Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Almost every professional dance institution in Britain traces back, directly or by inheritance, to two immigrant women. One was the Irish-born Ninette de Valois, whose Vic-Wells troupe grew into the Royal Ballet. The other was smaller, sharper and far stranger: Marie Rambert, a Warsaw-born teacher who never ran a grand opera-house company, yet presided over the workshop where British choreography was actually invented. The company she founded in 1926 survives as Rambert, the oldest dance company in the country, and the artists she prodded into their first real work, above all Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor, went on to reshape ballet on both sides of the Atlantic. She matters because without her the British classical tradition would have had choreographers to import but almost none to grow at home.
From Warsaw to the Dalcroze school
She was born Cyvia Rambam on 20 February 1888 in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland under the Russian Empire, into a Lithuanian-Jewish family. Her route into dance was oblique. A performance by Isadora Duncan in the early 1900s convinced the young woman that movement could be a serious art rather than a decorative one, and in Paris she fell in with the circle around Duncan’s brother Raymond. The decisive training, though, came from the Swiss musician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, whose method of eurhythmics taught pupils to internalise rhythm through physical movement rather than count it on paper. Rambert became good enough to teach at Dalcroze’s institute. That single, unusual skill, musical rhythm made physical, is what carried her into the centre of twentieth-century dance history, before she had any classical ballet technique to speak of.
The dancer who counted for Nijinsky
In 1912 Serge Diaghilev, the impresario behind the Ballets Russes, had a problem. Vaslav Nijinsky was choreographing Le Sacre du printemps to Igor Stravinsky’s violently irregular score, and the dancers simply could not hold the shifting metres. Diaghilev recruited Rambert from the Dalcroze school specifically to drill them in the rhythms. She worked at Nijinsky’s side through the rehearsals and was present for the premiere on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, one of the most notorious first nights in stage history, when jeers and applause fought each other over the orchestra. She remained with the company through 1913 and used the opportunity to study classical technique with the eminent Italian teacher Enrico Cecchetti, whose rigorous method she would later transplant to London. The lesson of the Rite, that music and movement are a single fused thing rather than a tune with steps laid on top, became the backbone of everything she went on to teach. Her instinct for the marriage of score and choreography, sharpened in that Parisian furnace, is the thread running through her whole career in the performing arts.
A school in Kensington, a company in Hammersmith
The First World War brought her to London in 1914, and she never left. In 1918 she married the English playwright and drama critic Ashley Dukes, a partnership that gave her both a collaborator and, later, a theatre. Around 1919 she began teaching, opening a dance school in Bedford Gardens, Kensington, and in 1920 she earned her Cecchetti teaching certificate. The company grew out of that classroom. In 1926 her pupils appeared in the revue Riverside Nights at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, performing A Tragedy of Fashion, the first ballet ever choreographed by the young Frederick Ashton, with designs by Sophie Fedorovitch that began a collaboration central to his later work. That modest revue number is conventionally treated as the birth of the company now called Rambert. Ashton had trained as a dancer with no thought of making ballets; it was Rambert who identified the talent and pushed him, relentlessly, towards choreography. Spotting and bullying a shy pupil into becoming the defining British choreographer of the century may be her single greatest contribution. By every account she was a teacher and impresario of genius rather than a choreographer of note herself. Her gift was diagnostic: she could see what a dancer might become and refused to let them settle for less, a quality that made her studio formidable and, by report, exhausting.
The Mercury – a laboratory for British dance
The infrastructure followed the talent. In 1930 Rambert was among the founders of the Camargo Society, formed to keep serious ballet alive in Britain after Diaghilev’s death in 1929 had scattered the Ballets Russes. In 1931 she established the Ballet Club, a subscription operation that gave regular Sunday performances from its own home: the Mercury Theatre at 2 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill Gate, a building her husband had converted from an 1851 Sunday schoolroom into a playhouse seating only about 150 people. From 1935 the company performed as Ballet Rambert. The Mercury’s tininess, a stage barely wide enough to turn on, became a creative discipline rather than a handicap. It forced choreographers to work in miniature, on character and psychology rather than spectacle, and out of that constraint came some of the most influential dances of the era. Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas premiered there on 26 January 1936, set to Ernest Chausson’s Poème and now regarded as the first genuine psychological ballet; his Dark Elegies, to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, followed in 1937. The stream of talent that passed through the Mercury and Rambert’s classes reads like a roll-call of British theatre and dance: Alicia Markova, Andrée Howard, Walter Gore, Harold Turner, Peggy van Praagh, William Chappell, and the visiting American Agnes de Mille all worked under her eye.
From ballet to the leap into modern dance
Rambert refused to let the company calcify. In 1946 its main London seasons moved from the pocket-sized Mercury to the far larger Sadler’s Wells, and it toured relentlessly at home and abroad. The most striking decision came in 1966, when, under the direction of Norman Morrice and with Rambert then in her late seventies, Ballet Rambert reinvented itself as a smaller modern and contemporary company rather than a classical one. Few founders in their eighth decade would demolish the thing they had spent forty years building to chase a new form, yet that gamble is exactly why the company outlived her. It nurtured a later generation, among them Christopher Bruce, Richard Alston, Glen Tetley and, much later, Wayne McGregor. The name kept changing with the times: Ballet Rambert became Rambert Dance Company in 1987 and simply Rambert in 2013, the year it opened a purpose-built home on London’s South Bank. The honours accumulated too, a Commander of the British Empire in 1953, the French Légion d’honneur in 1957, and appointment as a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1962. Her 1972 memoir was aptly titled Quicksilver, the word colleagues used for her mercurial, impatient energy.
Why Rambert still matters
It is tempting to file her under de Valois’s shadow, the two of them habitually named together as the mothers of British ballet. The comparison flatters neither. De Valois built the palace, a large classical company with a school and a royal charter. Rambert built the laboratory, the small room where the experiments were run and the choreographers made. The psychological ballet, the whole Ashton sensibility that defined the Royal Ballet, Tudor’s influence on American Ballet Theatre after he left London, all of it was incubated in a 150-seat converted schoolroom off Notting Hill Gate by a woman who had arrived in the city with little English and a rhythm method learned in Switzerland. She died in London on 12 June 1982. The company still carries her name, which is the correct verdict: British dance did not merely employ Marie Rambert, it was to a remarkable degree made by her.
