In the ballet world, Cathy Marston counts as many kinds of rare. First, she is a she and a ballet choreographer whose work is sought for opera-house stages. In ballet, women’s creations are usually confined to themselves: dancer. Second, this recently appointed director of Ballett Zurich is committed to that delightfully old-fashioned yet much in-demand genre, the story ballet. But, third, she doesn’t resort to the traditional ballet sources, the fairytale, nor to junk like Dracula or The Lady of the Camelias. Rather, she has turned to Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and, last year in her first premiere for Zurich, the morally complex Ian McEwan novel Atonement. In the past, Marston’s storytelling has been a bit step-for-word, but her idiom is growing deeper and richer now that she has a solid institution behind her—the most uncommon thing of all for a woman choreographer. —Apollinaire Scherr