A limited-edition book of 50 photographs of Richard Alston Dance Company taken over 25 years by dance photographer Chris Nash and published by Fiat Lux, with a foreword by writer and critic Judith Mackrell and conversations between Richard Alston, Chris Nash and Martin Lawrance, is available on Amazon from 19 October 2020 and from Nash's web site now.
Alston Nash is a 108-page book of 50 photographs chosen by Nash, Alston and Martin Lawrance, who was originally a dancer with RADC, then its rehearsal director and associate choreographer. Accompanying conversations offer insights into the creative relationship between choreographer and photographer, the art of the successful photoshoot and the life of a dance company.
Writer Judith Mackrell, who became The Guardian’s dance critic in the same year Alston and Nash took their first photos together, has written an opening essay for the book which covers the aesthetics and careers of Alston and Nash, key moments in the history of dance photography and her take on some of the images in the book.
Mackrell says in her foreword, “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.”
Alston Nash is conceived by Chris Nash and is the first publication from his Fiat Lux imprint.