shikkis just collapsed on the floor. It has a real feeling of Michelangelo with Joshua’s hand reaching towards Shikkis.

CHRIS Yes, the attitude that Shikkis has, it is like Adam from the Sistine Chapel – I love it. The fact that he is falling back but he could be moving forwards as well, the energy sort of vibrates both ways. At the same time, it has a lovely poise and elegance to it, it feels so balanced.

MARTIN And to have captured the line of Shikkis’ attitude leg going all the way up to Joshua so there is a real synergy. There is so much character in it, with the shade on Shikkis and Joshua almost like lightning.

CHRIS I think we had talked a bit about colour before the shoot and you had mentioned cold greys as an indication.

MARTIN The piece uses Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro and Elgar is from Malvern, so I was thinking about the wind on the Malvern Hills because whenever I’ve been there it’s always been grey, with these little funnels of wind, little whirlwinds. And in the other pictures with Elly and Shikkis she’s quite witchlike. There are a lot of covens in the Malverns on top of the hills…

CHRIS Are there?

MARTIN Apparently so!

CHRIS Well now that you have said that, this looks like one of those cold, misty, overcast days. A Far Cry (2019) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers Nicholas Shikkis Joshua Harriette Costume Designer Jeffrey Rogador

A Far Cry MARTIN And what they are doing is slightly tempestuous in the middle of that. It’s quite wild! I like it and it’s those moments where you don’t expect things like that to happen that really sing out.

CHRIS Yes, it’s nice when you’re making something out of nothing and things start to take off.

MARTIN I took these images and some other moments from the shoot into the piece with me. It really started me thinking when I began to choreograph with the music, which is also very tempestuous. It has a crescendo every ten beats and I had to consider how I could structure that. In the end I made it for Shikkis and Elly with Joshua as this figure who keeps coming into them or leading the group as they whirlwind around.

CHRIS It’s interesting, the chemistry of how these things percolate through. As you say, when you begin the process, whether that’s creating choreography or making photographs, you have all these images in your mind and when things happen in the studio, you’re either going to recognise them as being relevant or not.

MARTIN It was the first time that we worked together where I hadn’t had any material and for me that was really exciting. No costumes, no choreography, just a feeling.

CHRIS I think it’s such a tribute to the company’s dancers that you can give them stuff to work with in that situation, especially bearing in mind that we only have a couple of hours to work in…

MARTIN I think we only had 45 minutes for this shoot and we got so many beautiful images from it. There is an energy that you and the dancers create sometimes where something just happens. And this just seemed to happen really quickly.

CHRIS I know with improvisation I change the way that I take pictures. I take a lot more than I need to partly because I don’t know what’s going to happen next but also so I can give feedback to the dancers through the flash going off. That way they are thinking ‘oh this is good, this is productive’ whereas if I’m just waiting and waiting then the energy will drop and there will be doubt in the dancers’ A Far Cry (2019) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers Nicholas Shikkis Elly Braund Costume Designer Jeffrey Rogador

minds.

MARTIN I suppose there was an element of that with these pictures because we didn’t know how things would play out, how the dancers would want to fall, how real it would be, what moment to catch it, how long to leave it before they all ended up in a heap on the floor.

Roughcut (2011 revival) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers The Company Costume Designer Rebecca Hayes

Brahms Hungarian RICHARD In the last few years of the company the pieces I made took on a particular intensity, as if each dance was the last chance saloon. Brahms Hungarian was absolutely one of those and I began by very rapidly making this duet for Elly and Shikkis. They knew each other well but had bonded particularly strongly after Liam Riddick and Nicholas Bodych had moved on the season before. There is often in dance companies a subtle hierarchic shift, a moment when dancers instinctively take a firm step forward to fill the shoes of those who have left. This duet fed on that energy and that’s so clear in this picture where the two bodies are absolutely as one. I love how you have captured all the movement in Fotini Dimou’s luminescent dresses which only added to the restless swirl of things.

CHRIS As I remember it, we just did two shots like this and then two more at a slightly different angle (which didn’t work). We could have posed this shot as we knew exactly which moment we wanted, but it’s so important to allow the dancers to move through the choreography to retain that sense of energy which is captured in the whirl of the dress.

RICHARD This is the first dance in the piece and it was the only way to begin. Other aspects of Hungarian traditional music and dance also became important – the haughtiness of the Hungarian Czardas, the play between exciting acceleration and sudden stops. Brahms Hungarian is an aristocratic companion to Gypsy Mixture and the essence of that nobility is portrayed beautifully by Joshua and Monique (pages 48-49).

Brahms Hungarian (2018) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Elly Braund Nicholas Shikkis Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

Brahms Hungarian (2018) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Joshua Harriette Monique Jonas Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

Grey Allegro MARTIN This shoot was the first time we worked together on photographs of my own choreography – boy was I nervous! We actually struck a great bond right there and then, there was a real chemistry that stayed. The lighting design for Grey Allegro was by Charles Balfour and was integral to the piece, with toplight flowing from stage right to stage left and vice versa. It really highlighted the space and the choreography.

CHRIS I think for a long time I avoided using the kind of lighting with a soft box toplight that you see a lot in dance photography, especially with Anthony Crickmay – it was almost a signature look for his photographs of London Contemporary Dance Theatre. But it’s such a great look! So for these ones I stopped resisting and just thought about how I could add to it, make it a bit different. I’ve always loved a colour palette that uses white, black plus one strong colour. I thought if I emphasise the contrast between the areas in the light and the areas beyond the light, and combine that with a strong saturated colour on the backcloth, I could get that look. But then the choreography has to fit in with the lighting not the other way round so that approach can be a bit of a constraint.

MARTIN The way that Jonathan is highlighted like an angel and Luke is in the shadows looking on, it’s so dramatic. The focus though is towards Maria, there’s so much happening in one photo. This is what you do best – you make me think about focus. What do you want people to see? What do you want people to feel? Wow! For our first collaboration this was mind blowing…

Grey Allegro (2003) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers Jonathan Goddard Luke Baio Maria Nikoloulea Costume Designer Elizabeth Baker

Rumours, Visions (1996) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Henri Oguike Martin Lawrance Costume Designer Elizabeth Baker

Tangent CHRIS This was a bit of a different approach because I brought in some smoke to create some atmosphere. I’m always trying to do something that will differentiate one shoot from another, one piece from another. These are all little touches, not big changes because we have to keep the RADC feel about it.

MARTIN In Argentina the men practice with each other in the backstreets in the streetlight and that’s what I really see in this picture, even though it’s a man and woman. It’s got that kind of smoky tango club feel about it.

CHRIS When my wife (Ragnhild Olsen) was dancing she did a tour of South America and went to a tango club and danced with some of the old guys. She said it was the most amazing experience. It was in this crappy room off a backstreet, plastic cups, makeshift bar, red wine mixed with Coca-Cola, chairs around the edge of the room, but with these old guys dressed up for the evening in their suits who could really dance, it was really powerful. She said it was great to be led…

MARTIN Yes, amazing partners can really control the dance, one little movement of a finger and they can take you off…

CHRIS She said the communication was fantastic, a little touch here, a little change of weight there. I had in mind her description of that room, quite shadowy and smoky. And I thought I don’t have to be too careful with the lighting, it can be a bit rough and ready.

MARTIN What I like about this it is that it feels very modern but the picture could have been taken in the 50s.

CHRIS There is something about Oihana’s attitude, the angle of her head – it does seem very 40s, 50s Hollywood. I think we played with the colour, it was pretty monochrome but there was a little bit of red light in there.

MARTIN In the piece the duet is danced to Piazzolla’s The Four Seasons and this was Winter so we were keeping it quite cold. There is something in the photo that keeps spiraling even though it’s come to the end of the fling. You can imagine her being some sort of cape. Tangent (2016) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers Oihana Vesga Bujan Liam Riddick Costume Design Jeffrey Rogador

CHRIS Very Pasodoble! The motion in the hair – it’s a crucial indicator of movement and direction.

Beyond Measure RICHARD One of my favourite images of yours is for Beyond Measure. The woman on the left is Rachel Salt who had terrific attack. Her back wasn’t totally straight and so somehow she always had this wonderful off-centre, three-dimensional quality in her movement. And the others are bent strongly away over the bench. I love this picture and I had a whole brochure designed around it. The shadow and light and the amazing physicality of the two women (Rachel and Samantha Smith) who are standing – it has a real sculptural energy.

CHRIS As I remember it, I’d brought my flash lighting but this is on stage isn’t it?

RICHARD Yes.

CHRIS So we had the space of the stage but I could light it with the quality that flash lighting gives. I think I took my cues from the lighting that you had for the piece so it’s a sort of facsimile of the lighting that already existed.

RICHARD Well I think you Nashed it up quite a bit – wonderfully! The shadows on the floor and the light from upstage on the two women, the light on the arms and the feeling through their backs, Fotini’s very simple, beautiful dresses that photographed so well. This was a really outstanding picture for me – a picture of people who were completely convinced about religion or faith or whatever. The music was Bach (I don’t often choreograph to Bach) and we had these plain churchified benches.

CHRIS Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. When we shoot pictures there’s not much money available for lighting. I bring different things each time because I have different ideas about how I can approach it but it’s often quite a basic set up, four or five lights at most.

RICHARD One thing that I find fascinating, and I’m sure nobody quite understands, is how you use light to transform an environment. Someone commented on it at the very last photoshoot, one of the dancers said ‘oh look at that!’ as they were looking at the camera screen. What they were seeing there was totally different from what they were seeing in the studio. And this photograph which Beyond Measure (1996) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Rachel Salt Samantha Smith

you took on stage using your own lights – it’s like a Caravaggio painting.

Angela Towler Christopher Tudor Olcay Karahan Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

Beyond Measure CHRIS From my art school background, I have an absolute fascination with the Renaissance and Mannerism and, like you say, Caravaggio and chiaroscuro. All of those things are absolutely relevant to how I think about lighting for the camera and particularly lighting the figure.

RICHARD Now you’re explaining to me why I like your work so much in ways that I hadn’t really registered before. The light in Caravaggio’s paintings is so subtle and I try to have a sense of that when I am choreographing. Perhaps even more consciously now than when I made this piece. But your work has such a range, and the stark black and white image of Isabel Tamen, so pared down and forceful, has a different kind of powerful simplicity. Isabel became the company’s Executive Director for its last decade and we always kept this picture on the walls of our office to remind us to stay within budget – which we did!

Beyond Measure (1996) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancer Isabel Tamen Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

Lie of the Land MARTIN This moment happens in the piece – but for the photoshoot we exaggerated it to give it more impact. It’s spectacular. Andres is so off-centre and you have caught it just before he’s about to reach out with his hands to steady himself.

CHRIS We quite often arrive at that moment where we’re saying ‘okay, keep it going, keep it going’ and catching it just before they fall out of it.

MARTIN And yet in his face he is completely animated, as if he could stay there forever. He is really focused. It has so much movement, you can see that he’s come around the corner, there is a real spiral to what he’s doing…

CHRIS ...because of the arch in his back that takes you round…

MARTIN ...and that back leg, even though it is spectacularly high, is still rotating.

CHRIS For a lot of the pictures the camera is quite low down near the floor because that perspective, combined with the lens I use, just makes people look a bit taller and gives them slightly longer legs. But for this one the camera was low because I wanted to see his face and if I was up any higher, nearer to waist level, I wouldn’t be able to. The narrative of the picture is in the lower half of the frame. It’s about him coming towards the floor, it’s about the distance between his face and the floor, about his weight tipping forwards, about his expression, that’s where the story of the picture is.

MARTIN And it is his territory – that’s where I got the title of the piece from. It starts with a solo for him where he sets out his territory.

CHRIS I think you had the name of the piece when we did the shoot and you’d talked about earthy colours. And again, it’s not much, just a bit of colour in the background that gives a hint of something, a suggestion, but combined with the title it sets the mood.

MARTIN And then with the costumes, which were all bluey-grey, and the warmth around him, it focuses everything on him.

CHRIS Lie of the Land (2010) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancer Andres De Blust-Mommaerts Costume Designer Rebecca Hayes

Well it’s a very obvious colour thing where you have warm and cool colours and one jumps out against the other. And I love the reflection on the floor. When you frontlight things you can wash out that reflection but with this one it’s mostly backlit and so the reflection is a lot stronger.

Shimmer MARTIN I remember turning up to this shoot with three tramlines shaved into my hair and in every picture I am having to hide those stupid lines by tilting my head to the side. I don’t know why I did it. I was 30 then, I should have known better. But these pictures have a dear place in my heart. Sonja and I danced so much together and this is one of my favourite pieces that Richard made for us. In this image and the other photos from the session you can really see how close we are. There was a real connection between us and we trusted each other. She hated being lifted off the ground and whenever Richard was making a new piece she would say ‘can I dance with Martin?’. I lifted her through three babies so I had to lift her in certain ways at different times to make sure she was okay. I love that photo – and it makes my legs look so long!

CHRIS I think we shot these on film, so you would have only have seen a couple of Polaroids on the day and those were mostly for me to look at the lighting, they weren’t really about checking what was happening with the dancing.

MARTIN It comes back to how when you get the right energy, something magical happens. We didn’t have to look at what our feet were doing or what our arms were doing because something really connected. We’ve both got our arms crossed, but that doesn’t happen in the piece. We’ve put two different moments together and changed the timing and we’ve got something beautiful. It has become such a distinctive Alston picture, it’s one of his iconic photos, I think. There is something so formed and yet so carefree about it.

CHRIS I remember the crystals on the costumes. Most of my thoughts about the lighting were about getting those crystals to sparkle, getting the bling to bling. I was fretting about frontlighting to get the crystals to reflect, but then that tends to wash out any colour on the backdrop. With the costumes I knew I wanted to accentuate those colours and go all blue or all red.

MARTIN I also remembered that Sonja had tape on her foot that you cleaned up.

CHRIS That’s another one of my jobs – removing bandages and plasters from people’s feet. Along with cleaning floors…

Shimmer (2004) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Martin Lawrance Sonja Peedo Costume Designer Julien Macdonald

Shimmer (2004) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Jonathan Goddard Ino Riga Costume Designer Julien Macdonald

Cut and Run MARTIN We had been talking about pools of streetlight. I took the inspiration from something that I had seen in the Philippines, a knife fight in the street, and there was something very combative about this piece. It was the first time that I had been able to work with James and Jenny and get them to let their hair down in the studio. It’s in the energy again. She is jumping but it’s like she is holding him at the same time. And he has really let go – actually you’ve captured a moment where they’ve both really let go.

CHRIS It can be difficult to get those energetic, wild, free moments when the dancers want to look perfect.

MARTIN I think that happens naturally. If the energy is right then the lines will look beautiful. If one dancer wants to do more than the other then the synergy isn’t there, but they were so in tune with each other that day.

CHRIS The relationship between them within the frame is really good – the composition of it and the flow – but it is also a really wild abandoned moment. It would have been a very fast-moving moment when they did it…

MARTIN …and to get the timing of that exact moment they come together is pretty amazing.

CHRIS It’s an almost aggressive energy in what she is doing.

MARTIN The colour contrast works really well, the black figures in the shaft of yellow light against the purple background. You know the lighting designer Zeynep Kepekli used these colours in the final piece…

CHRIS Working with different choreographers I find that the photoshoots are often a first chance for them to visualise ideas and try things out to get a feel of how the piece might look. Because the shoot happens right at the beginning of the process, it’s a chance to see if those initial ideas are working or not.

MARTIN I’m not sure that this moment actually occurs like this but it really says a lot about the piece and I used this image in the programme. Cut and Run (2018) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers James Muller Jennifer Hayes Costume Designer Jeffrey Rogador

CHRIS I guess it captured the energy of the piece, the feel of it. We did just five shots of this – I couldn’t work out where it was best for Jenny to be in relation to James so I did some at the beginning of the jump, one (this one) at the apex, and some on the way down.

Gypsy Mixture RICHARD This is Dam Van Huynh and Francesca Romo. Franny, as we called her, had an extraordinary energy, a superb dancer. I love this photograph because it’s so three-dimensional. The way she twists towards him, the way the light reflects on his chest – very, very sculptural. There’s also a great sense of contact between the two of them. She’s way, way off-centre, which was very much Franny’s style. She went for things, she was very feisty. Dam came from Cunningham, his dancing was very clearly defined and that contrast is what is so wonderful here. Franny is softer, she had this remarkably giving quality and I see that here. I see a real partnership between two people.

CHRIS When you talk about a sculptural quality, that’s very much something that I’m striving towards with the lighting. You need to see what’s happening within the body because then you can start to understand what is happening with the movement.

Gypsy Mixture (2004) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Dam Van Huynh Francesca Romo Costume Designer Peter Todd

Gypsy Mixture RICHARD When I choose one of your photographs, I obviously look for pictures where the dancers are doing the right thing, but time and again I choose the one where the lighting really strikes me. The lighting just brings out something rich and yes, sculptural. I keep talking about sculpture. I think about my choreography in one way as being moving sculpture and so when you make a picture, Chris, you show the sculptural qualities of my work and that speaks to me in a language I understand.

CHRIS You know in my training I initially made a lot of sculpture and I did a lot of figure drawing as well. From the age of about 14 I had a solid five or six years of life drawing, just looking at the figure. It took me a long time to work out – much, much later, decades later – that the photography that I was doing was a continuation of that. It’s very similar in that you are looking at line and weight and how the light falls on the body, how it describes form, bringing out the definition of the muscles. It’s the same thing.

RICHARD Well I did two years of art college and in the foundation course the drawing master used to keep saying to me ‘well Richard, you get the movement in the figure and then you seem to lose interest’ and he was right…

Gypsy Mixture (2004) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Francesca Romo Harriet Macauley Martin Lawrance Costume Designer Peter Todd

Gypsy Mixture CHRIS I think this one is another good example of us bearing in mind how everything looks on stage, even though we’re shooting in the studio. So we’re working out colour balance and the relationship between the dancers and the background. I’m always looking for the flow of energy around the stage, through the figures from dancer to dancer. That’s a compositional thing but I also think it very much reflects what you are looking for in your choreography?

RICHARD Yes, absolutely.

CHRIS It’s something that I do for every dance picture but I think it’s particularly important for the pictures that we do because of that close connection with how your choreography is in performance.

RICHARD This piece was a celebration of how music could literally cross the world picking up new influences on the way, and the carriers, if you like, were travelling people. Gypsy Mixture actually had a story within it, a long and arduous journey through often hostile terrain. The couple in this photograph were very much the leaders of the travelling group, positive and joyful in their energy. Your picture really shows Maria’s force and determination and Jonathan’s courageous sense of adventure as they led the way to successful arrival, in New York or wherever. We talk about dancers being bravely offcentre a lot in this book, but no one cracked it quite like the truly phenomenal Jon Goddard – just look at him!

Gypsy Mixture (2004) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Jonathan Goddard Maria Nikoloulea Costume Designer Peter Todd

Detour MARTIN When we were talking about this moment in the shoot, we were wondering what Shikkis was doing with his feet, but now I love his feet because they show the energy of the movement – he is really pushing up. Sometimes in photoshoots I analyse things as a rehearsal director so I’m looking at things from a technical point of view and thinking well the dancers won’t like that…

CHRIS Yes, you can overanalyse things…

MARTIN Mmm, but there’s something very raw about what Shikkis is doing and very strong. And Elly is just flying through the air and yet is very connected to him.

CHRIS Sometimes it’s hard to recreate the energy and drive that happens on stage in the studio. That is such an important part of it, it’s not just about placement and being able to see everything and if the lighting is okay. Having said that, in this image the negative spaces between them are as important in the composition as their lines and limbs.

MARTIN I think we work well together on things like that when we push things so that it has that dynamic reach, that sharpness, but there is also an abandonment.

CHRIS And it’s great that we are able to work quickly. I think we appreciate the same things so we know what we’re looking for, we know the things that work and don’t work. As you say, it’s great to be with dancers who don’t mind when you say ‘no this isn’t working, let’s move on’. It becomes very efficient in the studio.

Detour (2019) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers Elly Braund Nicholas Shikkis Costume Designer Jeffrey Rogador

Carnaval RICHARD This is another example of the strong sculptural qualities that come out in these photographs. Here, Elly is in the air with an incredible lightness and Nick is down. Nick is weighty and you have brought that out with the lighting. He is almost in shadow in a black silhouette and with Elly you can really see the light coming through this diaphanous skirt that she’s wearing. She has the most extraordinary legs and feet and they look wonderful in the picture. She has him firmly by the arm so there is marvellous contact, and this is very much one of the images of the piece. Carnaval is about Schumann’s fractured nature. He invented two characters in his music that represented the different sides of himself and this is the introverted and troubled part. Elly is Clara the long-suffering lover (then wife) and she had to deal with both those sides of him. In the simple story she gets bothered and rejects him as here when she is pushing him away. But then she realises that these two men are one person. She can’t love one without the other.

CHRIS The masks they wear and the mystery those lend to their characters, I remember they really made me think about the light and shade within the picture. Quite often with the lighting, I start with the faces and work outwards. The eyes are the first thing people go to when they look at a picture so the face needs to be lit in a satisfying way. But with these ones I thought, well if the faces are in profile but still in shadow it doesn’t matter so much, there just needs to be bit of detail in there so that you can see that they are wearing masks.

RICHARD To me, this image does everything. It’s sculptural, it’s three-dimensional, it’s a beautiful dance image. It also says something very clearly about her character and his character. How she’s affecting him, how she’s pushing him away and how he is distraught and vulnerable. And all of that in one moment.

Carnaval (2017) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Nicholas Bodych Elly Braund Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

Carnaval CHRIS It can be so difficult to find images that are emblematic of a whole piece…

RICHARD Not with your work – you don’t seem to find it difficult at all and of course it’s in my mind when I suggest particular moments…

CHRIS Yes, you’re suggesting things that you feel have an importance within the piece…

RICHARD Sometimes I get it wrong. Sometimes I choose things that are dramatically very important to me or choreographically very important to me and you just show me very simply and in a short amount of time that it does not work for the camera.

CHRIS I think that’s what I was hinting at – it can be a problem because moments that have narrative to them or, as you say, are choreographically important might not have the same relevance on camera or the same narrative when seen as a still picture. When I see these sequences in the studio I’m usually seeing them for the first time, out of context of the rest of the piece, so perhaps it’s easier for me to make a judgement about how they read.

Carnaval (2017) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Elly Braund Liam Riddick Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

An Italian in Madrid RICHARD This picture comes from a ridiculously fast solo I made for Liam Riddick in An Italian in Madrid. How you photographed such fast movement so clearly, I’ll never know. Liam always had that look of unflappable calm on his face as he moved at what often seemed the speed of lightning – at the same time he displayed utterly perfect articulation and the subtlest of musical phrasing. For a choreographer he was a joy, and over the eight years that he danced for me and Martin we made a whole series of solos for him, each one like a new discovery.

CHRIS I remember we watched him dance the solo through a few times and I made a mental note of the points that I thought had potential. We ended up isolating four or five things, one of which was this. As you say, when dancers have this kind of clarity, it makes it easy to see where those moments are, even when they are fast-moving. I don’t think we slowed Liam down at all for the shot because he needed to move at speed to retain his balance through this turn.

An Italian in Madrid (2016) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancer Liam Riddick Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

Touch and Go RICHARD Touch and Go was a Tango piece – well, you try anything once. This is a great picture from a long and languorous duet I made for Martin and the wonderful Patti Hines. I only worked with Patti for one season before she was whisked away on a world tour with Kylie Minogue, but it made the short time I was lucky enough to work with her all the more special. Patti’s physique was slight but the attack and sharpness of her dancing has stayed with me always. She and Martin were a really good match. The image is so backlit that you can see through the silk of the costume and the Ungaro tops which we used worked wonderfully.

CHRIS This lighting is really specific, it is only going to suit certain moments of choreography and the dancers really have to hit their marks for it to work. With this picture of Patti and Martin, there was a single lamp, high and slightly behind them, providing this high contrast rim light. But it has to outline their figures otherwise it would be too dark and you wouldn’t be able to see what was going on between them. Then there is a second lamp with a red gel and a snoot to just put a bit of light into their bodies and emphasise them. Finally there’s a bit of light on the background with the brown gel which is also bouncing off the floor to give a bit more fill.

Touch and Go (2002) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Patricia Hines Martin Lawrance Costume Designer Emanuel Ungaro

Touch and Go CHRIS With Maria I used a set up that I have seen in the theatre a lot where there is a wash of colour on the floor and then the dancers are lit with low lights from the sides, picking them out in a white light, lifting them out of the floor colour. The angle of that sidelight is really important and you have to use barn doors to stop it spilling on to the floor.

Touch and Go (2002) Choreographer: Richard Alston Dancer Maria Nikoloulea Costume Designer: Emanuel Ungaro

Chacony CHRIS We should talk a bit about the difference between photographing in the studio and photographing in theatres because photographing on stage is so different – it gives you more scope because obviously you are working in a bigger space.

RICHARD In the studio it’s hard to use more than a few figures. It begins to get very cramped and people get hidden behind other people. On stage, you can use the full company of ten dancers. In Chacony they wear these beautiful red coats based on an 18th century design that the costume designer Peter Todd found. In many ways, they are very modern but actually they have historical reference and this is part of the atmosphere of the piece. It’s very formal in its spacing and very formal in making structures that are quite architectural and that is there in the photograph (page 88-89). At one point they are standing in this deep V shape which their arms make, firm and confident. Later on in the second half (page 91) they do almost the same thing, this time arms inverted and leaning forward, less certain. The second half is set to music that Britten wrote in response to visiting Belsen at the end of the Second World War – a very painful piece of music.

CHRIS When you’re working with the whole company on stage there are several things that always crop up. One of them, as you mentioned, is about spacing because when the dancers are moving through the choreography the spacing is constantly changing so you have less time to look at it in detail. But when you freeze it as a photograph being able to see everybody and ensuring that everybody has a presence becomes really critical. So we do spend quite a lot of time arranging people, making sure that everybody has space.

RICHARD One of the joys of working digitally is that you can check up.

CHRIS Yes, you get instant feedback.

RICHARD Gone are the days of endlessly waiting around for Polaroids. And before that just keeping our fingers crossed…

CHRIS Yes, we just had to hope. Again, it’s the compositional thing. If people are ‘out of place’ then it doesn’t feel right in the photograph because the balance of the picture is wrong. That is so important for your work because it is all about Chacony (2017) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Liam Riddick Elly Braund Costume Designer

balance and composition and everything being in its right place at the right

Peter Todd

I have seen many pictures by other photographers over the years, some of them

time.

RICHARD That is one of the great joys for me of working with you because you have an uncanny way, time and again, of hitting absolutely the right millisecond. so awful and I think – are those dancers really dancing that badly?

Chacony (2017) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers The Company Costume Designer Peter Todd

Chacony No, it’s just been photographed by someone who has no sense of timing and who has just gone for the front figure and everybody else is all over the place. You don’t do that.

CHRIS When I’m watching a section of choreography there are so many things I need to make sense of in order to turn it into a picture. Like you say, there is always somebody at the forefront and they are usually the person that I follow for timing but of course it’s not just about them, it’s about everybody in the picture. Timing for the dancers is crucial and so we do spend quite a lot of effort on it.

RICHARD Making the photographs is extraordinarily disciplining in a way. For instance, Martin has got a very clear eye when he is working as rehearsal director and as a choreographer and he will say ‘Richard, so-and-so is doing something different’ and I often say ‘well they are so musical, as long as they are with the music I don’t really mind’. It’s the music that carries the thing. So when you remove the music, the most important element in my work, to take a photograph, you have to find a different way of expressing that clarity. I used to find it really difficult but now I know how to give the dancers the impulse to be there at the right moment. It doesn’t always work but this photo is a very good example where everybody is absolutely on it and you have caught it.

CHRIS When we talk about musicality, that can be working with the beat or against the beat or both at the same time. Whereas in a photograph, if somebody is not there, not on it when the shutter is released, then it can look like a mistake, if they’re in transition it can look wrong.

RICHARD I don’t think many people have much idea how you and I together alter things in the choreography. I might ask someone to face the other way because that will make the particular instant more logical and coherent, or we respace things and move people around. And you say things like ‘I can’t see her now, that arm is in the way’ and you, umm, deforest it!

Chacony (2017) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers The Company Costume Designer Peter Todd

Overdrive RICHARD You took great pictures of Overdrive. This one with Nick and Elly where she is bent over and he is stretching up. They are both slightly shadowy, but you can see them with all those gleams of light. The gleam on her hair and upper arm is so beautiful. If the lighting wasn’t that way the picture would look like nothing.

CHRIS It’s the spacing of the two them plus the light and shade that give it the depth.

RICHARD I’m a huge fan of Henry Moore for the same reasons. There are a lot of photographs of his outside sculptures and you can see them change according to the light and the weather and this picture could quite easily be a Henry Moore. His work is about something physical. I don’t necessarily like it when it’s obvious that it’s, say, a reclining woman but I like them when they become more and more abstract. He uses these textures and the patina of bronze and when they are outside the light changes the look of them and that’s what I love about your work. Every time I see one of your pictures, the light brings out something important about people dancing together. In a certain sense it’s visual, it’s an abstract effect, but it’s about the connection between people. Here it’s about the fact that he knows she is behind him. He’s not looking at the camera saying ‘look at me’, he is feeling through his back and she is saying ‘yes, I’m here’. It’s a wonderful duet and they do it beautifully, these two.

CHRIS When I’m talking to students about photography, I always say to them ‘you’re not photographing landscapes, you’re not photographing people, you’re photographing light – that’s what the camera sees and that is what you should be looking at’. Light describes things, it reflects off things and once you have that little twist in your thinking then that opens up photography to you.

RICHARD Ages ago a very well-known photographer was taking a photograph of a group piece I had made for a company and I wasn’t used to working with him. There was a section where people started downstage and ran up to the back and began making a line, then came around and joined in again. At one point the photographer said to me ‘Richard, which is more important, the figures at the front or figures at the back?’. And I said ‘it’s what happens between them’ and he said ‘I’m a photographer, that’s not very helpful’. I don’t have to worry about that with you!

Overdrive (2003) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Elly Braund Nicholas Bodych Costume Designer Jeanne Spaziani

Overdrive CHRIS I’m always thinking about the negative space – the space that is described by the absence of the figure. The space in between people can help reveal what they’re doing and the relationship between them. I saw a picture a long, long time ago of Siobhan Davies in a studio and there was something about the way that her body was describing the space that she was in. It resonated with me then but also subsequently, working with choreographers who were always talking about inhabiting the space, describing the space, gathering the space, all those descriptions of how a body can be in space. It made me realise that you can’t divorce the figures from the space they’re in. And even though we photograph in quite a neutral space, it does still have an important presence in the pictures.

RICHARD This also reminds me of superb photographs of architecture – it’s exactly the same thing. You can have a picture of a church that just looks like a picture postcard or you can have a picture where the light is coming through and the photographer has caught it and you suddenly see what one part of the building has to do with another. And that’s exactly the same with these three human beings. I do think of my work as being architectural. I’m absolutely obsessed with architecture and space and the fact that in dance you change the space all the time.

CHRIS I love watching dance in the theatre for many reasons but one of them is that I get to see lighting designers’ work and how they illuminate figures on stage. I can see how, if you take this light and you shine it at this angle, with this colour combination, then it has this effect, creates this atmosphere, gives this feel. All of these things are really useful to me for when it comes to working in the studio. So it all goes around in a circle. Working in the theatre with the big lighting rig can be fantastic but it also brings its own problems because it’s very low light levels for the camera. When we have shot in the theatre there is a lot of tweaking of lights as well as tweaking of choreography.

Overdrive (2003) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Nancy Nerantzi Elly Braund Oihana Vesga Bujan Costume Designer: Jeanne Spaziani

Stronghold MARTIN Stronghold is energetic but with dark moments when the dancers cluster together. It’s a piece that relies on formation and pattern and it’s tricky to photograph – especially when there is so much unison. I remember we started the shoot with the unison moments then moved on to the individual duets. This photo of Elly and Nicholas was from one of the duets and really captures what I call the tipping point. You really know how to find the end of a movement or the start of something new – the tipping point!

CHRIS There’s often a little moment in a lift, right at the apex, where it pauses briefly in the space between rising and falling…

MARTIN You also know that I do not like purple, but I always trust you. The outline of light really defines the dancers and the swooping motion of the lift. They seem to be guarding something, almost like a lighthouse protecting ships from danger. And there was danger in this lift particularly! In my programme note for Stronghold I wrote: ‘A fortress. A protected place. An area protected by a particular group. A place of survival or refuge’. I think we captured this in both of these photos, especially in the image I call the flock of landing birds (pages 98-99). We started off with seven dancers but it looked a little crowded so we took two out – solving these kinds of problems is so important in photoshoots. We wanted this idea of a flock of birds but it was too difficult to see everyone and get the range that we wanted. I just love how James and Liam look as if they are landing whilst the other dancers are still hovering. The colour feels like the sun is about to set and that there is danger in the air. They are truly guarding their stronghold.

CHRIS That was one of the unison jumps. I think in the end we did just three shots with the smaller group and even though there was another shot where the timing was more together, we liked this one best because it had a natural flow from right to left. You can see the jump progress.

Stronghold (2015) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers Elly Braund Nicholas Bodych Costume Designers Inca Jaakson Martin Lawrance

Stronghold (2015) Choreographer Martin Lawrance Dancers James Muller Nicholas Bodych Liam Riddick Elly Braund Nancy Nerantzi Costume Designers Inca Jaakson Martin Lawance

Hölderlin Fragments RICHARD This picture of Oihana and Liam – it’s the photograph that for me encapsulates the whole work. It’s not just about the movement at that moment but the connection between the dancers and the movement, not just in their bodies but in the costumes, the lighting on them, everything. It makes it an image of the piece and I always try to choose a picture like that to put in the programme because when people look at it afterwards they want to say to themselves ‘I remember that moment, oh and I remember that dancer and she did this and she did that’ and then they remember the whole piece.

CHRIS When I’m working with choreographers and dancers, I try to listen a lot. I listen to what’s happening with the dancers so that I can empathise with them and gauge where they’re at but I’m also listening to you. You are the choreographer, not me. I need to listen to you, to accept and understand what’s coming from you, what your priorities are, the things that you enjoy and are striving for and that you want to showcase in those particular pieces.

Hölderlin Fragments (2013) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Liam Riddick Oihana Vesga Bujan Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

100

101

102

Shine On RICHARD Shine On was the very last dance I made for this company. It was commissioned for our last appearance at Snape Maltings, Britten’s glorious concert hall near Aldeburgh. Naturally I chose music by Britten (for the eleventh time) and went to an early work On This Island, settings of words by his friend WH Auden. Auden’s Nocturne has dark and threatening imagery and I made a slow extended duet for Elly and Joshua. The moment in the photograph was taken from the opening line – ‘Now through night’s caressing grip Earth and all her oceans slip’. The title of the dance was in reference to the first song in the cycle, which includes the words ‘Let the sun shine on’. As the company closed, I wanted to assert defiantly that the work would do just that...

Shine On (2019) Choreographer Richard Alston Dancers Joshua Harriette Elly Braund Costume Designer Fotini Dimou

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Repertoire

1994 *MOVEMENTS FROM PETRUSHKA Stravinsky

2001 FEVER Monteverdi

*LACHRYMAE Britten

STRANGE COMPANY Schumann

SHADOW REALM Holt

*SODA LAKE (revival)

SOMETHING IN THE CITY Man Jumping

WATER MUSIC Handel

1995

2002

STARDUST Carmichael

TOUCH AND GO Piazzolla

*RAINBOW BANDIT (revival) Amirkhanian

STAMPEDE Mediaeval

1996

2003

BEYOND MEASURE Bach

GREY ALLEGRO Scarlatti (chor. Martin Lawrance)

ORPHEUS SINGING AND DREAMING Birtwistle

OVERDRIVE Riley

OKHO Xenakis *RUMOURS, VISIONS (re-titled ILLUMINATIONS in 2013) Britten 1997

2004 SHIMMER Ravel GYPSY MIXTURE Electric Gypsyland CHARGE Reich (chor. Martin Lawrance)

BRISK SINGING Rameau

2005

LIGHT FLOODING INTO DARKENED ROOMS

SUCH LONGING Chopin

Gaultier/Kondo

VOLUMINA Ligeti

1998

2006

RED RUN Goebbels

THE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL Joplin

WALTZES IN DISORDER Brahms

ABOUT FACE Marais (chor. Martin Lawrance)

SOPHISTICATED CURIOSITIES Various

PROVERB Reich

1999

2007

SLOW AIRS ALMOST ALL Mozart

FINGERPRINT Bach

A SUDDEN EXIT Brahms

BRINK Ayuo (chor. Martin Lawrance)

*ROUGHCUT (revival) Reich

NIGREDO Holt

2000 THE SIGNAL OF A SHAKE Handel TREMOR Shostakovich

104

2008

2014

SHUFFLE IT RIGHT Carmichael

REJOICE IN THE LAMB Britten

BODY & SOUL Schumann (chor. Martin Lawrance)

BURNING Liszt (chor. Martin Lawrance)

BLOW OVER Glass

2015

THE MEN IN MY LIFE Various

NOMADIC Shukar Collective (chor. Richard Alston & Ajani Johnson-Goffe)

2009

STRONGHOLD Wolfe (chor. Martin Lawrance)

SERENE BENEATH Stanchinsky

MAZUR Chopin

ALERT Molitor

2016

TO DANCE AND SKYLARK Bach (chor. Martin Lawrance)

AN ITALIAN IN MADRID* Scarlatti

2010

TANGENT Piazzolla & Nisinman (chor. Martin Lawrance)

OUT OF THE STRONG Prokofiev

*DUTIFUL DUCKS (revival) Amirkhanian

LIE OF THE LAND Rorem (chor. Martin Lawrance)

2017

2011

CARNAVAL Schumann

UNFINISHED BUSINESS Mozart

CHACONY Purcell & Britten

OTHER THAN I Couperin (chor. Martin Lawrance)

2018

IN MEMORY Hindemith (chor. Robert Cohan)

CUT AND RUN Gordon & LeGassick (chor. Martin Lawrance)

2012

MID CENTURY MODERN Various

A CEREMONY OF CAROLS Britten

BRAHMS HUNGARIAN Brahms

ISTHMUS Kondo

2019/20

MADCAP Wolfe (chor. Martin Lawrance)

DETOUR Miyoshi & Gordon (chor. Martin Lawrance)

DARKNESSE VISIBLE Adès

VOICES AND LIGHT FOOTSTEPS Monteverdi

2013

A FAR CRY Elgar (chor. Martin Lawrance)

BUZZING ROUND THE HUNISUCCLE Kondo

SHINE ON Britten

HÖLDERLIN FRAGMENTS Britten PHAEDRA Britten

*Except for those marked with an asterix all works were originally created for Richard Alston Dance Company, resident company at The Place, London 1994-2020. Publicity shoot (1995) Henri Oguike, Rachel Salt, Isabel Tamen, Samantha Smith and Darshan Singh Bhuller

105

Richard Alston Dance Company 1994 - 2020

Darshan Singh Bhuller

1994-1996

Yolande Yorke-Edgell

2006-2008

Henri Oguike

1994-1998

Darren Ellis

2007-2010

Leesa Phillips

1994-1996

Peter Furness

2007-2008

Andrew Robinson

1994-1996

Hannah Kidd

2007-2013

Stephanie Ross-Russell

1994-1995

Andres De Blust-Mommaerts

2008-2012

Karen Su Ying Woo

1994-1995

Katie Lusby*

2008-2009

Isabel Tamen

1994-1999

Ira Mandela Siobhan

2008-2010

Christopher Tudor

1994-1999

Quentin Nagyos

2008-2009

Ben Wright

1994-1995

Charlotte Eatock

2009-2012

Ben Ash

1995-1999

Nathan Goodman

2009-2014

Martin Lawrance

1995-2007

Genevieve Watson

2009-2011

Rachel Salt

1995-2000

Lewis Wilkins*

2009-2010

Samantha Smith

1995-2000

Jordi Calpe Serrats

2010-2011

Angela Towler

1995-1999

Liam Riddick

2010-2018

Greig Cooke

1996-1997

Joanna Wenger*

2010-2011

Olcay Karahan

1996-1999

Elly Braund

2011-2020

Jason Piper

1997-2001

Christopher Brown*

2011-2012

Khamlane Halsackda

1998-2001

Nancy Nerantzi

2011-2017

Pari Naderi

1998-2001

James Pett

2011-2013

Lee Clayden

1999-2001

Andrew Macleman*

2012-2013

Diana Loosmore

1999-2002

Monique Smith-McDowell*

2012-2013

David McCormick

1999-2001

Oihana Vesga Bujan

2012-2017

Amanda Weaver

1999-2001

Nicholas Bodych

2013-2018

Friedrich Gehrig

2000-2001

Ihsaan De Banya

2013-2018

Ellen Kane

2000-2003

Jennifer Hayes

2013-2020

Pamela Leung

2000-2001

Marianna Krempeniou

2013-2014

Luke Baio

2001-2006

James Muller

2013-2018

Maria Fernandez de Gamboa

2001-2003

Simon Donnellon*

2014-2015

Patricia Hines

2001-2002

Phoebe Hart*

2014-2015

Caroline Hotchkiss*

2001-2002

Sharia Johnson*

2015-2016

Andrew Obaka

2001-2003

Ryan Ledger*

2015-2016

Antoine Vereecken

2001-2004

Monique Jonas

2016-2020

Davina Givan

2002-2003

Vidya Patel (guest dancer)

2016-2017

Maria Nikoloulea

2002-2006

Nicholas Shikkis

2016-2020

Wayne Parsons

2002-2003

Ania Jurek*

2017-2018

2008-2010

Ellen Yilma

2017-2020

Sonja Peedo

2002-2010

Melissa Braithwaite*

2018-2019

Francesca Romo

2002-2006

Carmine De Amicis

2018-2019

Jonathan Goddard

2003-2008

Joshua Harriette

2018-2020

Harriet Macauley

2003-2005

Jason Tucker

2018-2020

Ino Riga

2003-2005

Niall Egan*

2019-2020

Margarita Zafrilla Olayo*

2003-2004

Alejandra Gissler*

2019-2020

Omar Gordon

2004-2005

Nahum McLean

2019-2020

Silvestre Sanchez Strattner

2004-2008

Dam Van Huynh

2004-2005

Amie Brown

2005-2009

Gildas Diquero

2005-2006

Anneli Binder

2006-2012

Rose Sudworth

2006-2008

Pierre Tappon

2006-2013

107

* Apprentice dancers

Publicity image (1999) Khamlane Halsackda and Rachel Salt