Riho Sakamoto

“It was the ideal time to take the step.” After dancing for one season with Staatsballett Berlin, Riho Sakamoto returned to Amsterdam in August 2025. She’s glad to be back, as Dutch National Ballet is really her ‘home’. But, she says, “I was 16 and had just left school when I started with the Junior Company in 2014. So I thought it would be good to step out of my happy bubble after ten years and work with other people.”

In Berlin – besides dancing various classics and works by William Forsythe – she was introduced to dance styles that were new to her, in works by Ohad Naharin, Sol León, Edward Clug and artistic director Christian Spuck, among others. And she was cast – unexpectedly in view of her young age – for the role of the prince’s mother, in Patrice Bart’s Schwanensee. But the Berlin production schedule turned out to be even more of a challenge for her than the new repertoire. “They don’t have block programming like here. You dance all your roles one after another, all jumbled up. That has advantages, as you return to a role more often and can grow further in it. But there are disadvantages too. In the run-up to the premiere of Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16, for example, we only had Gaga classes (a training method developed by Naharin) and no ballet classes, whereas I was due to dance my first Giselle in Berlin two days later. Oh my God, that was so hard! But it taught me to listen even better to my body and to prioritise what I need as a dancer.”

Incidentally, it’s no coincidence that she chose Staatsballett Berlin for her gap year. Former Dutch National Ballet dancer Martin Kortenaar, to whom Riho got engaged in February 2025, is a principal dancer there. After being together for a year, she says there’s one benefit to having a long-distance relationship again: “We write each other old-fashioned love letters, with stamps and all.”

Tomboy

As a young child, Riho was an unstoppable whirlwind, who was happiest running around outdoors all day. She had so much energy that her mother and grandmother went in search of a way for her to let off steam. And as her grandmother also thought it was important to have a nice, straight posture – “I had rather droopy shoulders” – Riho ended up at the ballet school in her hometown Nara, in Japan. In the beginning, the classes were more stressful than anything. “For a tomboy like me, the strict ballet discipline took some getting used to.” But gradually, Riho’s enjoyment of moving to music grew and grew. Dancing and creating beauty with your body turned out to be her refuge from a home situation that was not so nice and stable. So when her ballet teacher told her one day that in order to become a professional dancer she should really go abroad, the idea appealed. She got a scholarship for a summer course at the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington DC and when the school invited her to stay on, her mother took the plunge, and Riho moved to the US at the age of ten – alone. “I was confused and had no idea what to expect. I didn’t speak a word of English and wasn’t even familiar with the Latin alphabet. Yet I never regretted it for a moment. I soon settled in and made friends, and the teachers – who were mostly Russian – were tough but kind.”