Tamara Rojo
From last year's collaboration with designer Vivienne Westwood to the recent signing of former Royal Ballet star Alina Cojocaru, Rojo has kept the company regularly in the news.
Then came her comments in Time Out magazine, comparing the attitude of male choreographers with that of makers of pornography. A furore blew up at once.
Rojo's argument is a serious one. It is directed at the differences between male and female choreographers and the reasons why so few of the latter are working in ballet.
Yet, with one effortless flick of a porn reference, Rojo has spun this rather specialist issue right into the middle of the media's attention.
The connection between porn and dance isn't entirely random. Earlier this month, the sexualisation of ballet came under excitable scrutiny when it was discovered that Jeppe Hansen, a 22-year-old dancer, had been expelled from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet student group for moonlighting as a "high art" porn actor.
Hansen's defenders argue that his work as "Jett Black" was simply an extension of his dancing talent; critics claim he had been suckered into an industry that's ultimately only about exploitation. Both sides, however, became embroiled in the muddled area between sex and art that dance has always occupied.
The puritanism of British and North American cultures means there is a lingering, prurient perception that scantily clad men and women making a frank display of their bodies must automatically be sexual. But ballet does have a long and complicated history with the erotic: from the abstract, combative sexual manoeuvres of George Balanchine's Agon to the psychosexual dramas of Kenneth MacMillan, one thing the artform does best is communicate a physical and sensual intensity that is beyond words.
Less benignly, ballet has also been tainted by a history of sexual exploitation. Traditionally, the profession has been filled with young, working-class men and women, who have known full well that their performances on stage would attract the attention and lust of rich and wealthy patrons. The evolving technique of ballet, with its focus on preternaturally supple bodies, its frank display of buttocks, groin and torso, has historically been shaped by male choreographers to please their own gaze.
Rojo's use of the word "porn", however, has a very different and specific slant. She claims that men and women tend to approach the art of choreography from opposite perspectives: while women start with the emotion they want to express, men begin with the making of steps – an approach to bodies that Rojo suggests is parallel to the objectification of porn.
It's an off-the-cuff theory, to which there are obvious exceptions in both ballet and modern dance: Twyla Tharp has made her name through being principally about steps, while Russell Maliphant is one of many men to work from a very internal emotional map of the body. But the more important truth for Rojo is that, with about 90% of today's ballet repertory being made by men, as well as a disproportionate percentage of modern dance repertory, we have only a very limited idea of the kind of work that women might make.
There are many factors influencing that statistic. Some are institutional: schools and companies still tend to encourage young women towards dancing rather than choreography. Some are social and biological: the 30s tend to be peak years of a choreographer's career, but for women these are also the years in which their lives may be complicated by pregnancies and families.
The really heartening part of Rojo's argument is her call to the profession and society as a whole to recognise these factors and give more support to women. She acknowledges that her own attempts to commission work by two female choreographers were stymied by the fact that both were pregnant. In the old days, a ballet director would have shrugged and moved on. Now we have one who is prepared to lend a campaigning voice to make choreography a more equal profession. Forget the "porn" headlines: it was a good week for women in dance. – © Guardian News & Media 2013Judith Mackrell is the Guardian's dance critic