Tamara Rojo on the English National Ballet and how Isaac Hernandez 'makes her feel lucky'

Karolina Kuras
Charlotte Edwardes27 February 2018

Tamara Rojo is surprised that my first question is not about her boyfriend, Isaac Hernández, the senior dancer at the English National Ballet (ENB) where she is artistic director, who just happens to be a smouldering Mexican, 16 years her junior.

She doesn’t say why she is surprised but the relationship has certainly been ruffling tutus. Anonymous sources told The Times last month that members of the company were “uncomfortable” with the romance, suggesting “a conflict of interest” because Hernández is a “direct subordinate” and blamed it, in part, for the fact that the ENB has lost a third of its dancers in two years.

Those sources were never identified and Rojo, 43, is genuinely bemused, possibly a little hurt, by the fuss. Hernández arrived in this country “a fully fledged star”, she explains, a veteran of the Paris Opera and the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. There’s “not even a possibility” of conflict, she says, because “he has won all the awards you can possibly win, so there was nowhere I could promote him”. Anyway, she adds, crisply, “I don’t deal with contracts.”

They’ve been together a year-and-a-half and have “never made any secret of our relationship — it is what it is”. Whether such whispering would have happened to a male director she doesn’t wish to speculate. “All I can say is that we’ve always been honest and I hoped there was no animosity towards us.” She perks up when I ask how she feels about the age gap. “Lucky,” she says. “He makes me feel lucky. He’s amazing.” She throws me a mischievous glance. “I highly recommend it.”

We’ve met at the ENB building behind the Royal College of Art in Kensington (it’s moving to a new building on City Island in 2019). Lithe dancers line tatty corridors wearing leotards and legwarmers, stretching and chatting. It’s like a cross between a Degas painting and Kids From Fame.

Upstairs in her office Rojo sits pole-straight, almost a parody: shoulders back, pelvis tucked, limbs loose like a science lab skeleton. Does she ever slouch? “All the time!” She demonstrates but it’s not a real slouch, more an origami fold.

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For the uninitiated, Rojo, who has a PhD from Madrid University, was a principal ballerina at the Royal Ballet and stepped into management when she took over at the ENB in 2012. As well as astonishing on stage — she has been described by The New York Times as “the greatest dance actress of her generation” — she’s been applauded for her artistic vision and risk-taking. For instance, commissioning Giselle as a refugee, and She Said, a programme of all-women choreography.

She is hugely proud of taking all 67 ENB dancers to the Paris Opera (“a dream I didn’t even dream would come true”), of its Laurence Olivier award (“Which ballet company gets that? We did!”) and the fact that Giselle recast as “not necessarily a victim” will be shown in 140 cinemas worldwide.

Does she have any unmet ambitions? “My ego is good, it’s fine,” she laughs.It’s a relief, though, to discover that she finds gossip “fascinating” (she wants to write a novel one day) and that she has a sense of humour — joking, when I spot a plate of Jaffa cakes beside me, “Yes, balleri nas eat chocolate biscuits.” (Although when I have one I daren’t tell her they are stale).

She is keen to impress on everyone that ballet is not exclusive — “we have tickets for £10, less than football, less than the cinema” — but also that dancers are not just mythical inaccessible creatures of poise and beauty, they go out, they have a drink, they let their buns down. “We have relationships, we have children, we have lives. Proper lives. And I’ve always believed that the more rounded you are the better artist you can be, the more empathy you’ll have, the more you understand people and their motivations.”

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Among her crusades is to stop cuts in arts funding in schools, which she thinks is mad because ballet — like boxing, football or acting — is a place for those who don’t always fit the mould. “Lots of dancers are dyslexic, for example,” she says. They come into their own in an environment “that needs a different kind of intelligence: empathy, musical and physical intelligence”. If art is for everyone, she argues, exposure should start at school. “It can be profitable too — like law or medicine.”

I get the impression she slightly revels in the sweat and focus. She endorses a brand of ballet shoes for bunions and says, “actually the day to day is quite gritty. It doesn’t have much glamour.”

Certainly one of the worst things I learned was that Rojo suffered a burst appendix on stage and — wait for it —carried on dancing until the end of the show (I have an image of her pirouetting into an ambulance before the blue lights to hospital).

Does she shut out pain? “A bit. Dancers get used to pain. It’s part of the process of strengthening,” she says. “This was not was not a knee, a foot or a bone or something broken, I had stomach ache. The doctor said, ‘Nah, you don’t look that sick’. So I thought: ‘I’m fine’.”

Another time she ignored a sprained ankle to seize the chance to play Giselle when Darcy Bussell was injured. Yes, it turned out to be her big break, but still. “I always have been very demanding of myself,” she says.

But not on others, she says. This brings us back to the anonymous complaints because one issue raised was the pressure to work while injured, something Rojo responds to with a very Latin “Tsss.”

“We couldn’t recognise our company in that description,” she says. “People had left, yes, but we felt it was explicable because a lot of change had been going on. We didn’t feel it was unnatural, that there was anything to be concerned about.”

Nonetheless, she addressed all points raised. “We went through it with the [ENB] board. We shared our procedures with the Arts Council and the Unions; they were satisfied.”

Tamara Rojo at the National Dance Awards 2017
Elliott Franks

Among changes they will introduce are new channels of communication. She’d already widened the medical provision when she arrived, ripping out old floors, replacing them with sprung boards to lessen the impact on the dancers.

She invested in a sports scientist, nutritionist, psychologist, and added more physiotherapy hours.

To to her visible relief we move on to politics. “I love politics,” she says — she watches Question Time and Newsnight “on a loop” — and for this she blames her parents. Her father described himself as an “anarchist republican”, she says and gallops off on the story of how her parents met in Canada, where her father was fleeing Franco and her mother was studying.

Her mother went into labour during a political debate — literally — and on return to Spain with baby Tamara they kept an illegal printing press under her cot. As a toddler she dozed on her mother’s lap during long revolutionary discussions. Even her earliest memory is political: riding her father’s shoulders during a demonstration, then gunfire. “The fascists were still fighting for the regime. I remember him saying: ‘Let’s go, let’s go’. We were running. You could see people trying to get away from the shots. It was the first time I had seen my father scared. That was scary.”

At school she stood out. While other children watched E T at the weekends, Rojo was taken to “hard-hitting political films about Eastern Europe. Sometimes violent.” When she relayed this to classmates, “they would look askance”. (Fortunately an uncle took pity and took her to E T. “It was the most amazing film I’d ever seen.”)

Her parents believed “it was a time of possibility” and although the family lived in subsidised housing, “it didn’t feel like we had nothing, it felt the opposite. It felt like the sky had opened and the country was breathing.”

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Today she speaks to them daily — for the entire drive into work from her home in Bloomsbury — both on speaker asking questions simultaneously and squabbling. “As an only child you worry as your parents get older. My sole responsibility is to keep them entertained.”

Her father is more Conservative today. “He says: ‘Only fools don’t question their own beliefs’.”

She is funny on the pressures of being an only child (“all expectations in one person!”), not least because Hernández is number seven out of 11 children and he left home at the age of nine. “He got a scholarship to study so he went to America. In many ways he’s more grown up than me.

“In a strange way he felt perfect,” for this reason, “like a good relationship should feel. The age gap doesn’t seem to be in our relationship, other than being in a positive way. But we are dancers so most of our experiences are shared.” She adds: “So I’m not worried.”

Does she think they will marry? “Ask him.” Of children, she joshes, “I think I have left it a bit late for 11,” but doesn’t rule out the possibility. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Tamara Rojo in Akram Khan's Giselle
Laurent Liotardo

For a dancer, choosing to have a child is “complicated”, she says, because “from the beginning you have this clock ticking: you know that the career is going to finish soon”.

Many dancers are back on the stage in four months — “if they choose to,” she says. I spied a baby on my way in, and she says, “I think we have six.”

Brexit is a threat. She has “constant” tedious conversations about student visas. “An organisation like this, how do we prepare?” she says in a way that suggests she’s said this a million times recently “The dance world relies on free movement of creatives — dancers, choreographers, designers and technicians. We don’t have resources to deal with 200 more visas a year.”

London leads in the arts in the world, she says, because of the system of public subsidy, unlike New York, which relies on selling tickets or fundraising, “both of which are Conservative-led. If you have a bad year you have to rely on the blockbusters — Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty. Funders want guaranteed successes. If you said: ‘There is this kathak contemporary artist and I want him to do Giselle. He’s never worked with a ballet company but I’m sure it’s going to be amazing’. They would be like: ‘Yeah whatever, but I’m not paying for it’. Here I can take those risks.”

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