With AUGMENTED, a landmark collaboration between Rambert School, The Juilliard School and Studio Wayne McGregor, having just premiered at Sadler’s Wells East, Amanda Britton, Chief Executive, Principal and Artistic Director of Rambert School, reflects on a year that has taken her students from London to New York, and on what it means to lead one of the UK’s leading specialist dance conservatoires. She spoke with Juliette Barber
When Amanda Britton pitched a transatlantic collaboration to Alicia Graf Mack, then Dean and Director of Juilliard’s Dance Division, in a New York corridor during a Rambert School audition visit, she had no idea quite how far the idea would travel. Within months, 15 Rambert students and 19 from The Juilliard School were working alongside Sir Wayne McGregor to create AUGMENTED: Dance Powered by MAM + AISOMA, a full-length new work that would premiere at Sadler’s Wells East in May 2026. “The bonding between the two groups happened almost instantly the moment they walked in the room together,” she says.
For Britton, Rambert is more than an institution – it is in her DNA. She trained at Rambert Academy (now Ramber School), joined Ballet Rambert in 1984, and went on to perform works by Christopher Bruce, Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown among others. After a period away – teaching at London Contemporary Dance School, completing an MA in Dance Education and Training and working with Siobhan Davies Dance Company – she returned as Head of Undergraduate Studies in 2005, before being appointed Chief Executive, Principal and Artistic Director a decade later.
For Britton, the central challenge is holding tradition and innovation in balance, honouring the history of the school, its repertory and its training heritage, while remaining open to new ways of working and teaching. It sounds straightforward enough, but in practice it demands constant negotiation between the past and the present, upholding the traditions of a 106-year-old institution while preparing graduates for the world they are about to enter.
AUGMENTED sits squarely at that intersection. At the heart of the project is McGregor’s radical choreographic approach, integrating Mind and Movement (MAM), a practical resource that enhances the creation of new and original dance movements through the development of imagination skills, with AISOMA. This machine-learning tool was developed by Studio Wayne McGregor in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture. It generates original movement inspired by footage from McGregor’s 25-year archive, presenting it as a creative prompt for dancers to respond to. The collaboration brought these tools into contact with the two schools whose training, Britton notes, turned out to share more common ground than either might have expected. What differed was experience. “Juilliard students have already done a number of processes like this,” she observes. “They’re a bit older, a bit more mature, a little more experienced in their creative practice.” For Rambert’s graduating students, working with McGregor himself, rather than with artists from his studio, was something rarer still. “Having Wayne actually in the space has definitely been a different kind of atmosphere.”
The graduate year at Rambert is designed precisely to deliver those moments of professional immersion. Alongside AUGMENTED, students have been working with Alesandra Seutin and École des Sables in Senegal and performed newly commissioned work by Ben Duke and Holly Blakey in Geneva at Danse En L’île. For Rambert student Nina Lowe, the cumulative effect has been transformative: “Working closely with such talented dancers in New York immersed me in an environment that demanded artistic vulnerability and adaptability. One of the most special parts was the beautiful friendships that formed day one of the process.”
With Melissa Toogood newly appointed as Dean and Director of Dance at Juilliard, Britton is quietly optimistic about what a longer-term transatlantic relationship between the two institutions might look like.
