Five stars for Tamara Rojo’s farewell in Akram Khan’s Giselle — review

Not many ballet dancers get to have a three-decade-long career on their own terms. Injuries, ageing joints and management changes are only a few of the obstacles. Yet Tamara Rojo, star and director of English National Ballet, who retired from the stage last week at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, has handled them all with rare savvy.

And she looked contented, rather than sad, after her eloquent final performance in the title role of Akram Khan’s 2016 reimagining of Giselle. At 48, Rojo is leaving ENB to direct San Francisco Ballet and hanging up her pointe shoes in the process — in a ballet she commissioned herself, no less.

It was a vintage Rojo interpretation, fiercely individual and layered, her lush command of the classical technique here blended with Khan’s Kathak-flavoured fluidity. Here and there came nostalgic flashes of her classical Giselle, in her look of innocent joy early on with Isaac Hernández (Rojo’s offstage partner doubling as her Albrecht); of her grief-stricken Frida Kahlo in Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Broken Wings, when Khan’s heroine mourned a pregnancy; of her affinity for Kenneth MacMillan’s expressive shapes as she reached for Hernández in ghostly, tragic form.

Aspiring dancers would do well to study the way Rojo took charge of her career. In the 1990s she left Spain for the UK, hopping from Scottish Ballet to ENB and, finally, to the Royal Ballet. There, she was one of a group of distinctive ballerinas (Alina Cojocaru, Marianela Nuñez and Leanne Benjamin among them) who made every show in the late 2000s a thrilling contrast to the next.

A precocious interest in leadership led her to return to ENB in 2012. While a director doing double duty as principal dancer is unthinkable in most companies today, it turned out to be a mutually beneficial arrangement in this case, because Rojo’s star power was a boost to ENB on every level.

She has picked her roles carefully in recent years, and since Khan’s Giselle won’t be performed in the UK this season, Paris — where Rojo has been seen only infrequently — was lucky to see her final bow. Unfortunately, the tour’s presenter, Albert Sarfati Productions, could have advertised it more widely: quite a few audience members seemed unaware of it, although the emotional bows probably clued them in.

Rojo generously shared her farewell with departing ENB first artist Stina Quagebeur, who took one final stab at the role she originated in Khan’s production. As Myrtha — queen of the act-two Wilis, here the vengeful ghosts of factory workers — she hovered disquietingly on pointe as she pushed Giselle to kill Albrecht, a murder-whisperer at the heart of a horror story. Her dramatic intelligence will no doubt serve her well in her second career as a dance-maker, since she will remain with ENB as associate choreographer.

When Rojo took Quagebeur by the hands to bring her front and centre, and handed her one of the red roses she had been showered with moments earlier, it was a reminder of the juggling act this boldest of ballerinas embarked on a decade ago — nurturing artists while leading by example onstage. Rojo pulled it off; now another chapter beckons in San Francisco, behind the scenes.

★★★★★

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