A fitting swansong from Tamara Rojo: The Forsythe Evening reviewed

One wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of Tamara Rojo. The most fearsome figure on the British dance scene since the authoritarian reign of Ninette ‘Madam’ de Valois, she has capped a brilliant international career as a prima ballerina with a formidable decade as artistic director of English National Ballet (as well as the award of a PhD, the patented invention of an anti-bunion device and the birth of her first child at the age of 46). She is now about to move on with her dancer husband Isaac Hernandez, 16 years her junior, to a similar position in San Francisco. The Bay Area doesn’t know what a tornado is on its way.

How does her achievement at ENB stack up? Her managerial style has been, er, forceful, and it has yielded results. Nothing if not ambitious, she has undoubtedly raised the overall standard of dancing in the company, though she has struggled to find women to promote to the highest level. On the male side, she lost Vadim Muntagirov and Cesar Corrales to the Royal Ballet, but found several others to compensate. This reflects a current global imbalance.

In terms of repertory, she has had some striking successes, notably in championing women choreographers, commissioning Akram Khan’s revisionist version of Giselle and winning a licence to perform Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. Another of her coups was bagging the services of the septuagenarian American master William Forsythe, and it is with two of his works that Rojo is making her ENB swansong to London.

It’s a good call. Forsythe combines a nimble and subtle mind with a vivid imagination. His style of physical exuberance seems to empower dancers and ENB’s brigade, which spends a lot of the time confined to a diet of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, meets its quirky challenges with relish.

Forsythe doesn’t deconstruct the classical vocabulary so much as question and enlarge it, putting its formalities and conventions through their paces, sometimes at breathtaking speed, sometimes with a sharp twist or bend, often with a sense of a symmetry to be stated, broken and reassembled.