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Judith Mackrell talks to choreographer Richard Alston

This autumn Richard Alston celebrates both his 60th birthday and his 40th anniversary as a choreographer. Bespectacled, he radiates a vaguely professorial air; he appears serenely successful but says he takes nothing for granted. "I feel I've been amazingly lucky. There have been moments when I've been through great waves of insecurity - feeling that I'm a has-been, that I'm finished. But I'm still here, and I'm still making dance." It is hard to put Alston's work into a single stylistic camp. Much of it is abstract, in the sense that it is about the fundamental elements of dance as an art form: space, energy and line. But it is also profoundly emotional, with a lyricism and romanticism that come from his early love of ballet. He counts Merce Cunningham as his greatest mentor, but doesn't share his absolute belief in separating dance from music. Mozart, jazz, Peter Maxwell Davies, Britten - Alston's tastes are eclectic, and whether it's the laidback songs of Hoagy Carmichael accompanying Shuffle It Right, or the splintered darkness of Heiner Goebbels creating the landscape of Red Run, music is always his prime inspiration. If Alston now ranks as one of the great survivors in British modern dance, he was once one of its original rebels. He came to dance late: he was 17 before he saw his first ballet, and there was no dance in his background (he was a schoolboy at Eton, and his father worked with MI6). But his timing was good. As one of the first students at the London Contemporary Dance School in the late 1960s, and then one of the first members of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, he embarked on his career just as the modern dance scene was getting underway. He was asked to make his first work for LCDT aged just 21. It would have been easy for Alston to secure his future at the company, but at that age he was too restless. In 1972 he left to form the experimental collective Strider, and to "make lots of very rigorous work which we performed in garages and gyms and art galleries". After three years, however, Strider began to feel constrictive. "We were doing rather well," Alston recalls, "and the Arts Council invited us to become regular funded clients. I was fiercely independent and the idea was terrifying. I felt it was time to stop before I found myself in a situation that I couldn't get out of."He left London for New York. "It was one of the best times of my life," he says. "I lived in the Lower East Side, which was crowded with Chinese, Ukrainian and Jewish communities and Puerto Rican drag queens. I took class every day with Merce [Cunningham], who was the most brilliant teacher I'd ever studied with. And I went to as much dance as I could. I soaked it all up."Alston returned to London in 1977, and began to settle down. "I've never had a strategy," he says. Shortly after founding his own small troupe, he was invited to choreograph a work for Ballet Rambert. He became the company's resident choreographer, and then, in 1986, its artistic director. In 1994, he ended up back at the Place Theatre, the home of his original school and company, where he formed a replacement ensemble for the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, which he has been directing and choreographing ever since. "I never planned for any of this to happen," Alston says, with an expression of slightly bemused gratitude. "Maybe there is a larger pattern here."The pattern lies in Alston's enthusiasm for his art. He remembers being a teenager at village barn dances, "learning complicated reels very quickly and wanting to organise everybody". Seeing his first ballet was a revelation. "It was the Royal Ballet Touring Company and I queued up to see every performance. This was 1965 and Margot Fonteyn was dancing with Rudolf Nureyev. Margot especially knocked me for six. Then at the end of the week I saw Ashton's Fille Mal Gardée and I thought, 'This is wonderful. I would love to make something like this.' I took my parents on the last night and said to them, 'This is what I want to do.'"Alston was due to start at art college. His mother "went crazy", but he stood firm. He enrolled in ballet and modern dance classes, and went to see every company that came to London. Those years, in which he studied art, listened to music and learned about different kinds of dance, made Alston the choreographer he is today.What has marked Alston out from many of his peers is his indifference to changing fashions in dance. He has seen successive generations of choreographers pioneering different trends, from strident, issue-driven dance theatre to experiments with digital technology. At times Alston, the purist, admits he has felt "like a dinosaur" among them. But he also believes that it is his commitment to "digging deeper and deeper into the core of dance" that has made him a survivor. "I've never wanted to make loud statements," he says."What I believe in is the amazing power and complexity of the human body in steps, in rhythm and music. And that doesn't change." He doesn't fear the prospect of diminishing energy. "I've always loved the endgame scenario - the late quartets of Shostakovich, the late plays of Shakespeare and of course the work that Merce is still making at 89. If I thought I had made my best piece, I would stop. But I don't think I have." ? The Richard Alston Dance Company perform 40/60 at the Northcott theatre, Exeter, today and tomorrow, then touring. Details: theplace.org.ukRichard AlstonDanceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds