RAMBERT, Britain’s national dance company, returns to Bath as it marks its 90th birthday with a programme of three powerful new works, featuring Patricia Okenwa’s mercurial Hydrargyrum, Lucy Guerin’s Macbeth-inspired Tomorrow, and Malgorzata Dzierzon’s topical exploration of migration in Flight.

Since its creation by Polish-born Marie Rambert in 1926, Rambert Dance Company has led the way, sustaining its founder’s pioneering commitment to choreography and developing dancers as artists. Rambert first brought their work to Bath eleven years after the company began and has toured to the city regularly ever since. As Rambert celebrates its 90th year, Artistic Director Mark Baldwin, commented: “Touring is at the heart of what the company does. We take Rambert and its world-class dancers across the UK, giving people the opportunity to experience a spectacle – the virtuosity of our dancers, the variety of our programme accompanied by our excellent musicians. Every town or city we visit is different. Bath is one of the cities we love touring to the most. Returning to Bath year on year (we’ve been coming here since 1937) feels like visiting an old friend – it is always a special occasion for us.”

For Rambert’s 2016 tour – which also coincides with the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death – Tomorrow inhabits the dark and dangerous world of Macbeth. Building on her recent landmark production of the play, Lucy Guerin’s choreography gives physical life to the psychological conflict that led a hero-turned-villain to murder. In her first dance work for Rambert, Lucy Guerin has created a split-stage experience featuring fourteen dancers. As seven eerie ‘witches’ perform a danse macabre, their sinister spellbinding movements presented alongside the pivotal movements of the drama present the Scottish Play in a whole new light. Tomorrow features a score by composer, sound and multimedia artist Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) whose previous dance collaborations include creating detritus with Wayne McGregor for Rambert in 2001. Designs are by Conor Murphy (who designed costumes for Labyrinth of Love in 2012) and lighting is by Lee Curran, who also worked on last year’s staging of Alexander Whitley’s Frames for Rambert.

Hydrargyrum is a first work for Rambert’s main repertoire choreographed by Patricia Okenwa, a dancer with the company from 2004 to 2016. A giant, revolving mirror hangs over the stage, offering a different angle to view the dancers as they morph from a powerful-but-anonymous group to defiant-but-vulnerable individuals. Set to original music by Serbian/US composer Aleksandra Vrebalov, Hydrargyrum features six dancers. The piece explores ideas of connection and disconnection, the individual and the mass, in Okenwa’s distinctive, grounded and powerful movement style. The title is an archaic name for mercury, or liquid silver: a reflective medium with the potential to transform, and to poison, which is fluid when all others of its kind are solid.

Completing the programme is Flight by Malgorzata Dzierzon. Dancer, choreographer and producer, Malgorzata Dzierzon was a dancer with Rambert from 2006 – 2013 and is a founder of Rambert Associate company New Movement Collective. This, her first choreography for Rambert’s touring repertoire, is a new group work with the theme of migration. A moving set and multimedia projections create an ever-shifting backdrop as the dancers dramatise the mix of hope and fear that make up the migrant experience of leaving one home to search for another.

The emotion-filled music for this piece includes works by acclaimed Japanese composer Somei Satoh and a new composition by Kate Whitley, a former Rambert music fellow and co-founder of the award-winning Multi-Story, a project that brings classical music to unexpected places.

All three original dance works are packed with powerful images and emotions, making an utterly distinctive and memorable programme from Rambert’s company of twenty-two dancers, who are among the finest in the world, with backgrounds in both classical and contemporary dance.

Appearing at the Theatre Royal from Thursday 27 to Saturday 29 October, Rambert will be accompanied by live music performed by the critically acclaimed Rambert Orchestra.

Whilst appearing at Bath’s Theatre Royal, Rambert will host a free, pre-show talk on 28 October at 6.30pm; tickets for the talk can be booked via the Box Office, call 01225 448844 or visit theatreroyal.org.uk