#Cathy Marston

[dianessunflower]

The 2024 US premiere of Cathy Marston's Atonement (adapting the 2001 novel by Ian McEwan) at the Chicago Lyric Theatre, serving as the opening production of the Joffrey Ballet's 2024-25 season and was co-produced with Ballett Zürich.

[arcimboldisworld]

Clara/Ballett Zürich - Opernhaus Zürich 01.11.2024

Clara/Ballett Zürich - Opernhaus Zürich 01.11.2024 #cathymarsten #claraschumann #danielcapps #tanz #ballett #saison2024_25 #review

Es ist nach “Atonement” die zweite abendfüllende Neuproduktion von CATHY MARSTEN und zugleich Eröffnung der Ballett-Saison am Opernhaus Zürich: “Clara” – nach “The Cellist“, in dem sie sich mit der Cellistin Jaqueline du Pré auseinandersetzte, nun also ein neues Handlungsballett über Clara Schumann, eine weitere grosse und bedeutende Musikerin und Komponistin ihrer Zeit… Continue reading…

[elaine-of-shalott-blog]

[dance-world]

Edward Watson - The Royal Ballet - photo by Rick Guest

Former Royal Ballet Principal Edward Watson is a Répétiteur of The Royal Ballet. He trained at The Royal Ballet School and graduated into The Royal Ballet in 1994 and was promoted to Principal in 2005. He was appointed Répétiteur in 2020.

Watson was born in Bromley, South London. His repertory with the Company included major roles in works by Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, and numerous role creations for choreographers including Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky. His many role creations for McGregor included in Symbiont(s), Qualia, Chroma, Infra, Limen, Carbon Life, Raven Girl, Tetractys, Woolf Works, Obsidian Tear and Multiverse, and for Wheeldon Lewis Carroll/The White Rabbit (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Leontes (The Winter’s Tale) and John Singer Sargent (Strapless). Watson has worked with numerous other choreographers, including Siobhan Davies, David Dawson, Javier De Frutos, Alastair Marriott, Cathy Marston, Ashley Page and Arthur Pita.

His numerous awards include the 2012 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance, the 2015 Benois de la danse and Critics’ Circle Awards in 2001, 2008 and 2022. He was awarded an MBE [Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire] in 2015.

https://www.roh.org.uk/people/edward-watson

[thesoulbound]

ooc: no Cathy you cannot use Slater as live action John Marston.

[daughter-of-winterfell]

THE JANE EYRE BALLET IS COMING BACK IN 2025!!!!!!!!!!! ✨️✨️✨️🎊🎊🎊

I've had a Google alert set for years with no real hope that Northern Ballet would perform Cathy Marston's Jane Eyre again, and here we are!!!!!! I could actually cry!!!!! I'm going to start saving up so I can see it at least twice!!!!!!

[balletroyale]

The Royal Ballet: Back On Stage

[b-mw]

Romany Pajdak and Calvin Richardson in In Our Wishes

[dhamaka]

The Cellist, a new ballet by Cathy Marston (contains spoilers)

The Cellist, a new ballet by Cathy Marston (contains spoilers)

Cathy Marston has created her first work for the Royal Ballet The Cellist, based on the life of British cellist Jacqueline du Pre, whose career was tragically cut short at the age of 28 due to the effects of multiple sclerosis. In this one-act ballet, Marston provides a series of vignettes, the critical moments in du Pre’s life. Her discovery of the cello as a young child, danced with sparkling…

[peopleofthebarre]

Gary Avis, Marcelino Sambé, and Lauren Cuthbertson in The Cellist, photo by Marilyn Kingwill for the Times of London. 

Ballets about Jews are few and far between, and although Cathy Marston’s one-act ballet The Cellist, created for the Royal Ballet, is mostly quiet about this facet, it certainly is about a Jew. 

Jacqueline Du Pré z”l (1945 – 1987) is generally accepted to have been one of the greatest cellists of all time, particularly known for her interpretations of Edward Elgar. She made many recordings still considered to be gold standards,  appeared in the notable film The Trout alongside Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Zubin Mehta, toured internationally, and taught extensively after her multiple sclerosis cut short her performing career. 

Du Pré, whose family hailed from the Channel Islands, met and fell in love with Israeli-Jewish pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim in the mid-1960s, and they developed a noted professional relationship as musician and conductor alongside their personal association. In 1967, during a visit to Israel, Du Pré converted to Judaism and married Barenboim at the Western Wall. Although her marriage to Barenboim eventually dissolved, her relationship to Judaism persisted throughout her life -- indeed, she was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Golders Green. In conversation with William Wordsworth, editor of the book Jacqueline du Pré: Impressions, she noted that, “I think the thing that made it so easy for me is that the Jewish religion is perhaps the most abstract. Since I was a child I had always wanted to be Jewish, not in any definite way, because, of course, I didn’t understand anything about it. Possibly it may somehow have been to do with the fact that so many musicians are Jewish. …” In a BBC interview in 1981, she described her feelings about Judaism’s relationship to music: “I am sometimes asked if religion has helped me and I always reply: To be quite honest, not as much as music, because for me the Judaism is almost bound up in the music. I just cannot separate them or indicate their boundaries.”

The Cellist is a condensed and stylized retelling of her life from the first time she picked up the instrument to her eventual retirement from the stage as a result of her MS. Overall, it presents a balanced picture of her life without sensationalism. Balletic treatments of women artists are few and far between, as are treatments of disability, as are ballets by women and ballets about Jews. I think it could be said that Marston treats Du Pré’s disability in the abled model of three-act tragedy, trying to fit it into a narrative form that life and illness simply don’t have. I was also at times uncomfortable with the objectification (literally) of Black dancer Marcelino Sambé as Du Pré’s cello and the spirit of music, although Sambé danced with incredible beauty and fluidity, and other dancers also played the role. Nonetheless, I think it to be worth seeking out to form your own opinions. 

Du Pré’s Jewishness is lightly touched upon in a brief scene depicting her wedding with Barenboim: the couple are hoisted up upon chairs, as is traditional in Ashkenazi weddings, and the score quotes, of all things, the hora. It was a moment of sweet recognition in a world that ignores Jews, especially Jewish women, or relegates them to magical, greedy villains such as Coppelius. 

Further reading: JWA entry on Du Pré’s life and work, archival news piece on Du Pré and Barenboim’s marriage, a personal reflection by blogger kaznyoung on the impact of Du Pré’s recordings of the Kol Nidre prayer, The Guardian review of Marston’s The Cellist, BBC review of The Cellist, Financial Times review providing a rather different take

[dianessunflower]

The 2024 US premiere of Cathy Marston's Atonement (adapting the 2001 novel by Ian McEwan) at the Chicago Lyric Theatre, serving as the opening production of the Joffrey Ballet's 2024-25 season and was co-produced with Ballett Zürich.

[arcimboldisworld]

Atonement/Ballett Zürich - Opernhaus Zürich 30.06.2024

Atonement/Ballett Zürich - Opernhaus Zürich 30.06.2024 #cathymarston #ianmcewan #ballettzürich #tanz #abbitte #review #junioballett #jonathanlo

Es braucht schon sehr viel Selbstbewusstsein und ein gutes Team, um einen internationalen Bestseller wie “Atonement” (Abbitte) von IAN MCEWAN als grosses Handlungsballett auf die Bühne zu bringen. Jeder kennt den Roman, die Erwartungen sind entsprechend hoch. CATHY MARSTON – Direktorin des Ballett Zürich – hat sich dieser Aufgabe angenommen und (zusammen mit EDWARD KEMP) einen interessanten Abend…

[clairemercie]

The Cellist @ The Royal Opera House Ballet

[galina-ulanova]

Lauren Cuthbertson and Marcelino Sambé rehearsing The Cellist with Cathy Marston (Royal Ballet, 2019)

[northernballet]

Northern Ballet dancers Mariana Rodrigues and Joseph Taylor in Jane Eyre, a ballet by Cathy Marston.

Photo Emma Kauldhar.

[artmutt]

You Can’t Go Backwards: Jane Eyre at the Joffrey Ballet

I’ll say this right at the outset: as much as I love dance, and can admire the skill and beauty of ballet, the big, 19th-century story ballets don’t do a thing for me. Swan Lake, Coppelia, Sleeping Beauty, none of them. Oh, you can update them with snazzy sets and costumes, but for the most part I find them tedious. They’re best in excerpts, as far as I’m concerned, to enjoy the virtuoso dancing in them, without having to try to follow a plot delineated by movement and mime. And note that I don’t include here the more abstract ballets of people like Ballanchine, or even the Tanztheater works of people like Pina Bausch. I’m talking the 19th-century chestnuts.

So, when the Joffrey Ballet announced a “new” ballet, based on Jane Eyre, with an original score, I thought, well, maybe. After all, it’s the 21st century, and maybe they’l come up with something Post-Modern and abstracted, vaguely based on the story of Jane Eyre. Alas, that was not the case. What choreographer Cathy Marston and composer Philip Feeney have come up with here is not something Post-Modern that comments on the ballets of the past. They have attempted to create, in essence, a new 19th-century story ballet, a piece of ersatz Romanticism that takes a 19th-century novel and tries to render its plotline in movement. It didn’t work for me.

Feeney’s score was part of the issue. I was OK with it when it evidenced a certain bland Post-Minimalist quality (kind of like a Philip Glass film score, which is always indistinguishable from every other Philip Glass film score, or in this case, like the bland minimalist Romanticism of Michael Nyman). I kept thinking, the music is trying to be like early 19th-century music. It wants to be, I don’t know, Schubert or something like that. Then, as the first Act slumped toward its conclusion, sure enough, it actually turned into Schubert, with a set of variations on the song “Auf dem Wasser zu singen.” As if that wasn’t enough, the end of the first act relied on an orchestration of the slow movement of Schubert’s Sonata for piano in B-flat, D. 960. (I notice that Feeney’s score says “compiled and composed.” So...he’s more like the editor?)

I might not have minded the bland pseudo-Schubert score, but the mise-en-scene of this story ballet kept going around the bend for me. Like, who were the dudes who kept chasing poor Jane around the stage? Figures of death? Unfortunate ex-boyfriends who still haunted her? Why did the same gang show up later with a saddle and start riding each other? (And regarding that scene, I have a general what-the-fuck reaction as to what was supposed to be going on...do I need to re-read Jane Eyre?) I had a similar wtf moment when Jane “saves” Edward Rochester from his burning bed. And who was that lady in red lurking around? Another angry ex who existed only in the imagination? Indeed, distinguishing “real” from “imaginary” in this work was a constant struggle. 

And therein lies the heart of my problem with story ballets. The “language of dance” is very inherently abstract. Yes, it can convey emotion, but typically it is at its most emotional when it is not engaging in bad mime. I’d be willing to bet that when Charlotte Brontë wrote the novel, she wasn’t thinking “This will make one hell of a ballet!” Rather, she thought her story best conveyed in carefully chosen WORDS, that allowed her to explore her characters’ states of mind and their actions. Joffrey’s Jane Eyre had a lot of posturing and posing, and kept trying to be like the ballets of the past. The problem is, it’s the present.