Raising the woof

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This article was published 16/02/2016 (3820 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He’s played princes and paupers, white rabbits and wolves. He’s also sprouted wings as a bluebird and soared through the air as quintessential man-child Peter Pan.

Starting Wednesday, Royal Winnipeg Ballet first soloist Yosuke Mino morphs into a furry canine in Val Caniparoli’s A Cinderella Story, reprising a role he performed during the company’s last staging of the ballet in 2010.

“Dog is one of my favourite animal roles,” says the ballet chameleon, who shares the role with Philippe Larouche during the five-show run. “I also love dancing to jazz music and Val’s choreography is unique.

“Dog is really cool and suave — or at least thinks he is,” he adds with a laugh.

Set in 1957 and based on a libretto by Sheryl Flatow, the stylized ballet performed en pointe tells of bespectacled Nancy (Sophia Lee and Yayoi Ban) who dreams of finding her prince charming — in this case, hunky ballroom dancer Bob (Josh Reynolds and Dmitri Dovgoselets) — while glued to her newfangled television with her faithful pet by her side.

The 131-minute production also features Winnipeg jazz king Ron Paley’s swinging live arrangements of Richard Rodgers tunes, as well as Alexander Nichols’ lighting design and vintage couture costumes by Sandra Woodall.

The latter’s real-life black standard poodle inspired the ballet’s only non-human character — as did a raft of Walt Disney films in which protagonists often confess their deepest, darkest secrets to attentive animal companions.

“Sandra’s poodle was a very strange dog, but also very funny,” the San Francisco-based Caniparoli recalls during a phone interview. “I also modelled Dog after Darren Anderson (a former RWB dancer now based in San Francisco), because he’s such a goofball and brought so much personality to the role.”

Caniparoli quickly adds he’s fully confident in Mino’s abilities to follow in Anderson’s larger-than-life paws.

“I first noticed Yosuke as the Goblin in (YTV’s children’s series) The Toy Castle and saw right away how good he is, technically. He’s so versatile and just so personable. He has nothing to worry about.”

That includes one of the ballet’s most difficult sections, a non-stop, fur-raising solo where Dog is eventually chased offstage after leaping to Nancy’s defence against her evil stepmother (Sarah Davey and Jo-Ann Sundermeier).

“That’s one of the hardest solos in the entire ballet. Stamina is an issue as well — if you do it right,” says the acclaimed choreographer, who also created two classical-based works for former RWB prima ballerina Evelyn Hart in 2002 and 2003. “And just keeping in character, and making sure you don’t lapse into, ‘I’m not a dog, I’m a ballet dancer’ is another real challenge.”

Born in Kanazawa, Japan, Mino moved to Canada in 1998 to train at the RWB School Professional Division after seeing an ad for its summer session in a Japanese dance magazine. He graduated in 1999 and became a company apprentice in 2002.

The dancer also spent a season with the Boston Ballet before returning to the prairie troupe, where he was promoted to his current rank of first soloist in 2006.

Lauded by the Ottawa Citizen in 2009 for his “beautiful turns, light, laser-cut footwork and an irrepressible, bounding sense of fun,” the gifted dancer is equally home with both classical and contemporary repertoire.

He’s played the Jester in Swan Lake, Bluebird in The Sleeping Beauty, as well as his personal favourites: Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet; Charlie in Going Home Star – Truth and Reconciliation; and the high-flying title role in Peter Pan. But he’s also known for his strongly athletic performances in such works as George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante, Mauricio Wainrot’s Carmina Burana, Toer van Schayk’s Seventh Symphony and Itzik Galili’s heart-pounding Hikarizatto.

Lately, when he’s not portraying animals, Mino has also been nurturing a burgeoning choreographic career, with a unique movement vocabulary ranging from percussive syncopated gesture to melting lyricism.

His first choreographed work, KOJI, garnered second prize at Stuttgart’s International Solo Tanz Theater Festival in 2011 — which he modestly attributes to beginner’s luck. Another solo, Kevät, premièred with Peter Quanz’ Q Dance company — of which Mino is a founding member — in February 2013. Quanz, a former RWB School classmate of Mino, praises Mino’s creative gifts.

“Yosuke is an artist of the purest sense, whose choreography ripples with minute explosions of energy, shifts of focus and a play of detail that is immediately engaging,” he writes in an email. “Instinctively, he offers a direct window into his joyous love of movement by suggesting textured images without pretense.”

The RWB also featured Mino’s pas de deux Revelry/Rivalry on its Pure Ballet mixed bill in 2012; his ensemble work Sȯ was included with the RWB School’s 2014 On the Edge production.

Mino is hoping to take his latest creation, a new duet set to Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis for RWB company apprentices Saeka Shirai and Yue Shi, to the Varna International Ballet Competition in Bulgaria, which is regarded the Olympics of ballet, in July.

Every dancer fears the day he or she will no longer be able to perform. Mino, 35, believes that day is still far in the future.

“To be honest, my body feels even better than it did five or six years ago,” he says. “It takes a little longer to recover but you learn how to do that more efficiently as you get older. I hope to perform at least a few more years.

“I feel that you learn a lot when you do different kinds of roles — it expands your vocabulary as an artist and helps you add more depth to your performances,” he says. “It’s discovering something new that keeps me going.”

holly.harris@shaw.ca