✦ Origins ✦
Rambert began in London in 1926, founded by the Polish-British dance teacher and impresario Marie Rambert out of the studio she had already been running for several years. As Ballet Rambert, it became one of Britain's first ballet companies and an important seedbed for homegrown British choreography, nurturing early works by figures such as Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor before either had built the reputations that would later define British ballet.
The company's identity changed fundamentally in 1966, when director Norman Morrice steered it away from its classical repertory and toward the contemporary dance idiom then emerging out of American modern dance, drawing particularly on Martha Graham's technique and the work of choreographer Glen Tetley. The shift was not a gradual blending but a decisive break: the company shed its status as a classical ballet company outright, a transformation few institutions of comparable age have made this completely within their own continuous history.
Artistic Identity
Today Rambert operates as one of the United Kingdom's leading contemporary dance companies rather than a ballet company in any conventional sense, building its repertory around release-based, ensemble-driven contemporary technique and commissioning both UK and international choreographers — including, in past seasons, artists such as Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The company combines performance with a substantial education and outreach program, and has been resident since 2013 in a purpose-built studio complex on London's Southbank, a facility designed around the demands of contemporary rather than classical training.
Recent Leadership
Choreographer Benoit Swan Pouffer became artistic director in 2018, continuing the company's pattern of using changes in leadership to shift its programming rather than settle into a fixed house style. Rambert also maintains a formal link to Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, a separate conservatory that shares the company's name and history without being run as its in-house training pipeline in the way some other companies structure their schools.
Why It Matters
Rambert offers a useful case for understanding the boundary this site traces between classical ballet and contemporary dance, because the same institution has occupied both categories at different points in its own history rather than the two being separate lineages. As the oldest continuously operating dance company in Britain, its complete pivot away from classical repertory in the 1960s remains one of the clearest single examples of how thoroughly a company's identity can be remade.