SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.- Coming from Tamara Rojo, three words go a long way: “That, I believe.”

Rojo, the artistic director of San Francisco Ballet since 2022, wants dancers to have autonomy — more than just input, a real choice in how to interpret a role. There’s a difference between watching dancers ripple through steps, however beautifully, and watching their ideas about a role unfold in real time. When Rojo sees a moment she believes, it means they’re performing steps with meaning and intention.

“What I really want is for them to go through the exercise of asking themselves questions,” Rojo said in her office after back-to-back “Swan Lake” rehearsals last month. “That’s something that is not encouraged in our training in general as dancers. We are given very clear guidance and very clear feedback all the time: ‘That’s wrong. That’s right.’”

Her rehearsals are entertaining. Coaching the principal dancer Misa Kuranaga as Odette in “Swan Lake,” Rojo said: “What does it mean to suddenly have a man touch you after how long — three years, six years, 10 years?”

Odette is a princess, turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer. “I have no idea how long you’ve been in this situation,” Rojo said. “And then, why you would break away?”

When Kuranaga’s partner suggested that a dramatic problem in “Swan Lake” might be solved by merely adjusting his spacing, Rojo tried to suppress a giggle. She failed.

Her endgame is to instill her dancers with self-reflection as they approach their roles, a kind of decision-making they can carry throughout their careers. “It’s not about me and you in the studio,” she said. “You’re not performing for me. You shouldn’t please me. You know? This is just a set of tools that is going to allow you to take this in every aspect of what you do.”

As an artistic director, Rojo, 50, is spectacularly unguarded — a rare open book with a progressive way of looking at ballet’s place in the world. She has experimented with this already in San Francisco, producing a hit, “Mere Mortals,” a ballet exploring the story of Pandora through the lens of artificial intelligence.

After performances, there were parties hosted by a DJ in the grand lobby of the War Memorial Opera House as dancers from Rising Rhythm, a local company, danced under spotlights. “Mere Mortals” was more than a new ballet, it was a full-fledged event.

Soon after its premiere, in January, the company was given $60 million from an anonymous donor, a breathtaking amount for a ballet company at any time but especially now after the financial burdens of the pandemic — and especially in San Francisco where other prominent performing arts institutions are struggling. In March, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the star maestro of the San Francisco Symphony, announced that he would step down as music director next year, as the orchestra’s administration cuts costs.

“It’s concerning when you hear that great artists choose to leave,” Rojo said. “This is a very interesting city with amazing cultural institutions, and we all want to be part of successful, cultural landscapes. So I’m constantly in communication with many of my colleagues to see how we can learn from each other and how we can collaborate.”

Yet San Francisco Ballet — founded in 1933, it’s the oldest professional ballet company in the United States — is woven into the city’s heritage in a deep way. “People have invested in this company at whatever level, for decades and through generations,” Rojo said. “And they have this personal attachment and stories of how my grandmother brought me to my first ‘Nutcracker,’ and now I’m bringing my grandchildren.”

In San Francisco, she has a mission: “To make San Francisco Ballet like an arrow to the future,” she said. “A company that is at the forefront of what a ballet company ought to be, both a support of the standard of the performances in the traditional rep, and the diversity of artistic voices and the innovation.”

And now with the company’s groundbreaking $60 million gift, Rojo can really dream big. She has the kind of carte blanche other artistic directors only dream of. “It’s an amazing gift,” Rojo said. “The first $10 million is to help us through the first two seasons. But the other will come slowly into our endowment. So it would take a little bit of time for it to kind of create the kind of revenue that enables creation regularly.”

Of course, it will produce more ballets. “But I think more than the gift itself,” she said, “it’s been the reaction of the audience and the reaction of the company to new works that has made me think ahead differently.”

Rojo is responsive. It’s not her intention to educate audiences because that “assumes that I know better, and I don’t think I do,” she said. “I just want to give them the best. The best from every angle.”

When it comes to her dancers — that angle — the quality she prizes most is intelligence. Her mind is tremendously agile. A star ballerina herself, she trained and danced in Spain before making her way to the Scottish Ballet, the English National Ballet and the Royal Ballet.

In 2012, she took over as the artistic director of English National Ballet where she was credited with transforming the company artistically as well as financially. During her tenure the company and its school moved into a new building. She took chances on new productions, including Akram Khan’s “Giselle,” as well as her own version of “Raymonda,” set during the Crimean War, which will be included in San Francisco’s next season.

“I felt that somebody with new ideas for the company needed to take the next 10 years,” she said. “That I had done my bit, and that I didn’t then want to be the very thing I didn’t enjoy, which was a nostalgic repetition of myself.”

This cracked her up. “Do I repeat the successes, do I commission the same people?” she said. “Do I start again, or do I step back and let someone else look at it with fresh eyes?”

She voted for fresh eyes. Helgi Tomasson, San Francisco Ballet’s artistic director, was leaving after running the company for 37 years, and Rojo was asked to apply for his job. (This season was her first presiding over programming.) “It was that moment where I had decided that it was time for me to step away from ENB,” she said. “It felt like life was bringing me here.”

Rojo loves San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, Isaac Hernández, a principal dancer in the company, and their 3-year-old son. There is the food — “I just want to eat the best Chinese food outside of China” — but also the “forests that line to the water.”

In a brief amount of time, she has accomplished much. Her plan was to attract new audiences, which is something all artistic directors say. Rojo has actually done it. A large portion of that success can be traced to “Mere Mortals,” an evening-length exploration of the Prometheus and Pandora myths that she envisioned with the ballet’s artistic team, including choreographer Aszure Barton and British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points.

Rojo wants ballet to be relevant — to San Franciscans, but also to the issues of the day. “AI is a very loud conversation right now here and very conflicted,” she said. “I just felt, well, what about if we talk about it? What is it exactly that worries us?”

Rojo eats up podcasts. Shepherd and his girlfriend, a dancer, told her about one that she especially likes, “Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics,” which had an episode about Pandora. “In a way, AI is both Prometheus and Pandora,” Rojo said, “and I felt we could do a ballet about the moral consequences and the questions that we should be asking ourselves as a society ahead of creating this new technology in the same way that they ought to have asked those questions before the atomic bomb.”

In the ballet, which returned for encore performances in April, armies of dancers, wearing sculptural, futuristic costumes by Michelle Jank, descend on a dark, sometimes ominous stage glowing with visuals by Hamill Industries. Throughout, four figures — Hope, Prometheus, Pandora and Epimetheus — emerge as characters, loosely reframing the Pandora story in the context of our technological reality.

Essentially, Rojo, who has a little of ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev in her, brought together multiple departments to put on a show.

“The party — that was Tamara,” Shepherd said in a video interview. “I was like, you can’t have a party in here! I’m used to the clubs, warehouses and dingy raves. That’s my world. And Tamara’s like, ‘No, I think it’ll work.’ And it works!”

“Mere Mortals” brought the most new patrons of any mixed bill at San Francisco Ballet since 2008. But Rojo worked the same kind of magic with another program, “Dos Mujeres,” a double bill exploring Latino stories and featuring two female choreographers: Arielle Smith’s “Carmen,” set to music by Arturo O’Farrill; and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s ballet about Frida Kahlo.

To go with it, the company commissioned a piece by Oakland-based textile artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron, which was used to create a new curtain drop. Capron’s vivid pop of flower and faces — created with fabrics, thread and spray and acrylic paint — was more than a work of art. It was part of Rojo’s vision: To bring new voices, local ones, into the ballet space. (Each season will feature a new drape commissioned from a Bay Area artist.)

There was a post-show lobby experience for “Dos Mujeres,” too: a performance by the all-female Mariachi Bonitas de Dinorah. This, like “Mere Mortals,” attracted a different crowd: “Lots of people singing with mariachis and crying,” Rojo said. “It was very moving!”

Yes, it makes her proud. “Feeling that there is a room for your culture and for your art and for your artists and for your community at the highest level — I think it’s important.”

And there is also something to be said for the way she has infused the War Memorial Opera House lobby with actual warmth. It serves as a stark contrast to the societal realities a few blocks away, where homelessness and drug use are on full display. Rojo’s programming isn’t an escape from the real world — it’s out there — but entering the space is a reprise, an artistic haven.

That doesn’t mean that ballet can’t be challenging. “Mere Mortals,” she knows, is not “Swan Lake.” But “the response was so positive that I felt that I could take risks,” Rojo said. “This is an audience that not only is ready for something different, but is seeking something different. It’s hungry for something different.”

The topic of the future of dance is one that consumes her. “I’m trying to find the answer by finding these collaborators and by presenting work in different ways,” she said. “But I think we’re going through a very complex time in history. Politically complex. Culturally complex.”

Rojo tries to stay optimistic. These could be “potentially the best times, the most transformative times,” she said. “Especially for the arts. And that’s what I’m hoping: That we are in the middle of the tornado and we can’t see what’s about to come when we cross.”

Amid pandemics and wars, social media and AI, she said, “There’s so much noise.”

In the studio, Rojo tries to shut the noise out. And just as she encourages her dancers to do, she questions everything.

“I sit through a lot of performances,” she said. “So very often I’m sitting there going, ‘Should we still be doing this? Is this still relevant?’”

Part of what she’s trying to achieve at San Francisco Ballet is to make the experience as inviting as possible. “From the moment people enter the building, they need to understand that they are entering a different world,” she said. “And that it is open to them and is welcoming and is not reverential. And if anything, we are reverential toward them.”

But how the art form competes with popular culture — she brought up a show she had just been watching, “Black Mirror” — is something that keeps her up at night: “How do we continue to be relevant in the cultural landscape, to the people that we’re supposed to be serving?” Rojo said. “It’s much easier when you’re commissioning something to have that creativity. But when you’re trying to sustain and support the legacy” — of classical ballet — “for me, that’s where this distance becomes more apparent.”

Her perspective, she realized, is different from the ordinary ballet viewer. “Now I look at things through my 3-year-old son,” she said. “‘Nutcracker’ is the most magical thing you could ever wish for as a kid, and the beginning of ‘Swan Lake’ is terrifying. So I just look at it and then go, Oh, no, actually, this is fine. This can compete with ‘Paw Patrol.’

“But it is something that worries me,” she added, “and that I feel is also my duty to ask myself. That I don’t lose touch with the world.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.