Yoshida Coming Home

Author Scillystuff Licence CC BY 3.0 Source Wikimedia Commons

 

Miyako Yoshida trained at the Royal Ballet School and spent most of her career dancing in the United Kingdom first with Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet and later the Royal Ballet.  She rose quickly to principal and has won all sorts of awards, including the Order of the British Empire.  She is now Artistic Director of the National Ballet of Japan, which she will bring to London between 24 and 27 July 2025.

The company will perform Giselle at Covent Garden.  It will be Yorshida's own production with designs by Dick Bird and lighting by Rick Fisher. Judging by the YouTube video of Yoshida's rehearsal, audiences are in for a treat.  The National Ballet is located in the recently opened New National Theatre in Tokyo, which it shares with the National Opera and National Theatre of Japan.  There are 75 dancers in the company which enables them to perform everything from The Nutcracker to Kaori Ito's Robot, l'amour éternel.

The company has its own ballet school which offers a two-year full-time course to prepare students for a professional career.  The school also offers a two-year preparatory course for younger students.  Details of the curriculum and profiles of some of the students appear on the ballet school webpage.

The National Ballet is not the only company in Japan; The Tokyo Ballet and the K-Ballet are also prominent companies.  According to Wikipedia, ballet was introduced into Japan by the Italian ballet master Giovanni Vittorio Rossi in 1912.  Rossi trained several Japanese pupils, some of whom entertained troops and factory workers during the Sino-Japanese War, much in the way that Vic-Wells, Rambert and other companies did here (see Yukiyo Hoshino Use of Dance to Spread Propaganda during the Sino-Japanese War Athens Joujrnal of History Vol 1 Issue 3 pp 191 - 198).