Was Tamara Rojo, when she danced Swan Lake last Saturday at the Albert Hall, thinking as she shaped each phrase, ‘This will be the last time I dance this …and this …and this’? I wonder. She told me a few years back that she had a five-year diary to cover the rest of her dancing career, a diary ending in 2016. Akram Khan’s modern Giselle this autumn will be a Rojo role, but if at 42 she was privately saying farewell to her classical career on Saturday, she did it with the spectacular and refined artistry the public has come to expect.
A woman sitting next to me complained that the 5ft 2in Rojo is too short for this ballet. To which I responded that Rojo understands the possibilities for romantic connection with her princes and for wickedness in her manipulations of a good man as few other ballerinas ever have. The sad poetry of this fantastic artwork of theatre is not about long legs.
Nor is it about the notorious 32 fouettés — though Rojo is still the queen of those devilish whipping turns of Act 3. Count them if you must, but you must also discuss her immaculate timing of the role’s stunts, the controlling of her foot on the music to pick out, like a conductor’s baton, a tiny syncopation of Tchaikovsky’s, the dynamic arc and cadence that she gives to each group of spins.
Unfortunately, Derek Deane’s in-the-round version of Swan Lake for English National Ballet — which he actually made for Rojo herself 20 years ago (and I recall my amazed sense that night that someone great had arrived in the art form) — is a grandiose, mechanical swan tattoo, rather than a piece of poetry.
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