Cathy Marston's Sense of Narrative

I joined choreographer and artistic director Cathy Marston over a video call at the end of another day of rehearsals. She’s been tasked with creating a world premiere for the Royal Ballet’s upcoming triple bill. Set to Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, the work marks a return for Marston to Covent Garden following her award-winning biographical portrait of Jacqueline Du Pré ,“The Cellist.”

Cathy Marston in rehearsal with dancers of the Royal Ballet. Photograph courtesy of ROH

Juggling the pressures of directing Ballet Zürich and creating an entirely new piece at another company is unenviable. Yet Marston is all smiles in the Royal Ballet & Opera’s cavernous rehearsal room. We talk about the power of Benjamin Britten’s music, carving out choreography, and coming full circle.This conversation has been edited for clarity

How are rehearsals going?

It’s good! I’m actually in the opera rehearsal room as opposed to the ballet studios because we’ve got this set, great big thing. It’s lovely we have the chance to work in here because you respond differently to the space when you’ve got this huge thing. We’ve sketched the ballet out and now I’m just making a lot of changes [she grins], hopefully making it better.

Tell us a bit about the new work you’re making.

There's not much to tell as I would normally with one of my creations, and the reason for that is because I decided to start without a pre-existing story, novel, or biography. Rather, I took a piece of music and allowed that to guide me. I listened to a lot of things and came to Benjamin Britten’s violin concerto. It’s a beautiful piece, it's got a lot of contrast, but it also has a story underneath. You don’t exactly know what it is, he never did share, but you feel that there's a narrative to it. So I guess I’ve made a compromise in not starting with a novel or play, or what have you, but I have chosen a piece of music that is quite emotional and perhaps narrative to some extent.

I listened to it a lot and started to write down the images that came to my head, not in terms of steps because that doesn’t really happen for me until I'm in the studio with the dancers, but the kind of environment and, I use the word character very loosely, but the figures who are in the space. Slowly with my dramaturg Edward Kemp I shared these images and scenes that were somehow conjured by the music for me, and we began to thread them together and make some sort of sense of them structurally. What was lovely was we didn't have a narrative to impose, so in the studio, if I felt that something didn't need to change or a scene could go on longer, I could still be spontaneous much more than I normally am. So that’s sort of how the piece came about.

There is this large rocky precipice-bridge thing, and that was because one of the first images I imagined of this place was that the main character or protagonist, who is male, was entering a space he wasn’t familiar with—a kind of liminal space. It could be that it's by the sea, I had a sense of the edge of land, maybe that’s the influence from Britten. I had the feeling that he’s moving away from something but was unsure about that. Having written down these images I researched the context of the music a bit. It’s written shortly before the Second World War. I knew that Britten was a pacifist, so you hear the war in the undercurrents of the music. That definitely felt relevant to the choreography, this danger that’s lurking not too far away.

There was another section of the music that felt like a female character was being introduced. I felt that it was a maternal angel, a mother figure that’s not quite earthbound. I discovered then after writing that down that Benjamin Britten’s mother died shortly before he wrote the music. I let these small thoughts guide the way and we’ve come to a thing! I’m not sure what else I can share about it just yet.

William Bracewell rehearses Cathy Marston's new ballet for the Royal Ballet. Photograph courtesy of ROH

As you said, you normally work with a story or characters. Why did you decide this time that you would do something a little more abstract?

Well, I don’t think it’s honestly abstract. I was inspired when working with the Joffrey Ballet, [Artistic Director] Ashley Wheater asked me if I would be willing to choreograph “Siegfried’s Idyll” by Wagner, it was a collaboration they were doing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It’s a short piece, only twenty minutes, and I love working with Joffrey. I used to do it a lot more, it's only in the last decade or so that I’ve been almost exclusively doing narrative pieces. I did a piece called “Moving Still” during Covid that was more musically inspired followed by “Siegfried’s Idyll”—I called the ballet “Heimat.” I just felt like it would be a wonderful opportunity to use the gorgeous dancers here, to take a piece of music I love and work with dancers who inspire me, to let that be the guide for once. Just a different thing to explore I guess. To trust my own sense of narrative.

It sounds like the work has an element of war to it. Living in the fractured times that we do, has the state of the world seeped into the creative process at all?

It is coincidentally timely in a way, it does reflect the times, but I didn’t set out to create a piece that was so reflective of our times. I think war never really goes away. There is conflict almost always somewhere. The music was written before the Second World War, but it could be at any time. I do feel that I’m responding to the music rather than imposing any ideas onto the piece. We can’t deny everything that we bring to a work, but I haven’t intentionally taken inspiration from anything other than the music and, to a smaller extent, the context.

“The Cellist” made extensive use of Elgar’s music. This time you’ll be using music by Britten. Is there a desire to use British composers when working with the Royal Ballet? What draws you to the music you use?

It is a nice connection, but it wasn’t anything intentional. Kevin [O’Hare] really gave me carte blanche. What draws me in musically? It’s that with the Elgar and the Britten, and some of the Schumann pieces I’ve worked with recently, they’re emotional works. They’re not cool, though sometimes I will work with very cold music: a piece I made for the Ballet Zurich Junior Ballet this year was to music by Louis Andriessen, which is very mathematical. It was fun as well! That was a challenge to myself to see if I could do something that had no soaring strings.

With the Britten I was drawn to the implicit narrative that I didn’t know what it was, but it gave me freedom to find one without the pressure to follow one. So, for example recently as director of Ballet Zurich, I commissioned Dani Rowe to create a new “Pictures at an Exhibition” which is programmatic music, you have to decide whether you’ll follow the order that’s been set out or ignore it. Whereas with the Britten you feel that you're being taken on an emotional journey, that there's some sort of narrative arc, but it's quite liberating because he never tells us what it is.

Cathy Marston in rehearsal at the Royal Ballet. Photograph courtesy of ROH

The dancers you're working with are of course…

Gorgeous!

Yes! And very thoughtful. How has it been carving it all out with them? Since you’re developing a narrative, is it a collaborative process with the cast?

Yeah, particularly with the soloists. There's a character that, on the schedule, we’ve named “P for Protagonist,” [she laughs] and that’s William Bracewell. He doesn’t really leave the stage so it's his quest or journey, whatever it is. We hadn’t worked together before, so it’s been an interesting process to allow fragments of ideas that aren’t joined up out and he processes them and makes sense of them, and then he’ll have his own way of making sense of the choreographic journey he’s on—encouraged by me. I am, even though it's not a written story, encouraging the dancers to be clear in their intentions and the motivation behind each step. A stop is a stop, but why am I stopping you? How am I stopping you? What’s the tone of voice? So there are lots of little fragments of, what I call, dance dialogue in there. Are we intimidating someone or drawing them in? Are we taunting or tempting someone?

Those are the sort of terms I speak with in rehearsal. I’m not really just saying stretch your leg or lift it higher—sometimes I do when I’m shaping it—but I’ll ask questions. How can we connect to this? How can you be drawn together? I’m asking for help in terms of motivation and intention rather than “how can you get a grip to change?”

I guess there is also, with that theatrical tradition in the Royal Ballet, the fact that they are strong storytellers.

They understand that that’s where I’m coming from as well. That’s something I share with them.

A few years ago you had an association with the Royal Ballet, “The Cellist.” Of course was a great success, what does it mean to come back to the company?

It feels like home in a way. Coming to the Royal Ballet School was hugely influential, even if it was for only two years. So much was absorbed in those two years. Then coming back as associate artist at the Royal Opera House for five or six years before heading off to Bern as artistic director. It’s not the individual dancers on the whole, since most of them have retired now, but it’s the place, the values, the training, the references. It’s very familiar.

It’s a lovely thing to come back where you started. And I have it in Zürich as well, because that was my first job as a dancer when I was 18, so I have two homes in a way. Two centrepoints. Two places where I’ve come full circle.

The Royal Ballet performs “Perspectives: Balanchine, Marston, Peck” from the 14th of November to the 2nd of December at the Royal Opera House.

Eoin Fenton

Eoin (they/he) is a dance maker and writer based in Cork (Rep. of Ireland), and London (UK). They have danced across Ireland and London in venues including The Place, Project Arts Centre Dublin and Galway Cathedral. Eoin graduated with a BA in Choreography from Middlesex University in 2024 and began writing as part of the Resolution Reviews programme. They are a regular contributor to A Young(ish) Perspective.

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