Harvard Grad Nurtures Dance Career

Up-and-coming dancer and choreographer Ryuji Yamaguchi ’03 is making the plunge into an arts career.

Yamaguchi’s early foray into dancing grew out of a hallmark of Harvard students: an intense desire to improve. In high school, he was a dedicated athlete, and took up water polo, wrestling and pole-vaulting.

“[Since] I can only work out for x amount of time what could I do more?” Yamaguchi says he asked himself at the time. “And my coach said, ‘You should dance.’”

After piloting a successful dance program at Deerfield Academy, Yamaguchi sought bigger and better dance opportunities—not at the nation’s premier dance conservatory, but here at Harvard. Because dance at Harvard exists exclusively in the extracurricular domain, Yamaguchi says his dance experience has been fundamentally different from that of conservatory graduates.

“There are so many dancers and dance productions per semester, occurring just about every other week,” he says. “I think I danced a lot more than people who go to conservatories.”

And the quality of dancing at Harvard is no less either, according to Yamaguchi.

“I think there are just as experienced dancers here. Some of the kids here are even considering it as a profession,” he says.

But dance life at Harvard was not without its flaws. Despite recruiting over 40 male teammates and buddies to dance with him while he was at Deerfield Academy (“so that now dance is a big thing there,” Yamaguchi says), he laments the fact that “at Harvard, I had less access to guys [for dances] because I’m not an athlete.”

Post-Harvard life has found him playing catch-up to other dance conservatory graduates in other respects. Unlike dance conservatory graduates, Yamaguchi says, “I know very little about dance history. I know very little about the dance world.”

But fortunately this lack of knowledge has not left him permanently handicapped in his dancing pursuits. Instead, Yamaguchi has taken it upon himself to enrich his understanding of dance by working as an interpreter of interviews for book on Japanese choreography and by continuing to dance with the Harvard Contemporary Dance Ensemble, which performed last weekend at the Rieman Center.

Yamaguchi’s minimalist dance style has been labeled as East Asian, and he himself recognizes that there is a close connection between his Japanese heritage and the dance he creates. Because he had little dance training and “hardly any exposure to dance” before starting to choreograph, he wonders if the perceived Japanese influence in his dance originates from something innate.

“A lot of my inspiration comes from my awareness in society. I’ve been moved around a lot, back and forth between America and Japan. I really don’t have a sense of home in terms of one location, one set of people,” he says.

Thinking about how he relates to both American and Japanese culture and to society in general, he says, inspires him to create dances.

Yamaguchi also spent time dancing and choreographing in Japan after graduation. He says this type of travel has been both enriching and challenging for him as an artist. “Those kinds of things make me struggle because I’m in a different environment for performing and dancing. And that makes me think a lot,” he says.

With his recent move to New York, Yamaguchi says he hopes to further broaden his experiences and learn more from his new surroundings. “I’m about to encounter an even bigger community, which will definitely make a big impact on me,” he says. “I only started dancing seven years ago, so like any young artist, I’m still growing.”

But Yamaguchi still has an impressive background to support his budding career.

“I think all my athletic background, all my street performance or academic background, or anything else I did is all sort of fused into dance,” he says. “I feel I can use all my background to create something.”