Marie Rambert is in her dance studio, standing in the middle while her dancers leap around her in a circle to an arabesque. She occasionally reaches out to pull a dancer into the middle and correct her movements.
Her dance classes have been established for nearly four decades, producing not only the Ballet Rambert dance company but also radical and brilliant ideas affecting the art of ballet all over the world. An amateur film survives of one of her first productions, Foyer de Danse (1932), danced by Alicia Markova and Frederick Ashton (the future artistic director of the Royal Ballet, but then a Rambert pupil) and based on Degas' paintings.
Despite its size, the Mercury Theatre, a converted chapel in Notting Hill, houses everything: company, school, classes and the driving energy of its founder. Huw Wheldon asks Rambert about her extraordinary flair for discovering and exploiting talent.
She says that she's fascinated by people, and although her teaching technique is very strict, she learns a lot about them from how they react: someone can do something badly because they're over-ambitious, or because they're lazy, or because they're not concentrating enough. Each time, she gradually gets in touch with the actual person, and as a result she can develop their particular talent. It's a given that her pupils are talented to begin with, otherwise they wouldn't take up this career in the first place.
She thinks that out of the choreographers she's trained, Andrée Howard had the most unexpected talent, starting as a gawky child of thirteen or fourteen, but who went on to develop such masterworks as 'Death and the Maiden', inspired by Schubert's music and her own serious illness. It is performed by June Sandbrook and John Chesworth.
Rambert herself adored dancing, despite her poor technique, caused by starting proper training too late. She studied with Emile Jacques-Dalcroze in Dresden, who was visited by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in search of someone who could help rehearse Rite of Spring, whose complex rhythms and lack of conventional melody posed a problem for the dancers. She had only seen three of his ballets, each one of which contained major innovations.
Anthony Tudor, another former Rambert pupil turned Director of Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, is often equally innovative, as demonstrated by his comic, sardonic take on the Judgement of Paris, set in a Crazy Horse-style saloon bar populated by jaded, listless dancers (Gillian Martlew, Elsa Recagno, Valerie Marsh, Norman Morrice, Gordon Coster).
Rambert would like a bigger company, but she only has a relatively meagre Arts Council grant, and regularly loses her best choreographers and dancers to bigger, better-funded organisations in order to develop their careers. In Diaghilev's time, everyone was happy to see a programme of three or four one-act ballets, but now in the regions people want the classic three-act works lasting a whole evening, which demands a large-scale operation.
Although Britain probably cannot accommodate two companies the size of the Royal Ballet at Sadler's Wells, she believes there is certainly scope for a smaller company with a different policy. If the Royal Ballet is the medium's National Gallery, she sees herself as the Tate.
When prompted to highlight future stars, she singles out the dancer Lucette Aldous for special acclaim, praising her as a genuinely dedicated artist, a relative rarity even in her school.
