“Zürich always makes me feel 18!” laughs Cathy Marston, quite possibly the first and last person to make such a claim. Marston is the recently appointed director of Ballett Zürich, but she still holds close the memory of her teenage self in 1994, fresh out of London’s Royal Ballet School and arriving in Zürich for her first job as a company dancer.
“I was never ‘the ballerina,’ never that type,” she says. “I knew choreography was my direction.” For 30 years she’s done little else. Marston has received commissions from companies that include the Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and the Royal Danish Ballet. Her distinction comes from the fresh eye she brings to old stories and the range of stories she tells—the classic Jane Eyre, the unlikely Mrs Robinson, and the visionary The Cellist, a searing and award-winning paean to the tragic life of Jacqueline du Pré.
