“A dancer is a shapeshifter with undefined lines,” says Yonen Takano in a short video made about him by Hong Kong Ballet and released this summer. “We transform into symbols within the culture and context we exist in, absorbing the beauty of each culture along the way and finally sharing them with an audience.”
A video produced by Hong Kong Ballet’s Creative Media Studio is worth watching. In just three and a half minutes, Takano highlights his interest in traditional Japanese performance arts, some of the ideas that guide him and the kind of things that dance lets him explore.
He first discovered ballet at the age of seven when he watched a television performance of Japanese dance superstar Tetsuya Kumakawa. Amazed at what he saw, he started classes, first in Yokohama then at the Tokyo Ballet School.
A decade later, aged 17, victory in a dance competition won him a short-term scholarship to St. Petersburg’s Vaganova Ballet Academy. He stayed on at the school, and after graduating top of his class in 2011, was recruited to the city’s Mikhailovsky Theatre ballet company, then headed by former Spanish dancer Nacho Duato. His next move followed at 23, when former prima ballerina Nina Ananiashvili persuaded him to leave St. Petersburg for Tbilisi and a six-year spell at Georgia’s State Ballet, first as soloist, then as principal dancer – ballet’s highest rank.
Covid ended that period of his life. As theatres closed across Georgia, he returned to Japan. “With people blaming Asians for the disease, I no longer felt safe,” he says. Back home, he spent time with his family and wondering about his future. Though he hadn’t decided his next step, he decided to call Ananiashvili and tell her he wouldn’t be returning to Georgia. She surprised him with a counteroffer, telling him she was moving to Siberia to become head of ballet at the prestigious Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. Would he like to join her as a dancer and choreographer?
Takano said yes. Despite its remote location “very far from anywhere,” Novosibirsk is Russia’s third city. Its theatre, built and opened during World War II, is the country’s biggest. And unlike almost everywhere else in the world, public performances were still continuing.
At which point, politics intervened. Takano was waiting for his visa when Ananiashvili called again. The deal was off, sunk by tense relations between Russia and Georgia dating back to a war they had fought in 2008 and the fact that Ananiashvili’s husband was a former Georgian foreign minister and presidential candidate.
Instead of moving back to Russia, Takano for the first time in his adult life spent an extended period of time in Japan. He attended seminars and workshops with Noh theatre performers, watched Japanese traditional dance and together with some friends organised a series of workshops on ballet and its history. 
“We talked, did some research, discussed different topics. I read a lot, and I did some training. But if you’re not able to perform, it’s hard to be motivated,” he says. “Should I keep dancing or should I quit and start some new career?” he asked himself. His answer came when a friend suggested he talk to Hong Kong Ballet, which thanks to Hong Kong’s strict quarantine arrangements was still putting on shows. “I knew the company was doing some very unique stuff, such as its [Hong Kong-set] Romeo and Juliet and some video campaigns that looked really fun,” he says. “Its repertoire looked progressive but entertaining.”
His one concern was the nature of his experience. “Before Covid, I wouldn’t have thought I would fit in such a ballet company,” he says. “All I had ever done was classical stuff.” But that was also a spur. “The risk if you’ve been dancing for a long time is you accept being average – you get satisfied with the level of your performance,” says Takano. “As a performer, though, I need to break that. I have to be fresh and all the time present something new.”
Following a Zoom interview and a remote audition, Takano was offered a post, but with it a big demotion, dropping down the ballet hierarchy to coryphée, just one rank up from the corps de ballet. Takano arrived in Hong Kong confident his experience would stand him in good stead. “I think I was a little bit arrogant. I was thinking I’ll be fine, I’ve been dancing as a professional for 10 years, I’ve worked with many different choreographers.”
“My first performance, Alice in Wonderland, was very new to me,” he says. Long-established habits of movement had to be unlearned. “Where in classical ballet you would have just five steps, here there were ten. And Septime’s ballet language would betray my predictions,” he says, referring to Hong Kong Ballet director Septime Webre. “Based on my experience, to do this step, I would shift my weight this way. But to make the shapes Septime wanted called for the total opposite.” 
He also put various of the ideas he had studied in Japan to work: “Not in the moment in the studio or taking a class, but in a broader way,” he says. “When I was 20 and had just graduated, I was thinking I want to jump higher and turn more. You’re light. You have speed. And you look nice because you’re young. But that’s not true beauty – that kind of beauty comes with experience and age. If you want to find it, you need to train yourself to find something else and present something you haven’t presented before.”
For Takano, one of those somethings came from ideas acquired from studying Noh theatre’s greatest figure, 14th century performer and playwright Zeami, and the concept of yūgen – the idea that beneath the outward expression of phenomena such as beauty lie deeper, more subtle and more mysterious currents of meaning.
He recalls watching a 70-year-old performer play a young woman. “I was amazed. Sometimes those male kabuki actors create a gesture that catches the essence of what society sees as female movement,” he says. Being cast as Carabosse, the evil fairy in a reworked The Sleeping Beauty, gave him the opportunity to try something similar. “Performing cross-gender in classical ballet gave me the chance to use things I had learned from Japanese performance.”
Takano has many interests in and beyond dance. For 10 years, he has written a monthly column, “Dancer’s Eye,” for Japanese culture magazine Miraku. Recent topics have ranged from balletcore — the wearing of classical ballet-themed clothing as fashion — and Chinese mountains to Lamma Island and how Hong Kong Ballet’s recent production of Swan Lake addressed ballet’s male-gaze problem.
Takano’s period as a coryphée was brief. A year after his arrival at Hong Kong Ballet he was promoted to soloist. Two years after that, he was promoted back to principal dancer. His thoughts are also turning to what he might do in the future. “One idea is to make ballet more normal,” he says. “In Russia I received a very extreme education in an extreme environment.” While he’s proud of what that led to for him, he’s less certain about the methods used. “I’ve seen a lot of unnecessary disappointment, body shaming and all the other processes people believe you have to go through to become a great dancer.”
To do something about this, he’s planning to set up a ballet school. “Not in Japan or China,” he says. In both countries, he would have to spend too much energy battling the protectors of tradition. Instead, he’s thinking of “somewhere where there’s no history of ballet,” probably in Southeast Asia, though he hasn’t picked a country yet.
He’s already preparing for the practical side of things by spending part of his spare time studying for a business degree from the UK’s Open University. But he’s aware that the biggest challenges will likely be more mental than financial. “Sometimes I think it’s too big an ambition to change ballet itself,” he says. “But then I think there are so many things I can do with young dancers – being more careful, making them safe, having more contemporary values.”
Of course, at 32, and with his career as a performer far from over, this next shift won’t happen for a while. Instead, audiences in Hong Kong can enjoy watching Takano’s performances, shaped by his thinking, continue to evolve. “Hong Kong Ballet has changed my values and my mind,” he says. “I really admire what it does, and as a dancer, I think I now have a good position to achieve more here.”
Hong Kong Ballet is performing The Wizard of Oz from August 30 to September 1, 2024. Click here for more information. Yonen Takano will be performing Scarecrow (30 August, 7.30pm and 1 September 2.30pm performances) and the Wizard of Oz (31 August, 2.30 performance).