Giselle | Interview with Tamara Rojo and Akram Khan | The New York Times

LONDON — It’s a throw of the dice. Ballet audiences love full-length narrative works, but unlike opera, enduring story ballets don’t make for a long list. Ballet directors need more of them but tremble at the investment of money and time they require, knowing that the chances of long-term success, both financial and critical, aren’t great.

When Tamara Rojo, the director of English National Ballet, asked Akram Khan to create a new version of the much-loved 19th-century classic “Giselle,” the wager had particularly high stakes. Rojo, a Spanish-born ballerina, was only two years into her job as English National Ballet’s artistic director and was trying to establish an identity for the troupe that would differentiate it from the larger, better-funded Royal Ballet, where she had been a principal dancer. Khan, a British dance maker of Bangladeshi origin, who had risen to fame in Britain with a melding of classical Indian kathak and contemporary dance, had little interest in ballet and had never created a full-length work.

“There was about one in a million odds that this would work,” Khan said.

To read the rest of the interview, click here.