Photo: Chris Nash

@ Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, on Sat 24 Oct 2015 (touring)

It would be difficult to mistake Richard Alston Dance Company for any other troupe. They have a unique style, creating dance without sharp edges that has a truly intimate rapport with its music. As part of their UK tour, they present three carefully selected works at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, including the return of Martin Lawrence’s Burning, premiered here last year.

The programme begins with Brisk Singing, choreographed by Alston and first performed in 1997, which demonstrates just how coupled music and movement can be, small details in the music carefully reflected in the choreography. This goes beyond just mirroring the music’s shape. Rather, it exhibits a real understanding of how the music functions—its preparations, tensions, resolutions and cadences—subtleties that are carefully conveyed by the dancers.

The relationship of music and dance is somewhat different in Martin Lawrence’s Burning, where the music—Liszt’s Dante Sonata, played excellently by Jason Ridgway—appears to accompany the dance, in reaction to it, as though to an early film. The choreography is intense and fervent, with almost the exaggerated body language of the silent screen. Liam Riddick as Liszt and Nancy Nerantzi as his lover (the Countess Marie D’Agoult), dance with an impressively concentrated tempestuousness throughout, taking us to Burning’s sharp intake of breathe ending.

The company’s final work, Nomadic, is a collaboration between Alston and the hip-hop artist Ajani Johnson-Goffe. Again, dance appears to have grown organically from the music, this time extracts from the Shukar Collective’s Urban Gypsy Music. The choreography is rounded and soft edged, the hip-hop influence being seen in the softness of the beat, which often seems virtually concealed, and the inwardly projected energy of the dancers.

It ends rather more abruptly than expected, as if there is more to come, but apart from that shows just how successful such partnerships can be. It is danced brilliantly, with a precise clarity that is the hallmark of the programme as a whole.