Rojo tries to stay optimistic. These could be “potentially the best times, the most transformative times,” she said. “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 said, “There’s so much noise.”
In the studio, Rojo tries to shut the noise out. And just as she encourages her dancers to do, she questions everything.
“I sit through a lot of performances,” she said. “So very often I’m sitting there going, ‘Should we still be doing this? Is this still relevant?’”
Part of what she’s trying to achieve at San Francisco Ballet is to make the experience as inviting as possible. “From the moment people enter the building, they need to understand that they are entering a different world,” she said. “And that it is open to them and is welcoming and is not reverential. And if anything, we are reverential toward them.”
But how the art form competes with popular culture — she brought up a show she had just been watching, “Black Mirror” — is something that keeps her up at night: “How do we continue to be relevant in the cultural landscape, to the people that we’re supposed to be serving?” Rojo said. “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 perspective, she realized, is different from the ordinary ballet viewer. “Now I look at things through my 3-year-old son,” she said. “‘Nutcracker’ is the most magical thing you could ever wish for as a kid, and the beginning of ‘Swan Lake’ is terrifying. So I just look at it and then go, Oh, no, actually, this is fine. This can compete with ‘Paw Patrol.’
