It has been an extraordinary 20 months for Tamara Rojo. The artistic director of English National Ballet has been going nonstop. During the first lockdown she gave daily ballet classes from her kitchen watched by four million people around the world. She commissioned new ballets for digital platforms while the theatres were closed. She acted as a spokeswoman for the beleaguered dance community during the pandemic and helped to advise the government on its rescue plans for the arts. She took on the monumental task of staging her first full-length ballet — her first ballet of any kind — and gave birth to her first child in the middle of it.
But then Rojo has always been something of a dynamo. Growing up in Spain but spending virtually all of her career in the UK, the 47-year-old was a celebrated dancer with English National Ballet (ENB) from 1997-2000 and the Royal Ballet from 2000-2012. Fiercely dramatic and technically dazzling, she was one of Covent Garden’s brightest stars — her Kitri in Don Quixote is indelibly etched in my memory. As if that wasn’t enough, in 2012 she astonished the dance world by becoming artistic director of ENB, a job for which she had no real qualifications. And yet she excelled at that too. She gave Britain’s second biggest company a higher profile, an enhanced presence in the capital and a slew of interesting new ballets from some of the world’s most important choreographers, as well as overseeing ENB’s move to spacious new headquarters in Docklands, east London in 2019.
We are sitting in her unfussy first-floor office in that new building on London City Island. Spacious and airy, it’s a far cry from ENB’s previous cramped and antiquated headquarters, a stone’s throw from the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington. The move from west to east gave ENB seven new studios, including one big enough to act as a stage for rehearsing and developing productions, and plenty of room for dancers and administration staff. As we speak, elsewhere in the building rehearsals are in progress for Raymonda, which opens on January 13 at the London Coliseum.
Raymonda is the highlight of the company’s winter season and the biggest gamble of Rojo’s remarkable career. Full-length ballets are a huge investment that need to pay themselves back over a number of years, which means that a work has to be successful enough to stand the test of time in the repertoire. And Raymonda, a 19th-century ballet from the Imperial Russian stable, is relatively unknown in the UK. It has a great score from Alexander Glazunov and some of Marius Petipa’s most glorious choreography, but it’s still a hard sell.
So why did Rojo decide to take it on? “Nobody in the UK does it and I have always been very conscious of giving ENB its own identity in a landscape where there is a lot of dance on offer,” she says, articulate as always in her lightly accented English. “So I try to find pieces unique to the company. Glazunov’s score is one of the most beautiful ever written for ballet and Petipa’s choreography is some of his best — it’s a pity it was never presented in its entirety by a British company.”
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To overcome the weak narrative of the original — a Crusades tale in which the countess Raymonda has to be rescued from the evil clutches of the libidinous Saracen knight Abderakhman — Rojo has transplanted the ballet’s setting to the Crimean War and taken inspiration from Florence Nightingale and the contribution of women generally to the war effort. “After living in London for 24 years I felt inspired by the way that the theatre world presents Shakespeare’s canon and how unafraid directors are of changing the context and doing whatever they feel needs to be done to keep it alive and engaging audiences,” Rojo says. “I felt that while I believe in keeping our traditional ballets alive, we need to do something similar within our own classical technique. The text is still Raymonda, but the context and meaning can change.”
In her version of the story, the title character “is an upper-class British woman who does not want to follow society’s expectations by getting married. Inspired by the figure of Florence Nightingale, she wants to become a nurse, she wants to make a difference.” So in 1854 Raymonda runs away from her comfortable life in England to become a nurse on the battlefield where she becomes engaged to a soldier, John.
“Many women went to the Crimea. It’s one of the first wars where women were active in the camps. They went there to make a living. Washing, cleaning, cooking, some were prostitutes, some were nurses.”
During her illustrious career as a dancer Rojo performed the famous 19th-century ballerina roles — Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, Nikiya in La Bayadère — but she always felt there was something missing in their portrayal of women. “I felt most comfortable as an artist when performing roles that had meat and a backstory, that were full-blown characters,” Rojo says. “I did struggle with the very passive ballerina roles.”
Hence her determination to give Raymonda more of a voice. Unlike Petipa’s demure 1898 St Petersburg heroine, Rojo’s is a woman who doesn’t sit back and wait for men to define her. “She’s not a victim, she tries to take charge of her own destiny and follow her dream of becoming a professional nurse, which was something frowned upon by her social class.” Instead of a woman who needs rescuing from a sexual predator by a brave knight, Raymonda in the 21st century is an independent woman trapped in a love triangle when she falls in love with John’s best friend Abdur, a leader of the Ottoman army.
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ENB will take Raymonda to the Mayflower in Southampton a year from now, but other touring plans for it are still to be determined because the pandemic has led to so much uncertainty. The company’s autumn UK tours were cancelled two years in a row because of Covid, as were its lucrative foreign tours in 2020 and 2021. For a company that relies on box office both domestic and foreign for its survival, the past 20 months have proved an enormous challenge. “We have every intention of touring again as soon as feasible,” Rojo says. “But 100 people going from town to town during a pandemic just seemed completely impossible.”
Like all dance directors, Rojo is immensely grateful for the financial support her company has received from the government during the crisis — “that has been a lifesaver that kept us going”. How does she feel the future looks now with no end to the pandemic in sight? “It’s not all gloom and doom — 5,000 organisations have survived thanks to the government’s rescue package. But surviving is not thriving and there are still quite a lot of unknowns. The creative industries will continue to need some support to get back to being this incredible engine of the British economy — they contributed £111 billion in revenue in 2018.”
The extension of the government’s tax relief scheme — which allows companies to write off some of the costs of new productions — has made it possible for Rojo to stage Raymonda now. Although cognisant of the need to replenish ENB’s box-office coffers, the company has also scheduled 30 performances of The Nutcracker at the Coliseum before Raymonda opens. “Nutcracker is essential,” she says. “It’s not just of financial benefit to the company, or the fact that we have been performing it for 70 years. It’s also very often the first exposure children have with the art form and the development of audiences that Nutcracker allows can’t be overestimated.” Is she concerned that the Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and Matthew Bourne are all offering Nutcrackers in the capital this festive season? “Our Nutcracker is selling well so I’m not worried — ENB can handle the competition.”
There will be no competition when it comes to Raymonda, of course, but Rojo admits to being nervous about the scale of the undertaking. She has spent five years planning and researching her production, including visiting Harvard University in Massachusetts where the world’s most precious Russian ballet manuscripts are housed. With the help of the expert researcher Doug Fullington she has been able to reconstruct some of Petipa’s original choreography for Raymonda, especially the ballet’s famous female solos. It’s not a full reconstruction (unlike the fascinating one Sergei Vikharev mounted for La Scala in Milan ten years ago) either because the new narrative wouldn’t support the original’s courtly milieu or because Rojo felt that today’s dancers, especially the men, are capable of far more than Petipa’s choreography asked of them. “My choreography is much more demanding, much more physical, because the capacity of our dancers at every level is so much more and they deserve to be seen.”
Antony McDonald has designed the sets and costumes, while Gavin Sutherland has adapted the Glazunov score (with some minor tweaks to suit the revised plot). With its nursing theme, Raymonda will, says Rojo, be “a thank you to the nursing profession after 20 months of being complete heroes”. The company has been reaching out to nursing groups plus others in the healthcare sector to offer free and discounted tickets for the Coliseum run.
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On March 31 ENB will return to its other London home — Sadler’s Wells (establishing a secure relationship there was also Rojo’s initiative) — for a nine-day season celebrating the work of the American choreographer William Forsythe. It will include an expanded version of Playlist, the thrilling work he made for ENB in 2018. International touring is also set to return in 2022 — Covid permitting — so it feels as if some things in Rojo’s diary are getting back to normal.
Well not quite. Rojo, who never fancied herself as a choreographer, has undertaken to stage Prokofiev’s Cinderella for the Royal Swedish Ballet in 2022. “I agreed to do it before the pandemic, before the baby,” she says. “But I’m not someone who choreographs easily. I need a lot of preparation. It’s taken me five years for Raymonda, and almost three years for Cinderella, so I don’t think choreography is going to be my day job, that’s for sure.”
Still, I wonder how she and the baby’s father, Isaac Hernandez (a star dancer with ENB), cope with their unconventional schedules and a nine-month-old son at home. “All working mothers struggle with the work-life balance, and I’m not different,” Rojo says. “I don’t have a magic solution. This job is particularly challenging — it has long days and late nights. But that’s the reality of being a working mum and we are not the first performers to have children.”
Rojo has been ENB’s boss for almost a decade so, I ask, is she going to stick around? “I always have plans for the company. I love ENB and everything it stands for and I have always been really ambitious on its behalf. We have achieved a lot but I can dream of achieving more. For now, definitely this is my home.”
The Nutcracker opens at the London Coliseum on December 16, Raymonda opens on January 13; ballet.org.uk
