WA Ballet principal artist Chihiro Nomura delights at decade in Maylands-based company

A ballerina’s career can take her on the most unexpected of journeys; just ask WA Ballet principal dancer Chihiro Nomura. The Tokyo born-and-raised dancer never imagined venturing overseas during her formative years of ballet school training, and yet will mark the significant milestone later this year of a decade at the Maylands-based State company. “I wasn’t really ever aiming or dreaming to go overseas,” reflects Nomura, whose mother enrolled her in ballet lessons at age five when she wouldn’t stop dancing around their home. “I didn’t speak English well but one of my friends, who was a year younger than me, went to England to study and it made me realise there was an opportunity to learn ballet, not just in Japan. Then when I was 15, I got a scholarship (to the Heinz-Bosl-Stiftung ballet academy in Munich). “My mum really wanted me to go there. . . learning ballet in Japan is very expensive. It meant my parents didn’t need to worry about pointe shoes or ballet clothes or paying for hotels every time I danced in a competition.” Nomura began learning German but could only string a few key words together, unable to keep up with the fast pace of German conversation by the time she moved to Munich. It turned out her anxiety was unwarranted; ballet classes were taught in French and English with a large contingent of Japanese and Australian students. “That didn’t really help to improve my German, but it meant I was able to communicate with others and didn’t feel too lonely,” she says. Moving to Europe also meant Nomura was able to focus on ballet as a viable future career, with fulltime opportunities scarce in her homeland. While ballet is a popular hobby for younger children — where Japanese parents place them in lessons as a way to move the body and to learn structure and discipline — Nomura says it is an artform that lacks funding, unless your company is The National Ballet of Japan. “I guess that’s the hardest part of being a dancer in Japan,” she explains. “So many Japanese dancers move because they don’t want to be dancing as a hobby all the way until retirement. You never get paid well, so have to work a second job, and it’s hard to juggle both. It’s a bit different compared to here.” Nomura joined Norwegian National Ballet in 2008, where she met fellow Japanese dancer Gakuro Matsui, who had already begun to establish his career at the company. They remained friends until a romantic spark ignited in 2012; the couple is now engaged. Having started at the Norwegian company at such a young age meant Nomura eventually began to feel pigeonholed, unable to break free from her youthful persona when it came to casting considerations. “I was getting a bit older and felt like I needed to change that,” she says. “I wasn’t really planning to come to Australia at all and was thinking maybe a different company somewhere in Europe. I sent out a few CVs, didn’t get any answers and then got a very quick email reply from WA Ballet. “The company looked good and they were doing really great repertoire, so we decided to come all the way to Perth to audition. It was more Gakuro following me.” Nomura started at WA Ballet first at the end of 2015, with Matsui following soon after in 2016, a move that paid off with both elevated to the position of principal that same year. She has since captured audience hearts by sinking her teeth into a variety of roles, enjoying the challenge of character dancing as Lucy in Dracula, Daisy in The Great Gatsby and title roles in Romeo and Juliet and ALICE (in wonderland), the latter for which she won a 2020 Performing Arts WA Award. “It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here for almost 10 years, it’s actually gone really quick,” the 34-year-old shares. “Sometimes I still feel like a newcomer, but at the same time I feel, not so much grounded, but that I am in a good place to be. . . I don’t need to stress about the long-term future, or my ballet life future. It’s getting shorter and shorter, so I have to kind of enjoy the moment. “I am already a principal dancer and have experienced lots of great opportunities. I don’t need to be too hungry; I just need to be myself. It’s different compared to how I was 10 years ago. There were so many roles that I wanted to do. I’ve now danced most of the big roles, almost everything that I could ask for.” An aspect Nomura did not request was the extended physical separation she endured when Matsui decided to return to Norwegian National Ballet at the end of 2019, lured by the stability of a permanent contract at the Oslo-based company for the couple’s financial future. Their plan for a temporary long-distance relationship, travelling to see each other every six months, was thwarted with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, each stuck on either side of the world. There were finally reunited when they both could travel home to Japan in July 2022, the love story continuing when WA Ballet’s then-artistic director Aurelien Scannella played cupid to secretly secure Matsui as a guest artist for the company’s end-of-2022 season of Swan Lake. Matsui surprised his fiancee by walking into WA Ballet’s rehearsal room, the emotion-fuelled moment captured on video. He re-joined the Perth company in 2023, and while Nomura muses she would never want to get in the way of someone having the life or career they were meant to, she whole-heartedly welcomed the return. Currently recovering from a sprained ankle injury has seen Nomura take a step back from this month’s Genesis choreographic season at WA Ballet Centre, hoping to return for Don Quixote at His Majesty’s Theatre in May. It also meant she had a little more spare time to take part in a special fashion shoot for STM, in collaboration with Karrinyup Shopping Centre. “I used to like wearing lots of colours, especially when I was in Norway,” Nomura says of her own fashion style, away from the stunning costumes of the ballet stage. “I think it was dark there and I wanted to wear bright colour. Maybe it was also my age, I was younger and would never choose grey or navy then like I do all the time now. “It was very overwhelming when I moved to Australia because everyone would compliment my shoes or makeup, or even my eyebrows. I’d never had that experience before. I didn’t know how to react because it felt so strange.”