✦ Who She Is ✦
Cathy Marston grew up in Cambridge, England, taking evening ballet classes before two years' formal training at the Royal Ballet School and a move into choreography — a background that shows clearly in the literary sourcing of her mature work. She served as artistic director of Ballett Bern in Switzerland from 2007 to 2013, using the company as a laboratory for developing full-length narrative ballets, and has since worked closely with Northern Ballet in the UK and taken high-profile commissions from the Royal Ballet and other major companies internationally.
Marston's choreography is almost always built from an existing text — a novel, a biography, a historical figure's life — which she and her collaborators adapt into a movement-based structure before a note of music or a step is set. She is known for developing detailed "movement dramaturgy" with her dancers, working through a character's psychology and history so that gesture and partnering choices grow out of specific narrative reasoning rather than generic balletic pantomime.
Signature Works
Jane Eyre (2016)
Created for Northern Ballet, this adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's novel uses a shadowing device — a group of male dancers representing Jane's inner turmoil — to stage interiority that is usually invisible in narrative ballet.
Victoria (2019)
A large-scale Northern Ballet work drawn from Queen Victoria's diaries, structured around the tension between the queen's public role and private grief.
The Cellist (2020)
Created for the Royal Ballet and inspired by the life of cellist Jacqueline du Pré, this work personifies her cello as a dancing role, embodying the relationship between musician and instrument. Read the full profile →
Of Mice and Men (2022)
An adaptation of Steinbeck's novella made for the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, translating the novel's themes of loneliness, disability, and companionship into stark, character-driven partnering.
Snowblind (2018)
Adapted from Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome, this work stages a doomed love triangle in rural New England using a stripped-back, wintry design vocabulary that mirrors the story's emotional constraint.
Style & Method
Marston's process begins with dramaturgy: extensive research into the source text or biography, workshopped with dancers to translate internal psychological states — memory, longing, repression — into physical vocabulary and structural devices such as doubled roles or shadow figures. Her movement language itself remains rooted in classical technique and partnering, which allows her narrative innovations to register clearly against a familiar balletic vocabulary rather than requiring audiences to learn an entirely new movement language.
Legacy
At a moment when many contemporary choreographers have moved away from narrative altogether, Marston has built a distinctive career demonstrating that story ballet can still be formally inventive and psychologically serious. Her commissions from companies including the Royal Ballet place her among a small group of choreographers, alongside figures like Christopher Wheeldon, actively renewing narrative ballet's toolkit for contemporary audiences.
Her insistence on literary source material also sets her apart from choreographers, such as Alexei Ratmansky, who approach narrative primarily through ballet's own historical repertoire rather than external texts — a difference that makes Marston one of the more distinctive voices working in story ballet today.