Cathy Marston: Charged up and well in charge

Dancer, choreographer, Royal Opera House artist. At just 27, Cathy Marston is ruling the roost, says Jenny Gilbert

When you turn up to interview the Royal Opera House's first ever Associate Artist, a choreographer whose CV is long on Royal Ballet premieres and whose diary is stuffed with dates for showing her work elsewhere, it's slightly odd to find her hurling herself around a studio at another choreographer's bidding.

Yet Cathy Marston, 27, is that rare bird: a high-flyer who refuses to abandon her home territory. And her reasoning is unassailable. She trained as a dancer (Royal Ballet Upper School), has always worked as a dancer (classical companies in Zurich and Lucerne), and says she feels like a dancer (she certainly looks like one). Besides, she says, she's not so arrogant as to believe there aren't lessons she can learn from a mature experimenter in stage narrative such as Kim Brandstrup.

"What I love about his choreography is that he knows how to tell a story in an abstract way. In this production he delivers the Hamlet story with the most startling clarity and nuance without resorting to any kind of mime. And mime in dance is just what I'm allergic to. I spend my life looking for ways to avoid acting out feelings." There are other benefits, too, from close contact with another's creation – rubbing along for a season with the 10 other dancers in Brandstrup's company, Arc Dance. For Marston, it's a kind of dual education.

"When you're being a dancer you experience what it takes to pull a piece together. Three days before the first night it can be all over the place, then two days later key elements can click into place and it's ready to put on stage. Knowing that that's possible makes me panic less as a choreographer. And being a choreographer makes me a more sympathetic dancer. I know the kind of instructions that get results quickly. I know the cues dancers respond to. I've gained the courage to be casual and relaxed when I'm telling people what to do myself. And above all I've learnt to allow myself to laugh – it's a great way of getting your dancers to reveal themselves." So, full-time dancer and full-time choreographer-cum-psychologist. Juggling that diary must be hellish. For the next three months, life is a 12-venue Hamlet tour from Ilfracombe to Inverness. At the same time, Marston will be working (in her head, initially) on a commission for the Royal Ballet School's annual performance in July, and on another commission for a dance-with-organ music venture in Westminster Abbey with Dame Gillian Weir. She will also find time to revive Facing Viv, an intricate chamber piece about TS Eliot's marriage that she made last year for English National Ballet.

And it's that one – the revival – that makes her feel as if she might have, if not actually arrived, at least stepped up a rung on the ladder. New works come and go, but few get a second throw of the dice. Of all the pieces Marston has made in the last two years, including her extraordinary full-evening debut at the Linbury, little has had more than two showings. But ENB gave her Facing Viv 15 shows last year. And this year they've scheduled it for a live-orchestra tour that takes in Sadler's Wells.

It makes such a difference to get a proper run at things, she says, not just for herself, but for the dancers. "At ENB they were really getting into researching the characters, finding their own nuances in performance – a special look here, a subtle delay there. Now, a year later, from being a piece that works, just, with the mechanics sometimes fluffed to make it work, it has become a finely polished thing, the mechanics secure and the details properly developed. That's how it should always be, of course, but it feels like a luxury to me." Marston is clearly a thinker, as well as a do-er. She reads widely, and is unapologetic about seeking parallels with the novelist's craft. Last year at the Clore Studio, her choreographic mini-drama based on LP Hartley's The Go-Between gave a clear and uncluttered account of the book from several perspectives, sometimes more than one at once.

More recently, her Linbury Theatre debut Sophie, inspired by the novel Sophie's Choice, which in turn had inspired a four-hour opera in the main house, scored what may be a first in dance by attempting to deal with a range of un-truths rather than mere fact and feeling. This was achieved partly via life-size video images that played alongside the live players – a ploy deemed brilliantly effective by some, thoroughly confusing by others.

All could have been clarified by programme notes. "But how do you get people to read them?" she wails. This is currently a big issue for Marston and one she has yet to resolve. Should printed explanations have any place in a wordless art form? Some people, a few critics included, seem to think it's a cop-out on a choreographer's part. But as she says, "Dance just can't tell certain things. Should that stop me making work about those things when they tend to be the most interesting?" When Cathy Marston first gave up a permanent company job she was prepared to wait tables for the chance to make dance. Now her creative career is rolling. But she is not about to sit back on her heels. "I have ideas all the time," she says, disarmingly, "but the ideas are still bigger than the opportunities I have to use them."

'Hamlet': Crescent Theatre, Birmingham (0121 643 5858), Wednesday; tours to 10 May; Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1 (020 7960 4242), 30 April & 1 May. Visit www.arcdance.com for more details. 'Facing Viv', part of English National Ballet's triple bill 'Tour de Force': Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (020 7863 8000), 8 April. Marston's commission for the organ festival, Mixtures: Westminster Abbey, London SW1 (0870 842 2211), 13 May