Raymonda wants love and a career-SF Ballet gives her both

"I guess the Nightingale bit threw me a little when attending the opening on March 1st. I expected Sasha De Sola's pointe shoes to flutter across the battlefield as she bent to tie a tourniquet around a beautifully fallen dancer. But her real conflict was still one of the heart - now with a desire for career, too. So it's a bit more like a love quadrangle when you factor in the nursing."

"Structurally speaking, Raymonda hasn't strayed too far in Rojo's recent update, which puts a feminist perspective on choreographer Marius Petipa's original work. The love triangle remains, but no one dies now, and our protagonist swaps her noble title for some overlap to Florence Nightingale - who history remembers for turning war hospitals from death traps to functional clinics."

"In reality, one heroine fumbles every life decision and ends up in a swamp. Others create an existential dread music video about AI that's directed by Daft Punk. And somewhere, an army of ghostly women have formed a Kill Bill squad to dance their ex-lovers to death."

Tamara Rojo's update of Raymonda reframes the 19th-century noblewoman as a more agented protagonist who navigates romantic options and vocational desire. The production preserves Petipa's structural elements and classical technique while removing fatal outcomes and adding Florence Nightingale–style nursing responsibilities. Sasha De Sola's portrayal shifts emphasis from battlefield heroics to emotional and career conflicts, creating a love quadrangle that blends caregiving with romantic tension. Rojo's choreography advances gender politics a century forward without abandoning familiar melodrama, producing both earnest classical moments and contemporary, provocative staging elsewhere in the season.

Read at Medium