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, breakable 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 is innate to her.
But when I say this, Cojocaru purses her lips and shakes her head admonishingly. “When everybody says: ‘Oh, you’re a natural at this, you were born with it,’ I just want to yell and scream, ‘No I wasn’t born like that! Nobody was born like that!’” She laughs, but she is dead serious. Dancing is toil. You can be one of the best ballerinas in the world, as Cojocaru is, but you can never stop putting in the hours.
Cojocaru tells me she struggled coming back 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 were always working at least 10 hours [a day] before you had kids,’” and Cojocaru realised there was no shortcut. She needs to do three hours of training a day before even starting a ballet class, she tells me, and five hours before a show. However senior you are as a dancer, you can’t delegate the physical work. To illustrate the point, when our video calls ends it’s 9pm in Xi’an, China, where Cojocaru is on tour, and she’s about to head into the gym.
