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.