Showing @ Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Tue 22 Nov – run ended

Simplicity, or more accurately clarity, is at the heart of Richard Alston Dance Company’s success. If other companies often see the music as an afterthought to their experiments in movement then Alston’s dancers use the notes as the soil out of which to grow their creations leading to dance pieces which are beautiful, absorbing and harmonious.

The first piece of the evening Unfinished Business, one of two choreographed by Alston himself, was a perfect start to the show combining elegant shapes and forms with thistledown lightness of motion as the dancers almost physically bounced off the piano notes from the three Mozart pieces arranged by Federico Busoni and played live by Jason Ridgeway. There was nothing extraneous here and a more complete matching of dance to music you’d been hard pressed to find

After the first interval there were two contrasting, but equally interesting pieces. The short Other Than I choreographed by the company’s Rehearsal Director Martin Lawrence was a sombre, tender performance full of longing – danced to the elegant stately music of Francois Couperin. In Memory was a longer examination of human emotion from veteran Alston collaborator Robert Cohan. Cohan twisted his dancers into complex forms, and the breaking and re-bonding of connections gave a powerful reading to the underlying themes of loss and remembrance.

The final part of the show was a work that has become synonymous with Alston: Roughcut. Building and developing from small simple movements to large and exuberant dances – and featuring the entire company – this was exhilierating, life-affirming stuff reflecting the hypnotic, electronic pyrotechnics of the Steve Reich music.

Praising the harmony that Alston’s company achieves with the music is not to underestimate the creative intelligence involved here or relegate the work to ‘movement and music’ clichés. Instead, it appreciates that what this company manages to do is take the work of composers as diverse as Mozart and Reich and translate it into dance with a rare level of empathy unusual and admirable in the world of contemporary dance.