Rojo tries to stick constructive. Those may well be “potentially the best times, the most transformative times,” she stated. “Especially for the arts. And that’s what I’m hoping: That we are in the middle of the tornado and we can’t see what’s about to come when we cross.”
Amid pandemics and wars, social media and A.I., she stated, “There’s so much noise.”
Within the studio, Rojo tries to close the noise out. And simply as she encourages her dancers to do, she questions the whole thing.
“I sit through a lot of performances,” she stated. “So very often I’m sitting there going, ‘Should we still be doing this? Is this still relevant?’”
A part of what she’s attempting to succeed in at San Francisco Ballet is to produce the revel in as inviting as imaginable. “From the moment people enter the building, they need to understand that they are entering a different world,” she stated. “And that it is open to them and is welcoming and is not reverential. And if anything, we are reverential toward them.”
However how the artwork mode competes with usual tradition — she introduced up a display she had simply been looking at, “Black Mirror” — is one thing that assists in keeping her up at night time: “How do we continue to be relevant in the cultural landscape, to the people that we’re supposed to be serving?” Rojo stated. “It’s much easier when you’re commissioning something to have that creativity. But when you’re trying to sustain and support the legacy” — of classical ballet — “for me, that’s where this distance becomes more apparent.”
Her point of view, she learned, isn’t the same as the familiar ballet viewer. “Now I look at things through my 3-year-old son,” she stated. “‘Nutcracker’ is probably the most magical factor you might want to ever want for as a child, and the start of ‘Swan Lake’ is terrifying. So I simply take a look at it and after walk, Oh, incorrect, in fact, that is nice. This will compete with ‘Paw Patrol.’
