Photo: Vincent Klueger
Alina Cojocaru is one of those dancers who seems to have been transported from another realm. Her translucent movements melt into the air. Whether the Romanian ballerina is playing a tormented, fragile Giselle, a helplessly in love Juliet or a richly nuanced but feather-light Odette in Swan Lake, she dances on what feels like instinct, as if ballet were innate to her.
But when I say this, Cojocaru purses her lips and shakes her head admonishingly. "When everyone says, 'Oh, you're a natural, you were born with it,' all I want to do is scream and scream, 'No, I wasn't born that way! Nobody was born that way!'" She laughs, but she is dead serious. Dancing is toil. You can be one of the best ballerinas in the world, just like Cojocaru, but you can never stop putting in the hours.
Cojocaru tells me she struggled to return to ballet after having her second child during the pandemic, and was ready to say goodbye to the discipline. "Then my sister said, 'Alina, you're trying to make everything work with two hours in the gym. You always worked at least 10 hours [a day] before you had kids," and Cojocaru realized there was no shortcut. She has to train three hours a day before even starting a ballet class, she tells me, and five hours before a show. No matter how senior you are as a dancer, you cannot delegate the physical work. To illustrate, when our video call ends, it's 9 p.m. in Xi'an, China, where Cojocaru is on tour, and she's about to go to the gym.
Somehow my life in the studio and on stage becomes so much more real than outside of it
At 42, Cojocaru is at the age when many dancers have retired, but she says her body feels "actually really good" and her technique remains amazing. But she is entering a new phase of her career. After fourteen years at the Royal Ballet - which she and her husband, dancer Johan Kobborg, left suddenly and somewhat controversially in 2013 - and seven years at the English National Ballet, she went freelance and performed around the world. She received an honorary OBE this year and continues to live in London with Kobborg and their two daughters (aged six and three).
The story continues
But now she not only dances, but also produces. Her first major ballet will premiere in January, based on Federico Fellini's 1954 film La Strada. It is the story of the eccentric, childlike Gelsomina, a girl bought from her impoverished family by a traveling strongman, Zampanó. to be his assistant/wife, and learned her trade as a Chaplinesque clown. They tour villages and earn a living, while Zampanó is downright abusive to Gelsomina, who maintains her naivety and simple loyalty to him, at least until Zampanó fatally abandons a rival circus performer and her world collapses. Cojocaru will be Gelsomina, with Kobborg as clown Il Matto and Italian dancer Mick Zeni as Zampanó. Natália Horečná's choreography combines ballet and contemporary dance, with Nino Rota's original film music in the soundtrack.
La Strada is hailed by some as Fellini's masterpiece, although it's now difficult to watch without shouting at the screen as Gelsomina misses opportunities to escape Zampanó. It is certainly an exposé of the cruelties of life and the dynamics of abuse. But Cojocaru sees the miracle in Gelsomina's character. "She's just so pure," she says. There is a scene where Gelsomina finds tomato seeds and plants them, even though they only stay in the village for a night. "But she has to put them in the ground because they will grow and that's the right thing to do. Someone, even if it isn't her, will benefit from it." That selflessness moves Cojocaru.
At the end of the film, when Zampanó hears that Gelsomina has died, we see him collapsed, crying on the beach. In Cojocaru, the audience discovers at the end what Gelsomina knew all along: that this damaged, lonely man does have a heart after all. "She sees the good, she sees the love," says Cojocaru. "It's such a childish way of life - I see that in my girls. For them, when it rained, I took an umbrella. Now we go outside and jump in muddy puddles.
Cojocaru has a bit of the Gelsomina in it. A few years ago, at the National Dance Awards, she spoke movingly about the role of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty - a princess character that some dancers find thin - and about how, after becoming a mother, she felt it was her job to 'bring the light on' every day. to find'. for her daughter, and that's what she wanted to do with Aurora. This is evident from her hopeful, radiant dance and her open-hearted personality.
This is a dancer who disappears into her characters even during rehearsal. "Somehow my life in the studio and on stage becomes so much more real than outside of it." She can't bring herself to watch most news right now, but the theater is a safe place to let go and be vulnerable. It's the same for the audience. Cojocaru remembers dancing Akram Khan's Giselle and hearing someone scream, in pain, the moment it was revealed that Giselle was dead.
Cojocaru is certainly not disconnected from what happens in the real world. Although born in Romania, she trained in Kiev and when the Russian invasion began, she quickly organized a benefit performance for Ukraine (with fellow dancer Ivan Putrov). She still speaks to her teacher in Kiev. "She is now alone in her entire building," says Cojocaru. "But they just go to work, they continue, there are performances. They hear the sirens and go to the shelter. It's a world I don't think we can imagine." She tells me that her teacher used to be an impatient person who didn't waste time talking, but now every conversation takes a long time. 'And I just listen. And that's the only way I think I can help."
Early on we are told how to dance, how to think about dance. You are rarely encouraged to ask, "What do I like?"
Artists who have remained in Russia and not condemned the war are no longer invited to perform in most of Europe. But Cojocaru meets them at galas in China. "I put on Gelsomina glasses," she says. "And when I see someone, I see the dancer, I see the mother, and I speak to that. I don't judge the passport. If I look at people that way, hopefully I will find the good."
If you watch Cojocaru's early interviews, when she was promoted to principal dancer at the age of twenty, she speaks in barely a whisper. But don't confuse some of the wide-eyed characters she plays with the woman she is now. Dancers have a hidden steel and Cojocaru has absolute certainty about himself as an artist. When she left the Royal Ballet it was partly because her own artistic ideas did not match those of then director Monica Mason.
"We are told very early on how to dance, how to think about dance, what a production should look like," she says. "You always follow someone else's vision. But you are rarely encouraged to ask, 'What do I like, what is important to me?'" If you want to pursue your own growth, "the challenge is to find companies that are open and knowledgeable enough to do that." support," she says, taking a very friendly dig at the Royal Ballet. "For me it just wasn't enough. When I felt I needed more, I had to take a step."
She did find inspiration from choreographer John Neumeier at the Hamburg Ballet, where she is still a guest artist. And now Cojocaru is chasing her freedom and flying as an artist, but she is still a real student, she tells me. "I like to learn, and I try to be smart enough to relearn things I thought I already knew." The challenge right now is how to balance an international dance career with the pressures of producing a new ballet and raising two children at the same time. She is still working on that. "The moment I say I know what I'm doing," she says, "it's time to take off the shoes."
La Strada is at Sadler's Wells, London, 25 until January 28.
