There are countless ways to measure the influence of ballerina Sonia Rodriguez, who retires next weekend after 32 years with National Ballet of Canada. Most are hard to quantify, but it’s easiest to start with the two inches. That’s how much she grew after becoming a corps dancer at the age of 17.
Rodriguez matured to a petite 5-foot-4-and-a-half, the ideal height for a ballet dancer. And yet, despite her small stature, it’s impossible to underestimate her outsize importance as a Canadian-born dancer who spent her entire professional career with National Ballet.
“I was always challenged,” she said in a recent interview, citing diverse repertoire and opportunities to grow as an artist as the top reasons she stayed so long, dancing under four artistic directors. “I always wanted to be a bit of a blank canvas.”
In the early 1990s, Rodriguez danced Rudolf Nureyev’s Sleeping Beauty. She went on to become one of the company’s finest Auroras, according to former artistic director James Kudelka, who created several leading roles for Rodriguez in his own ballets.
Beyond the studio, Rodriguez reached a much larger audience performing in a series of ice shows with her former husband, Olympic figure skater Kurt Browning, delivering the art of dance to millions of television viewers in the United States and Canada (hopefully, she says, some “bought a ticket to the ballet”).
In 2003, Rodriguez became a mother when no other female dancers at National Ballet had children. Since then more than a dozen others have given birth and returned to the stage. Many colleagues cite her as a mentor – not only fellow mothers but the men who learned to partner by holding Rodriguez aloft in Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and other ballets.
On top of innumerable rehearsals, whether in Toronto or on tour, Rodriguez can be found at barre every morning, even though a star dancer in her 40s would be forgiven for occasionally skipping. The number of daily classes she has attended are close to 10,000 at this point.
“Actions speak louder than words,” said Skylar Campbell, one of Rodriguez’s frequent partners over the past 13 years. “She set an example. Sonia is an incredible light, and a lot of people are going to miss her presence.”
Rodriguez will take her final bows after starring as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, an adaption of Tennessee Williams’s play by a choreographer she cites as one of her favourites: Hamburg Ballett director John Neumeier.
“A dancer is never their last performance, but a body of work over time, with many influences,” Kudelka reflected in a recent e-mail interview. “It is quite incredible that Sonia has had such a long career. I am glad that I was able to be there at the beginning of it.”
Born in Canada to Spanish parents who soon moved back to Madrid, Rodriguez trained at the Princess Grace Academy in Monaco and returned to Toronto not yet fluent in English. Kudelka, who served as artistic director from 1996 until 2005, recalled having the opportunity to promote one female dancer for the 2000-01 season, and picked Rodriguez.
“She had proven herself a valuable soloist,” he said. “I did not know immediately in what areas she would excel, but she was technically proficient and had a lovely personality.”
Proficiency and personality have indeed carried her far. By the time Campbell joined National Ballet in 2009, Rodriguez had already served as first partner to several other up-and-coming men in the company, including current principals Piotr Stanczyk and Guilliame Côté. Campbell recalled being 23 and landing the titular role in Neumeier’s ballet Nijinsky, a choreographic drama exploring the real-life love triangle between the iconic Polish dancer, Ballets Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev and Romola de Pulszky, the female dancer Nijinsky left him to marry.
“There was no ego,” Campbell said of walking into the studio to work with Rodriguez. “Everything was so natural and effortless. She wasn’t telling me what to do, or saying, ‘Can you do it the way I’m used to doing it?’ That made it such a good process.”
National Ballet performs more of Neumeier’s ballets than any other North American company, and his choreography “demands a lot of attention and vulnerability and commitment,” Campbell said. In retrospect, he did not realize how lucky he was to have Rodriguez as his partner. Veteran female dancers often request precision from men who will be spinning them around for the first time, but that’s not how Rodriguez built trust with her partners.
“Sonia really brought out things in me that I really never knew I had,” Campbell said. “She really allowed me to let go, to be a little bit more free and less calculated.”
They went on to dance together in Giselle and Streetcar, in which Campbell took on the role of Blanche’s husband Allan. Regrettably, Campbell will not be in the audience on Saturday; he left National Ballet in January and joined Houston Ballet in order to be closer to family and explore opportunities in the U.S. “It would have been nice to dance with her in this final performance,” he said.
Rodriguez, for her part, says retirement “snuck up on her,” even though she began planning to leave three years ago.
“In a sense, it has not been what I was hoping for,” she said. Like everyone else, she spent much of the past two years dancing at home, at worst in her kitchen and at best on the sunny deck of her lake house. Looking at her Instagram posts over the past year, it is clear she has not lost much of her toned physique.
“As you get more mature as an artist, you start really appreciating what you can do,” Rodriguez said. “You’re a lot more conscious about the time that you have on stage and how precious everything is, and I feel like I have been doing that for years.”
Across North America, many older dancers quietly retired during the pandemic, some unable to keep up with the demands of training at home and supervising online school. While losing her mother to a non-COVID illness, Rodriguez found herself doing barre at the hospital. Thankfully, her two sons, who are 18 and 14, are largely independent.
In November, she danced the leading role in George Balanchine’s Serenade opposite both Côté and Campbell, leaping a metre above the stage, long blue tutu trailing behind her, before rapturous audiences at the Four Seasons Centre. “After being gone for so long, it made us realize how lucky we are,” she said. “To experience that at the end of my career was an incredible high.”
In the months since, Rodriguez has time to reflect not only those high points, but on moments that could be called career lows if they hadn’t been so comic.
She recalled one early Swan Lake when a male performer’s fake mustache fell off and stuck to her shoe. “I danced the whole ballroom scene,” Rodriguez recalled. “I was completely unaware, except that people onstage were looking at me funny.”
Another “atrocious” memory: Her leotard ripping minutes before going onstage in Sleeping Beauty. The normally polite Rodriguez screamed, “My crotch, my crotch,” until a wardrobe supervisor came to her aide. Seconds later, she was dancing with a giant safety pin holding her leotard together “down there.”
Hopefully no costume malfunctions will mar her final performances with National Ballet. Rodriguez said she does plan to dance again somewhere, because “I still love being onstage,” she said. But her all her plans are indefinite. “It hasn’t quite sunk that this is really happening,” she said. As if to remind herself, she repeated with a sigh, “It’s here, it’s really here.”
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