by Alina Cojocaru is one of those dancers who seems to have been transported from another realm. Her diaphanous movements melt into the air. Whether the Romanian ballerina is playing a haunted, broken Giselle, a helpless Juliet, or a feather-light Odette in Swan Lake, she dances with what feels like an instinct, as if ballet is innate to her.
But when I say this, Cojocaru purses her lips and shakes her head eagerly. “When everyone says: ‘Oh, you’re a natural at this, you were born with it,’ I just want to shout and scream, ‘I wasn’t born like that! Nobody was born that way!’” She laughs, but she’s dead serious. Dancing is a will. You can be one of the best ballerinas in the world, like Cojocaru, but you can’t stop the hours.
Cojocaru tells me that she had difficulty returning to ballet after having her second child during the pandemic, and that she was ready to say goodbye to discipline. “Then my sister said: ‘Aline, 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 the point, when our video call ends it’s 9pm in Xi’an, China, where Cojocaru is on tour, and she’s about to hit the gym.
Somehow my life in the studio and on stage becomes much more real than outside
At 42, Cojocaru is at an age when many dancers retire but she says her body feels “really good”, and her technique is still amazing. But she is moving into a new phase of her career. After 14 years at the Royal Ballet – which she and her husband, dancer Johan Kobborg, left suddenly and controversially in 2013 – and seven years at English National Ballet, she went freelance, performing on around the world. She was awarded an honorary OBE this year and is still based in London with Kobborg and their two daughters (aged six and three).
But now she is not only dancing but also producing. Her ballet debut premiered in January, based on Federico Fellini’s 1954 film La Strada. It is the story of the eccentric, childlike Gelsomina, a girl who is bought from her poor family by a strong touring man, Zampanó, to be his assistant/wife, learning her trade as a Chaplinesque fence. They tour villages, scraping a living, and Zampanó is completely abusive towards Gelsomina, who maintains her naivety and simple loyalty to him, at least until Zampanó lamps a rival circus performer and her world is shattered. Cojocaru Gelsomina, with Kobborg as the clown Il Matto, and the Italian dancer Mick Zeni as Zampanó. Natália Horečná’s choreography includes ballet and contemporary dance, and Nino Rota’s original film music in the soundtrack.
Some love La Strada as Fellini’s masterpiece, although it’s hard to watch now without screaming at the screen as Gelsomina gets opportunities to escape from Zampanó. It is certainly a reflection of the brutality of life and the dynamics of abuse. But Cojocaru sees the surprise in Gelsomina’s character. “She’s so clean,” she says. There is a scene where Gelsomina finds tomato seeds and plants them, although they are only staying in the village overnight. “But she has to put them in the ground because they will grow and that’s the right thing to do. Someone will benefit from it, even if she’s not there.” That selflessness moves Cojocaru.
At the end of the film, when Zampanó finds out that Gelsomina has died, we see him collapsed, crying on the beach. As for Cojocaru, the audience discovers at the end what Gelsomina knew all along: that this lonely, spoiled man has a heart after all. “She sees the good, she sees the love,” says Cojocaru. “It’s such a childish way of life – something I see with my girls. Before them, when it was raining, I took an umbrella. Now, we go out and jump into muddy puddles.”
Cojocaru has a bit of Gelsomina in it. A few years ago she spoke passionately at the National Dance Awards about the role of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty – a princess character that some dancers find contradictory – and how she felt, after becoming a mother, that she was the It was her job to “find the light” every day. for her daughter, and that’s what she wanted to do with Aurora. It shows in her optimistic, luminous 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 much more real than outside.” She can’t bring herself to watch most of the news right now, but the theater is a safe place to pretend and be vulnerable. It’s the same for the audience. Cojocaru remembers Giselle Akram Khan dancing, and hearing someone scream, in pain, at the moment Giselle is revealed to be dead.
Cojocaru is certainly not divorced from what is going on in real life. Although she was born in Romania, she trained in Kyiv and when the Russian invasion began, she was quick to organize a benefit performance for Ukraine (with another dancer Ivan Putrov). She still talks to her teacher in Civ. “She’s alone in her whole building now,” says Cojocaru. “But they go to work, they keep going, there are performances. They hear the sirens, go down to the shelter. It’s a world I don’t think we can imagine.” She tells me that her teacher has always been an impatient person who would not waste time chatting, but now each call lasts for a long time. “And I listen. And that’s the only way I feel I can help.”
Soon we are told how to dance, how we should think about dancing. You are rarely encouraged to ask, ‘What do I like?’
Artists who stayed in Russia and did not deny the war are no longer invited to perform in most of Europe. But Cojocaru meets them at a gala in China. “I put on the Gelsomina glasses,” she says. “And when I see someone, I see the dancer, I see the mother, and I talk to that. I do not consider the passport. If I look at people that way I hope I get the good.”
If you look at Cojocaru’s early interviews, when she was promoted to principal dancer at just 20 years old, she barely speaks in a whisper. But don’t forget some of the wide-eyed characters for the woman she is now. Dancers have hidden steel, and Cojocaru is confident in herself as an artist. When she left the Royal Ballet, it was partly because her own artistic ideas did not match those of the director at the time, Monica Mason.
“Early on we are told how we should dance, how we should think about dance, how a production should look,” she says. “You’re always following someone else’s vision. But you’re rarely encouraged to ask, ‘What do I like, what’s important to me?’” If you want to pursue your own growth, “finding companies that are open and knowledgeable enough to support that is a challenge” , she says, in a very fine dig at the Royal Bill. “For me it wasn’t enough. When I felt I needed more, I had to take a step.”
However, she found inspiration with the choreographer John Neumeier at Hamburg Ballet, where she is still a guest artist. And now Cojocaru is searching for her freedom and flying as an artist, but she is still very much a 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 now is how to balance an international dance career, the pressure of producing a new ballet and raising two children at the same time. She is still working on that. “The minute I say I know what I’m doing,” she says, “it’s time to take the shoes off.”
La Strada is at Sadler’s Wells, London, 25 until 28 January.
