"This is Rambert"

Sadler’s Wells Theatre June 2026

Once upon a time, 100 years ago, a theatrical producer asked a young woman who was running a ballet school, “And what are you doing in your studio?” She answered, “We are working now on a little ballet for which [my husband] gave us an idea.” The woman was Marie Rambert, whose name alone identifies the company she then organized, almost by chance, from her students.

Needing a novelty to refresh an existing revue, the producer offered her the opportunity to present that little ballet, and she persuaded her only male pupil, Frederick Ashton, to create it though he’d never made a ballet before. “[A]t that time,” Rambert said fifty years ago, “all he wanted was to become the premier danseur of the great world.”

And so the fairy tale goes, improbable at every turn but finally reaching a happy ending. Looking back over a century, it’s clear that the choreographers Marie Rambert encouraged and developed constitute a significant share of Britain’s dance history.

In the troupe’s early days, Ashton and Antony Tudor were its mainstay. When they moved on, Ballet Rambert staged Giselle, La Sylphide and Coppélia. “[T]he provinces only wanted to see the classics,” Rambert declared. “[W]e were always being compared with all these big companies who seemed to abound at that time.”

So in 1966 the troupe changed its spots. The young choreographer Norman Morrice, soon her replacement as director, suggested “that we should keep a company only of soloists—no stars, no corps, just soloists.” Ballet disappeared, and as time passed, the dance makers Glen Tetley, Robert North, Christopher Bruce, Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies and Mark Baldwin reshaped the repertory according to their taste, the times, and the public.

Rambert’s current director, Benoit Swan Pouffer, has followed their lead, matching this centennial celebration to popular trends with three half-hour pieces. All were choreographed since last May—the première of In Crimson, by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, fell on the first night of the Sadler’s Wells season—and all featured the same vocabulary of relentless speed, complex choppy phrases, insistent repetition and extreme anatomical flexibility.

(LA)HORDE’s Hop(e)storm filtered the old-fashioned Lindy Hop through a breathtaking formation drill. Elbows linked and feet flashing like knives, the ensemble seemed to be gleefully reinventing geometry or solving a brain-teasing exercise in counting. I loved the work’s rhythmic formality and the dancers’ breezy mastery of its rigorous demands.

Emma Evelein’s Gallery of Consequence played with the familiar hazards of travel: late arrivals for a journey, romantic farewells, awkward posing for security scans, elbow nudging in cramped seats. As the passengers gathered in the airport, each dragging a wheeled suitcase, I predicted what was coming and I wasn’t wrong.

Danced in front of the stage curtain, In Crimson defied predictability by shuffling its eight dancers like a pack of cards through a moody series of casual encounters. An atmosphere of sexual attraction and rejection surrounded them, and an onstage pianist, woefully overamplified, accompanied them. But each episode seemed to occur in a vacuum—the dancers changed partners indiscriminately as if anyone would do. Because only their physicality and its inventive deployment engaged your attention, they left your mind the moment they left your view.

Swan Pouffer has said, “For the centenary, I didn’t want to look back, I wanted to define who we are today.” That effort includes slipping a souvenir poster into the printed program, which he must hope fans will pin up at home like a Taylor Swift poster.

Directing an ensemble of dazzling contemporary dancers, as precise and polished as any you can see today, he may consider the past excess baggage. Yet building an audience where none existed, Marie Rambert built a repertory that embraced variety, narrative, abstraction, drama and comedy. This celebration confines dance to a single fashionable style, which might be a practical choice but doesn’t really do justice to the company’s century of artistic achievement.

“This is Rambert” tours through September 16. rambert.org.uk/whats-on