There are many ways to tell the story of Max Day’s eleven years within the Rambert family. You could begin with a young dancer arriving at Rambert School, rooted in the precision and discipline of classical training. You could begin with Rambert2 and an audition process so enormous that Max remembers feeling less like a dancer than a contestant on a television talent show. Or you could begin with the unexpected offer of an apprenticeship that took them into Rambert’s main company.

You could also count the performances. Invisible Cities. Draw From Within. Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby. New creations, international tours and performances made for cameras when theatres were closed. In Peaky Blinders alone, Max performed more than 200 shows without missing one through injury.

But when Max looks back now, those milestones form part of a bigger journey. In their own words, it is the journey from a “passive, perfectionist, direction following young dancer to a self reflective, explorative human being.”

Max’s relationship with Rambert began at Rambert School. They arrived with an extraordinary technical discipline, but contemporary dance began asking questions for which there was not always a single correct answer. Improvisation was particularly uncomfortable. Max remembers watching other students seemingly throw themselves into it while they tried to be the last person asked to move. They were accustomed to knowing what they were supposed to achieve. Suddenly they were being asked to explore, make decisions and sometimes fail.

“I think my brain’s fixation on striving for perfection kind of dulled my creativity,” Max remembers. “There was a point where I made a choice. Do I choose to be more creative or do I strive to be a perfectionist?”

That question would become increasingly important. Creativity meant accepting that there might not be a perfect answer. It meant trying something, discovering that it did not work and trying again. Gradually Max began moving away from simply executing movement and towards questioning what movement could communicate.

By the end of their time at Rambert School, another opportunity appeared, but first they had to survive the Rambert2 audition. 

“It was challenging,” Max says, “but I think the immensity of it kind of made it funny in a way. I felt like I was on a reality TV show, like I was a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent or something.”

The process stretched across several days. Between rounds dancers waited around the Rambert building, knowing that another cut was coming. “The cuts were brutal,” Max remembers. “It was like being cut down by 50 per cent every round.”

Friends disappeared from the process. Dancers Max admired and expected to progress did not. Even people who had graduated before them were being eliminated. For a young performer accustomed to working hard towards measurable improvement, it was a lesson in the strange subjectivity of an artistic career. An audition is not an exam. There is not always a mark scheme that explains why one person remains in the room and another leaves it.

Max remained, and Rambert2 would begin to change their understanding of what being an artist could mean.

The discipline and technical precision of their earlier training remained, but something else was developing alongside it. Improvisation increasingly became a form of research. Movement could create relationships, atmosphere and emotion. Dance did not have to exist solely in the physical shapes a body could make.

Just as important were the people around them. Looking back, Max feels that conversations with their peers were fundamental to that development. Sensitive, thoughtful exchanges with other dancers allowed them to begin looking beyond their own individual experience. They started asking where they sat within a company, within an organisation and ultimately within the wider dance industry. They became increasingly aware not only of what they could shape, but also of what they could not.

That process of looking beyond the self would become as important as anything learned in a studio. Then came another unexpected step. Following a series of conversations about progression from Rambert2, Max was offered an apprenticeship with Rambert’s main company.

“I really did not know how to respond,” they remember. “I didn’t plan a response for it. So I think I just agreed because it felt like the right thing to do.”

The move was not immediately comfortable. Max had spent years watching Rambert’s dancers. Suddenly those people were their colleagues. Their instinct was to observe, listen and be respectful. Yet what Max understood as respect could sometimes appear as passivity. They have spoken openly about the imposter syndrome of that period and the feeling of almost waiting to be invited into a company to which, professionally at least, they already belonged.

Gradually that changed. Working on Invisible Cities in Manchester became particularly important. A new project and the intensity of spending an extended period together allowed relationships to develop differently. The dancers Max had once observed from a distance became collaborators and friends.

Those relationships did more than make Max feel part of a company. They continued the process that had begun in Rambert2. Conversations with peers offered different ways of thinking about their work, Rambert and the structures surrounding contemporary dance.

For Max, there is an intriguing contradiction at the heart of that world. Dance organisations inherit traditions, practices and histories accumulated over decades, sometimes centuries. Yet contemporary artists are continually being asked to find what has not existed before. An industry “built and governed on tradition”, as Max puts it, is simultaneously pursuing something new.

That sounds paradoxical. Perhaps it has to be.

Max has found a striking image for it. They think of arts organisations in cities as plants growing through concrete. The environment may not always seem like the natural place for something to flourish, but the way the plant searches for the light, adapting its direction and finding unexpected routes through what surrounds it, becomes part of what makes it interesting.

For Max, that also reveals something about the difference between being the artist and being the observer. The person making the work experiences the struggle, compromise, uncertainty and constant searching that lie beneath it. An audience encounters what finally emerges into the light.

That distinction became particularly literal during Covid. When theatres closed, Max found themselves performing for cameras rather than audiences. Initially it felt cold. Instead of looking into the darkness of a theatre knowing that people were there, dancers were surrounded by cameras, screens and technical equipment.

Yet something unexpected happened. Max became fascinated by what the camera could do. In a theatre, every audience member decides where to look. Through film, those decisions can be made for them. A close up, a change of angle or a cut from one dancer to another could completely change how movement was perceived.

“You really can curate an experience,” Max says.

Once again, something unfamiliar became an opportunity to explore.

Among the works Max particularly remembers are Invisible Cities, Draw From Within and Rambert2’s Cameo. Draw From Within stands out because Max felt a choreographer placing trust in what they could offer as an artist, while Cameo helped open another door towards research, curiosity and listening differently to their own body.

And then there is Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby.

Max performed more than 200 performances of the production across its tours without missing a show through injury. The experience was unlike almost anything that had preceded it. Rapid costume changes, musicians on stage, constantly shifting scenes and a direct relationship with the audience created a different sort of theatrical energy.

“I did love the music and the drive of the music and the drive of the musicians,” Max remembers, “and the fun that you can have on stage in a different way.”

After so many performances, however, even something once unfamiliar can become familiar. And that brings Max’s story to the decision they have made now.

Across Rambert School, Rambert2 and the main company, Max has spent eleven years within the wider Rambert family. They describe the past few years as the most comfortable they have ever felt. That, ultimately, is why they know it is time to leave.

“I don’t believe that feeling comfortable is a good thing,” Max says. “I want to be challenged.”

They want to discover what else they might be capable of creatively. That may involve dancing. It may involve other ways of making work. Crucially, there is no perfectly mapped next step, and that uncertainty is part of the point.

Throughout their interview, Max repeatedly returns to the sense that many of the major events in their career simply happened. Rambert School led towards Rambert2. Rambert2 led unexpectedly to an apprenticeship. When that opportunity was offered, the answer almost arrived before they had consciously decided what they wanted.

Now something has changed.

“I think it’s the first time I feel like I’m making an active choice for myself,” Max says, “to just kind of see where that takes me.”

As part of Rambert’s centenary oral history project, we have been recording the experiences of the people who have made the company what it is. Max’s story captures something that statistics and cast lists cannot. It records the internal journey of becoming an artist, the perfectionist learning to fail, the student frightened by improvisation becoming curious about what they might discover, the young dancer following directions beginning to interrogate the structures around them, and the apprentice waiting to feel that they belonged becoming part of a community of peers whose conversations changed how they understood themselves and their industry.

Ultimately, it is also the story of a person to whom opportunities seemed to happen deciding to make a choice of their own.

Perhaps Max’s image of the plant growing through concrete describes that journey rather beautifully. Creative lives rarely grow in straight lines. They encounter structures, traditions, expectations and obstacles. They change direction, search for gaps and keep reaching towards something they cannot necessarily see yet. Sometimes the most interesting part is not where they eventually emerge, but the route they take to find the light.

Thank you, Max, for everything you have given to Rambert over those eleven years. We cannot wait to see which direction you grow next.