“I have fallen in love with San Francisco so quickly that I’ve surprised myself!” After ten years at the helm of English National Ballet and three decades based in London, Tamara Rojo is now directing San Francisco Ballet. “San Francisco is made up of small neighbourhoods, like London, so you find your place quite quickly,” she tells me. “We live not far from the sea, I hear the boats at night. It is a beautiful city and one that is very welcoming. And they have some amazing arts institutions. I think it’s a very easy city to fall in love with.”
She has had a year to settle in and familiarise herself with the US. I’m keen to know about the differences between the US and UK – particularly in terms of sponsorship. She explains: “The major difference is the cushion of public funding. You don’t have this at all in the States. There is a different mentality here about supporting the arts, and a pride in doing so as individuals. I have been very lucky that I’ve found the community of San Francisco to be very supportive of their cultural institutions. They want to be involved. So what could be perceived as a negative, I actually see as a positive. People are personally invested in the success of the arts institutions in their city. We’ve had incredibly generous donors already who have contributed to my first season and beyond.”
“I had also felt in the last years in the UK that there was a change in what I believed the Arts Council was supposed to be,” she continues. “It had become a much more intrusive and politicised organisation, no longer supporting excellence and independent arts organisations to do what they thought was right. They were withholding or putting demands on the funding depending on what you were going to do as an organisation.”
She admits that for her, “It became more dangerous than having to depend on individuals. I think there were always conditions and rightly so, on being somewhat successful and being relevant to society. But I think the excellence of the art has been left behind. It was a direction that had become very concerning for me. The conditions were no longer serving the art but an ideological agenda which is the very opposite of why the Arts Council was created.”
Rojo brought many additions to ENB’s repertoire, among them giving opportunities to female choreographers and famously commissioning Akram Khan’s Giselle. Does she want to do the more of the same for SFB? “Of course I want to expand the repertoire for the artists of the company, because that’s the way you grow,” she says, “but also for the audiences of this city. On coming here I looked at the cultural diversity, there is a huge Asian influence, also a huge Latino influence. When commissioning work, San Francisco is the epicentre of new technology, artificial intelligence. I wanted to talk about this and that’s when Mere Mortals came along. It is the cultural flow that exists between Latin America and North America. We are right in the middle – California is rich in that conversation, in the food, the music and the people.”
“We have a Latina choreographer, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, whose Broken Wings we did at ENB, and a new Carmen by Arielle Smith, with a Latino composer. I will continue to invest in female choreographers because I think it is the right thing to do, but also in male choreographers, in general. It’s just building on the legacy of Helgi Tomasson. He has been one of the most creative directors of the past 40 years. It’s continuing to uphold the excellence of the classical repertoire and building new repertoire. We will of course be working with Akram. Christopher Wheeldon has a long history with the company and we will continue working with him and Yuri Possokhov, who is one of the most talented choreographers of our time. I want to build on the talent that is already here. It’s different because it’s specific to where we are. The type of choreography, themes, stories, the collaborators are relevant to San Francisco Ballet as part of California.”
Rojo explains that the past year has been about getting to know each other and says her style of coaching has been inspired by two women, Loipa Araújo and Lynn Seymour. She talks animatedly about mounting MacMillan’s Song of the Earth and Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand. “I think I have a particular way of collaborative coaching, one which demands a lot of intellectual engagement from the dancers, because I myself am very curious. It has to be a conversation and an exploration. This year we worked with a much larger cast than will finally go on stage. We needed to see who could achieve the intellectual rigour that those two ballets demand, as well as the interpretative skills.”
I’m keen to know a little more about Arielle Smith, who had such enormous success with Jolly Folly for ENB. Rojo says of her, “I thought she did an amazing job of bringing out the best in the dancers, with a language that was so defined already, so mature. She has a very interesting choreographic voice. During the time she was working on Jolly Folly, we had a chat about Carmen. I think there are so many versions where Carmen is disrespected and exposed as something she was not. I thought it would be great for a woman to do Carmen. It turned out that Arielle, being Cuban, was very interested in the story.”
Another female choreographer who Rojo has championed is Aszure Barton. She reminisces on how they first met: “It was when I was shadowing Karen Kain at National Ballet of Canada. Aszure did a ballet there that blew my mind. I went to the opening night and I came back every night afterward, just to see this piece. It was so layered and complex. When I was at ENB, she came and did Fantastic Beings and again, I loved how she used the dancers, how she pushed the technique, but also how she created an intricate, fascinating piece of work.”
Rojo has commissioned Barton to create a full-length work, Mere Mortals. “When I was thinking who I would pair with Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points) for a full-length work about AI, and about Pandora, Prometheus and humanity, hers was the only name,” Rojo says. “She was the only one who I thought could step up to that challenge. And she has! It has been a pleasure seeing her create this monumental piece of work. It’s a fascinating myth. The idea came to me while listening to Natalie Haynes, the British writer, comedian and historian.”
“It's difficult to do something when the technology is constantly changing,” Rojo says. “It can become dated so quickly. So it’s not about technology itself, it’s about the philosophical and moral questions that humanity needs to be asking itself. And it’s really scary, just like the nuclear bomb. It’s technology that is extraordinary but also incredibly dangerous. So when I listened to Haynes, I thought this is it: it’s the stealing of the fire, this liberating tool for humanity, for food, warmth and defence against animals – but also a tool for war and destruction. We are at a moral crossroads.”
And will she bring her Raymonda to SFB? “It took me eight years to do a ballet for ENB. I had hoped that someone else would do Raymonda but I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to do it, so I eventually did it myself. I want to bring it to SFB for the same reasons that I brought it to ENB. Because it’s a classical ballet that no-one else is presenting in America. It’s technically very demanding, one of the most difficult ballets in the classical repertoire.”
“We all make mistakes,” she says candidly. “I wouldn’t say that Raymonda was a complete success. I think it was the best I could do, but maybe someone else could do it better. I don’t expect success because that is impossible to predict. All I ask is to respect the art form, the artists you are working with and the audience. Within that, if you’re doing your best and you’re being respectful to everybody’s time and talent, that’s all that can be asked. With Akram’s Giselle – we didn’t know if audiences would like it because it was so unapologetic. If they hadn’t, I would have still defended it, because it is a work of integrity.”
I ask her if she misses performing. She reminisces: “To have that freedom when every technical aspect went smoothly, you were lost in the character and you had another life on the stage. For three hours you were somebody else, you experienced every emotion. Nothing else in life replicates that. I do miss that feeling. But I love my job! I love enabling other people to achieve their dreams. The composers, designers, dancers, musicians, I love the entire organisation from the backstage, the crew, the costumes, to marketing – everybody feeling on the opening night that they have achieved something together, that is relevant and has meaning. There’s nothing like it.”
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