Cathy Marston
Choreographer
Cathy Marston is a choreographer, artistic director and Clore Cultural Leadership Fellow. After education in Cambridge, she spent two years at the Royal Ballet School, before launching a successful international career now spanning over twenty years.
Cathy’s great gift is to join artistic dots, creating form for stories, emotions and ideas. She inherited a passion for literature from her English-teacher parents. For Cathy, stories inform dance. As Associate Artist of the Royal Opera House for five years (2002-2006), she created interpretations of Ibsen’s Ghosts, a prequel and sequel to Shakepseare’s The Tempest and a ‘dance–opera’ of Echo and Narcissus, among other works. During her six year tenure as Director of Bern Ballett in Switzerland (2007-2013), she further developed her unique, contemporary-ballet-hybrid signature in works like Juliet and Romeo, A Winternights Dream, Wuthering Heights and Witch-hunt – the latter two works also performed on tour at The Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London. Lending new perspectives to old narratives in her version of Chekov’s Three Sisters for Ballett im Revier (Germany), Blood Wedding for Finnish National Ballet, Swan Maidens for Ballet des Theater Koblenz (Germany), Lolita for Copenhagen Summer Ballet (Denmark) or Jane Eyre for Northern Ballet (UK), she strips back stories to their essence and expresses them through high quality technique and unflinching expressive integrity.
“She has let the drama bleed through the dance.” The Telegraph
Cathy has choreographed for companies worldwide including The Royal Ballet, Northern Ballet, English National Ballet, Finnish National Ballet, Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, Ballett des Theater Koblenz, Ballett Basel, Ballet of the Castle Opera Szcezcin, Ballett des Oper Graz and Washington Ballet; she has also choreographed operas, most recently Krol Roger for The Royal Opera, London. She launched her charitable company, The Cathy Marston Project in 2006, which continues to support her creative work. With future collaborations planned in opera and theatre, further widening her portfolio of over fifty works performed in ten countries, Cathy looks forward to continuing to charter new territory – both geographically and artistically.