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By Sarah Crompton / The Telegraph (UK)

Tamara Rojo – artistic director and star dancer with English National Ballet – tells Sarah Crompton about the sort of performers that appeal to her, her radical plans for her current company, and her frustrations with former employer the Royal Ballet.

‘I am very bad at waiting’: Tamara Rojo, artistic director and principal dancer of English National Ballet / Photo: Jeff Gilbert

“I used to sleep really well,” says Tamara Rojo, with a broad smile. “That’s gone now. I lie awake worrying about all kinds of things. When the Arts Council is announcing its funding, you can’t sleep for weeks and weeks.”

She giggles, leaning forward on her chair. However stressful she finds it combining her roles as artistic director of and star dancer with English National Ballet, she looks well on it. She’s 40 now, but still appears barely half her age, with perfectly moulded cheekbones, dark, fringed hair and brown eyes that look directly at you. She is almost uncannily beautiful, but more important are the animation and intelligence that shoots out from her like the spokes of a halo. She positively radiates energy.

Rojo is unusual in that she was the little girl who grew up dreaming of not only being a ballerina – an ambition she triumphantly fulfilled, turning herself into one of the world’s great dancers – but also running a company. Specifically, for a long time she wanted to run the company she now heads. “I really loved the fact that we were here to bring ballet of the highest quality to the widest possible audience, whatever their means. That has always resonated with me and I am proud to be part of that.”

After a training in Spain, Rojo’s early English career was in Scottish Ballet and then ENB before she moved to the Royal Ballet for 12 shining years. But it is not just sentiment that drew her back; when she talks of her mission to make ballet loved by as many people as possible, you hear her parents’ daughter speaking. They were committed anti-Franco campaigners, political radicals, and you hear their revolutionary spirit in her passion for her art.

Tamara Rojo and the Royal Ballet’s Matthew Golding in ENB’s ‘Swan Lake’ in 2013

“I believe the most important thing about the art is not just the present but also the legacy. And you can leave a certain legacy as a dancer but you can leave a much bigger, wider-reaching one as a director. I hope to inspire a whole new generation of dancers that will in turn become teachers, choreographers and managers themselves. I think you can really transform attitudes both for the audience and the artists and therefore you can grow a healthy, productive and interesting art form.”

Rojo says all this – in English that is perfect but deeply accented, swooping around and extending vowels – with a force born of personal knowledge. She learnt about ballet from books, from reading about Nijinsky and Diaghilev, and about Maynard Keynes, the economist whose love for the ballerina Lydia Lopokova helped to establish the art in Britain. She was inspired by the great dancers of the past, such as Nureyev, and by composers and creators such as Stravinsky, Balanchine and Petipa.

But her starry-eyed belief in ballet’s radical power to move and communicate was not necessarily always born out by her experience. “What I read and what I lived didn’t always match,” she says, thoughtfully. “I thought being a dancer meant being in a pool of creative people always discussing the meaning of the art and where it should go towards, and what it is that we should be creating and what we mean for the larger society, how we defend, lobby and fight for it.

“Those discussions very rarely happen. And that was disappointing for me. I wanted to be in that environment and it turned out that very often I felt a little bit like a puppet. You do this, you go there, you do that, rather than be part of the creative process.”

It’s astonishing to hear Rojo say this, since her dancing has always appeared entirely willed, fuelled by her own powers of interpretation and creativity. Yet despite her diplomacy, it is clear that her words apply to her own time at the Royal Ballet. She says that she feels she now has more courage artistically than she used to, and wishes that “more directors would take courage to allow dancers younger and sooner to make their own artistic decisions, right or wrong”.

Did she feel she was held back? She pauses. “I wish I could say no. But that is one thing I admire in Alina – she took the risk at a younger age than me.”

She is talking about Alina Cojocaru, who also left the Royal Ballet, frustrated by the constraints it placed on her career, and now performs alongside Rojo at ENB. Everyone used to assume they were bitter rivals. “I think that is one of those myths, like ballet being an elite art,” says Rojo with that wide grin. “I think what people don’t understand is that your biggest rival is always yourself. It is your own perceived limitations that keep you wanting to do more and do better.”

Another myth she suggests is the one which suggests that the discipline of ballet itself means that dancers must sacrifice their individuality. “I think that is a misunderstanding,” she says firmly. “I am very disciplined but it is self-discipline. It is not a question of control or of subduing someone else’s personality. I love dancers with personalities, the quirkier the better. I’ve never been attracted by just a beautiful body, that bores me to death.”

This belief that dance is not gymnastics, but “all about communication and expression” is part of the new identity she wants to forge for ENB. “I want my dancers to be very free on the stage, to feel safe enough to take risks. Great dancers move the art forward – they make wonderful mistakes that suddenly allow you to see the classics from a different perspective and inspire the next generation, so they can feel related to that way of dancing rather than feeling alien from it.”

She cites the dancers who have changed things: Nureyev, Fonteyn, Plisetskaya, Baryshnikov among them. The dancers who are guesting with ENB next season share similar qualities of charisma – not just Cojocaru, but the former Bolshoi star Ivan Vasiliev dancing Swan Lake for the first time, and Alban Lendorf, a principal with the Royal Danish Ballet. Rojo keeps her eyes peeled for talent around the world which has also resulted in the signing of Precious Adams, a Bolshoi-trained youngster who shone in the Lausanne competition, and Alejandro Virelles, a principal with Boston Ballet.

Rojo’s coaching staff – already strong – has been bolstered by the arrival of Irek Mukhamedov, also a former principal with the Royal. This is all part of her campaign to transform ENB, which also includes the introduction of a new training regime to help the dancers avoid injury in a punishing touring schedule that involves some 90 performances over three months. “I want to look at fitness in a more scientific way, like Olympic athletes do, which for traditional ballet has sometimes been difficult to understand.”

There’s a sense of urgency about everything Rojo is attempting to achieve, and it transmits itself in her conversation. “I am very bad at waiting, I just want to do it all,” she says, laughing again. But she cannot wait too long, in any case. She has only been appointed artistic director for five years – and two years have already passed. She faces standstill funding from the Arts Council and structural problems such as the need to find a different base: ENB’s current perch in Kensington is elegant but only has two studios and a makeshift gym in an area Rojo describes as “like something in the Tower of London”.

Most of all what she is seeking to do is to transform the repertory of the company. It will continue to perform the classics such as Swan Lake which are its bread and butter as it tours, but Rojo is determined to expand its range. “New repertory is the thing we have to continue to invest in because it is the identity of a company, just as much as the artists.”

She made a good start with a dazzling new production of Le Corsaire, and Lest We Forget, a triple bill of new work in remembrance of the First World War. Both were rapturously received by critics, although Le Corsaire took time to build up audiences – and significantly Lest We Forget, which contained premieres by Liam Scarlett, Russell Maliphant and Akram Khan, opened at the Barbican and has not yet been seen in the regions.

Rojo promises it will be. “I think subsidised art exists so we can take gambles. Of course, the subsidy is not enough for all the gambles I would like to take, for the risks I want to take with this company and that is where the difficulty comes. How do you square the circle?”

One answer is to involve more philanthropic support, and Rojo is committed to doing that. The company is also taking on more international touring, which makes money, rather than national touring which loses it. But she says ruefully, “It is difficult to create new art. We live in a very conservative society.”

That knowledge is unlikely to stop her. Her new season contains another bold choice – a triple bill of work by William Forsythe, Jíri Kilian, and John Neumier, all choreographers who have pushed the boundaries of ballet. But Rojo is confident it will appeal. Her hope is to establish ENB as such a force for good that people will want to come to see anything they dance. “Don’t underestimate where we are going. It is a big leap – in the past two years we are pushing forward technically, artistically and in style.”

She says this with some pride. You can see she is a formidable boss, however approachable, driven by exactly the kind of artistic ambition that has made her a dancer of rigorous technique and extraordinary emotion. She has also become quite a campaigner for dance – spending time at the highest level of government to help to convince them of its worth. Culture ministers and Chancellors are now listening to what she says.

“I am a passionate lobbyist for the arts,” she says, laughing again. “It is strange because as a dancer I was really bad at asking for what I wanted. But as a director, I am shameless at asking for what I think is fair for the arts and for English National Ballet.”

ENB’s ‘Swan Lake’ opens at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, on October 6, and then tours until January. Tickets and details:

ballet.org.uk

Reference:  The Telegraph (UK) / By Sarah Crompton