Richard Alston came late to dance. He came to the London area to attend Croydon Art College, but in the mid-1960s he saw a performance of Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardee and became completely hooked on dance. “I was obsessed with it” he says.

“If someone had told me at school that my life would be working with dancers, I would have been astounded, but I started cutting lectures at college and going to see everything I could, and I realised that I wanted to be moving my whole body and not just my arm with a pencil on the end.”

Alston trained as a dancer, taking classes here and in the United States with the man he calls his mentor, the legendary Merce Cunningham.

But he started making dances very early on, which led to an illustrious 40-year career as a choreographer, several years as artistic director of the Rambert Dance Company, and the founding of this own successful company.

There are two Alston works in the programme coming to Oxford, the first is Blow Over, premiered last October. “It’s to music by Philip Glass, which I chose because it’s an interesting mixture of all the usual things in Glass — all the layers and structural things. I specially wanted a jazz voice, and this is called Songs from Liquid Days. The lyrics are by Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega, so it’s very accessible and has an interesting energy, and I’ve put this feeling into the dance.”

More unusual is Movements from Petrushka. Stravinsky wrote the music for the original 1911 production, given by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. He then made a fiendishly-difficult piano transcription for the young Artur Rubinstein to play, which will be performed for Alston’s work by the company’s regular pianist, Jason Ridgway, a musician I have long admired.

At a fair, three dolls come to life. Petrushka, a clownish figure, loves the Ballerina, but the Ballerina loves the Moor. The Moor kills Petrushka in a fit of rage.

The role of Petrushka was created by the legendary Vaclav Nijinsky, and danced with a floppy, feet-turned-in pathos that was quite extraordinary. Sadly, the great dancer’s mind sank into schizophrenia, and from the age of 30 he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions.

Rather than remount the work, Alston has taken the character of Petrushka as a metaphor for Nijinsky’s descent into madesss.

“It’s thought that Petrushka’s turned-in, tortured movements, expressed Nijinsky’s knowledge and fear that mental illness ran in his family; his brother was institutionalised as a child, and Nijinsky had to go and visit him, and would see these catatonic figures shaking and moving in a weird way.

“In my version the first movement is the carnival crowd, happy, folk-dancing, celebrating. The second movement is the isolated figure of Nijinsky, or Petrushka, expressing his anguish, and the third movement is the two brought together, and in the end people see that he is in trouble and try to help, but he pushes them away violently.”

The programme ends with a new work To Dance and Skylark by Martin Lawrance, a former star of the company. The title refers to a command on navy ships of the past.

“All hands to dance and skylark” meant the crew had to take brisk exercise in the open air, after confinement below had made them sluggish and listless. I asked Martin how he had interpreted this.

“I’ve interpreted this in terms of physicality, and in the fact that there are a lot of really, really fast, vigorous steps for everybody, (the work is performed by all ten dancers of the company), so in a way the piece feels like a fitness-training session.”

lThe Richard Alston Dance Company is at the Playhouse, Oxford, on Thursday and Friday next week.