Crooked crosses poked out of the ground and moonlit, diaphanous mist swirled across the forest floor. A ghostly figure appeared above a tree, terrifying the man standing below.
It was a proper horror movie-thrill moment in the National Ballet of Japan’s “Giselle,” a wonderfully atmospheric production that opened at the Royal Opera House in London on Thursday to an audience that seemed delighted by the superb dancing of a company rarely seen outside Japan.
The five-show run here (through Sunday) is a European debut for the National Ballet of Japan, and a homecoming for its director, Miyako Yoshida, who spent nearly three decades in England as a principal dancer with both the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet.
In an interview, Yoshida said bringing the company to London was like saying thank you “to the amazing directors who taught me to dance, to act, how to express my feelings onstage.”
“Giselle,” she added, “the role where I first learned all this, is the history of my ballet life in England.”
The stakes are high for Yoshida, who has directed the National Ballet since 2020. (Founded in 1997, the company is based at the New National Theater in Tokyo.) “This is our first real tour as a company,” she said, “in front of a sophisticated international audience, and the people who knew me as a dancer.” She paused. “Scary!”
Yoshida, who was the Royal Ballet’s first Japanese principal dancer, retired from the company in 2010 and then pursued a freelance career in Japan. That experience, she said, revealed the poor working conditions that still remain for most Japanese ballet dancers. Usually paid by the performance, they have to buy their own shoes and rent studio space to rehearse. They have no job security, health insurance, physiotherapy or rehabilitation facilities.
“I was shocked when I went back,” she said. “I started working in England at 17, and everything I knew was from here. I thought, ‘Maybe I can bring this knowledge back.’”
Yoshida hadn’t aspired to direct a company. But she was impelled by what Kevin O’Hare, the director of the Royal Ballet and her frequent onstage partner, called “a strong sense of duty.” He said she knew she could make a difference. “She could change the mind-set of how you look after a ballet company and its dancers,” he said.
Ballet came to Japan late, in the early 20th century, but it has a devoted following, even if, Yoshida said, the general public doesn’t know much about it. Nonetheless, there are 11 companies in Tokyo alone, and a culture of fandom that makes some dancers the objects of adulation and adoration. Until recently, audiences have mostly revered dancers from foreign companies that tour regularly to Japan, including the Royal Ballet and Paris Opera Ballet, and stars like Yoshida and Tetsuya Kumakawa (another former Royal Ballet principal), who return home from successful careers abroad.
“There is a big audience for ballet here, but it is still seen as a kind of hobby,” said Sayako Abe, the editor of the online Shinshokan Ballet Channel, who had traveled to London to document the National Ballet’s debut there. “That’s why the more talented dancers often leave to dance abroad.” (The Royal Ballet currently has 11 Japanese dancers, three of them principals.) But, Abe added, Yoshida’s reforms have begun to effect real change.
Yoshida said her first mission had been to increase the low basic salary. The company’s 73 dancers were almost entirely reliant on fees paid for each performance, and so would dance through injury and illness. She has also increased the number of annual performances to 76 next season from around 40; and provided pointe shoes, connections to doctors and a gym, “although it’s nothing like the facilities here,” she said.
Kasumi Okuda, a first soloist with the company, said that when she was a student and early in her professional career she worked as a waitress and gave ballet lessons. “I loved ballet, I wanted to dance,” she said, “but I never thought there was a real job at the end of it and you could make a living.”
Although Yoshida said she was still some way off from offering the dancers the working conditions she enjoyed at the Royal Ballet, her production of “Giselle” showed the company as fully the equal, technically and artistically, of major international troupes.
With some additional ensemble choreography by Alastair Marriott, Yoshida has retained most of the 1884 Marius Petipa version (itself based on the 1841 original by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot). Set to music by Adolphe Adam, the ballet taps into the Romantic Movement’s fascination with the gothic and the supernatural, telling the story of an innocent peasant girl betrayed by her aristocratic lover and transformed into a Wili, one of the vengeful spirits of young women jilted by their lovers.
Throughout the first act, Yoshida’s Royal Ballet influences were clear in the dancers’s demure, flowing lines and spirited acting, mobile upper bodies, melodic phrasing and clear, nuanced mime.
Yui Yonezawa was a touchingly trusting Giselle with a spark of fun. She was superbly assured in delicate hops on pointe and joyous leaps, ignoring her mother’s dire warnings of overdoing things (Giselle has a weak heart) with true teenager insouciance, and descending into madness with frightening rapidity. Shun Izawa offered a smoothly charming if less nuanced Albrecht, a seducer who finds himself in love. Masahiro Nakaya was a gripping, intelligent Hilarion, a rival for Giselle’s love; and Risako Ikeda and Shunsuke Mizui gave accomplished, assured performances in the peasant pas de deux that entertains the aristocratic visitors.
But it was in the second act, with its phalanxes of ghostly, drifting Wilis (bravo to the lighting designer Rick Fisher), that the company showed a distinguishing near-uncanny synchronicity of line and ethereal lightness that gave an unusually eerie dimension to the story. As Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis, Akari Yoshida’s long arms, floating jump and sideways, skimming bourrées — tiny, rapid steps on pointe — were gorgeous; and Yuzuki Hanagata and Honoka Kinjo were no less impressive as her implacable chief Wilis.
Yonezawa’s gentle, fragile Wili, whose love for Albrecht saves him from being danced to death by her sister Wilis, had an exquisite purity, gossamer light as Izawa lifted her overhead, every step an emanation of a being we could almost see evaporating.
“I almost cried,” said the Japanese ambassador, Hiroshi Suzuki, at a reception after the performance. “For this company to come to the Royal Opera House, a stage of dreams, and give this performance of dreams; it is wonderful.”
It was.
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