Alston dancers stick to their hallmarks — pleasing patterns, light action

Dance review |

Light, springy action — and pleasing pattern and flow.

These are the hallmarks of Britain's Richard Alston Dance Company. What's missing are the moments of awe and the wild-card moves that turn expectations inside out.

The evening's three pieces — all by Alston — are set to music by Stravinsky, Philip Glass and Hoagy Carmichael. Alston has the most fun with "Shuffle It Right," the Carmichael piece — especially in its opening, which is set to a recording session of "Riverboat Shuffle" filled with false starts and stops. The dancers bob, sway, lope — only to be thrown off track once more by Carmichael's cranky displeasure with his own musical performance.

The flubbed "Riverboat Shuffle" recording is followed by other Carmichael tunes that are more intact. Most are brief, prompting pithy solos by Andres de Blust-Mommaerts and Pierre Tapon — both impressive — and group passages that seem little more than lithe reactions to the casual swing of the tunes.

Anneli Binder brings the suite to a wistful close with her take on "Stardust." Sometimes kicky in her exuberance, sometimes deflated with disappointment, she ends with a look offstage as if hoping to find something more there.

In "Movements from Petrushka," the solo work again outshines the group activity. Ira Mandela Siobhan, immune to the usual laws of gravity, is "the Petrushka/Nijinksy figure." Whether airborne or floor-bound, he keeps cutting new lines through space and slipping through them at unexpected angles. (Tapon takes on the role tonight and tomorrow, and should be just as captivating in it.)

Jason Ridgway provides fine live piano accompaniment, but the group action is hardly as frenzied as you'd expect something Nijinsky-inspired to be.

"Blow Over," set to excerpts from Philip Glass' "Songs from Liquid Days," seems a better match of score and style. The music is in Glass' trademark moto perpetuo mode, with some curious torquings of key. The movement onstage, with its arcs and dips, has something of courtly calisthenics about it. The dancers ripple through their moves with a supple precision. Blust-Mommaerts and Tapon again stand out.

If Alston has strong dancers at his command, he's not so lucky in his staging. Costumer Peter Todd has an inordinate fondness for black, gray and white, giving all three dances a similar monochromatic feel. Charles Balfour's lighting is more varied, but doesn't lock persuasively into the drama — and his use of a strobe light in the last section of "Blow Over" doesn't do a thing for it.

See this troupe for its standout dancers — not their setting.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com