Rikako Shibamoto - The Royal Danish Ballet

Rikako Shibamoto is a dancer at the prestigious Royal Danish Ballet. - I originally come from a very small city in Japan, Fukuoka in the south. Today I live in the fast developing district Refhaleøen and I completely and utterly love Copenhagen. The life quality is high and the atmosphere is very cooperative. It still overwhelms me from time to time, when I walk or bike the city streets here.

Aesthetics is naturally very important for my job, we seek for perfection. Often through techniques which we dedicate ourselves to through a lifetime of education, but what makes it interesting is communicating the character behind it. For example, in the Swan Lake, every swan has to be perfectly mirrored and doing the exact same step. But the story has a great weight to it, and I believe every swan has to be living individual characters in order to bring magic on to stage.

The Royal Danish Ballet and its ballet tradition is huge, and the company is one of the oldest and most legendary houses. So, I really wanted to come dance for them. Today we cherish the traditional ways, study it, learn it, but ballet is also developing and challenging itself to be more than perfection and academics. We take a more modern approach and use various languages within the artform to expand the horizon for dancing

I always get excited when I see an analog camera. I was really never big fan of taking pictures with a smart phone. To me, the real camera with a film inside, where you have to wait for the result to be developed is what I find interesting. How to capture the atmosphere, capture the light. My mom would say that you could capture air.