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Gloria Tso

“If you’re not happy, you need to change that.”
I’m on the phone with award-winning dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Patricia Zhou, who candidly drops this bit of wisdom mid-conversation as only someone very assured of herself can. That wasn’t always the case.
“As a kid, I was always following [others],” she tells me. It wasn’t until she hit a personal low that she began to take agency over her creative practice, which now spans choreography projects for luxury clients like Belmond on top of performances on the West End and even Dancing with the Stars.
“My sister’s friends [told me], ‘Only you can make a change in your life.’ I never knew that because I was so used to suffering through pain,” Zhou says.

Zhou was only about 25 at the time of her self-described “identity crisis”. Despite her young age, she had already endured a lifetime’s worth of training at some of the world’s most elite ballet academies and companies. These regimented environments demanded long, arduous practice to achieve perfection, leaving movement – beautiful as it was – to often revolve around muscle memory rather than freedom of expression. “I wasn’t excited about performance any more,” the dancer, now 32, recalls.
Roughly seven years after that period of misalignment, Zhou cuts a strikingly different figure. Now a free-spirited woman with a red pixie haircut, she speaks to me with ease, completely settled in herself as she recounts how she first became a professional dancer.
“Basically the reason is because my mom didn’t want me to dance,” she says and laughs. “She sent me to really strict ballet lessons at the Beijing Dance Academy hoping the teacher would be so mean to me I would hate dancing and never dance again. But weirdly it had the complete opposite effect. I used to be really lazy: suddenly, I was disciplined.”

Born in Canada but raised in Michigan, Zhou has built a career that has taken her from Beijing to Washington – where she studied at the now-defunct Kirov Academy of Ballet – then to London’s Royal Ballet and the Berlin State Ballet. After five years in Berlin, she joined the smaller but still prestigious company LA Dance Project, co-founded by Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied. She has since moved back to London, where she’s starring in a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical Cats, before embarking on a larger UK and Ireland tour through 2027.
“Younger me would feel a lot more apprehensive about not necessarily knowing exactly what I’m doing,” says Zhou, who has returned to the rigorous schedule of a large-scale production – eight shows a week for nine months straight – after years away from performing at that scale. “Obviously I still have a little fear because I want to know exactly what I’m going to do. But the older I get, I feel like there’s years of experience that allow you to [say], ‘I’m just going to trust myself.’ Also, realising that perfection isn’t necessarily exciting.”

What is exciting, Zhou argues, is the spontaneity of taking chances on yourself without knowing what comes next. After eight years of working for established dance companies, the dancer was ready to break free from the relentless routine of demanding performances. “I felt like, this is my job – and while I did give it as much as I could, I just didn’t feel the adrenaline or my hair standing on end when I thought about being in front of an audience. I was like, something’s wrong with this,” she recalls.
Zhou decided to strike out on her own just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit and tried to make things right by leaning into her other interests. It was at the LA Dance Project that she was first exposed to “non-traditional performances” and the idea of dance films. “Most jobs where you’re dancing are so fully encompassing that your identity is so tied to being a dancer,” she continues. “When [you ask], ‘Is this what I want to do?’ it does feel difficult because you’re like, ‘This is who I am.’ Maybe because I’ve always had interests outside dancing, I didn’t feel as scared to step away from it.”

Zhou also credits a former teacher with exposing her to the many different art forms connected to ballet, laying the groundwork for the kind of multidisciplinary projects she would pursue next. “She’d give me all these CDs of Schubert and Rachmaninoff and Chopin, and encourage me to open up my knowledge of classical music and appreciation for art in general,” she says. “When some people start dancing, they’re like, ‘I need to be in the studio all day every day.’ But I’ve always been someone [who] can find inspiration anywhere.”
Cabin fever during Covid allowed Zhou to find herself in new and unexpected ways, from teaching dance classes over Zoom to experimenting with storytelling through contemporary choreography.
A major breakthrough came after she took part in an online workshop hosted by Jacob Jonas The Company in Los Angeles. “There was one young man who had just started dancing [as a beginner], but everything he was doing was so emotive,” she recalls. “It was quite simple but so compelling because it was so pure and honest ... We were doing this exercise where we were supposed to build a ‘phrase’ with three simple movements, and everything came together.” That moment gave Zhou the creative spark to make her first short film, Little Treasure (2020), as a tribute to her grandfather.

Most importantly, Zhou adds, that new-found creative freedom allowed her to reframe her relationship with ballet as something dynamic, not static or restrictive. “It’s similar to when Picasso drew that face in five minutes,” she explains. “Obviously he’s trained for so long to be able to do that and have his own style … The everyday rigour and discipline of doing a ballet class [where] everyone’s doing the same steps, it gives you a framework so that you can then be free.”
You’d never guess from her commanding stage presence, but growing up as someone “not super confident”, it took Zhou some time to step into the leadership role of choreographer. And while she isn’t the first to bridge the gap between classical ballet and contemporary dance, she seems well primed to follow greats like Misty Copeland in putting the traditional art form back on the map for modern audiences.
Zhou doesn’t even view leadership in a traditional way – something she attributes to having worked with many talented female choreographers over the years. “Nothing against their male counterparts,” she clarifies, “but a lot of them can be more sensitive to how people are feeling and create spaces where everyone feels welcome. I want to keep perpetuating that. Making spaces for artists to grow, in which they feel safe, is just really important … The goal of performance is being present and authentic.”


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The award-winning dancer, choreographer and filmmaker talks to Style about how she learned to embrace uncertainty and take ownership of her work


The award-winning dancer, choreographer and filmmaker talks to Style about how she learned to embrace uncertainty and take ownership of her work.


Dancer Patricia Zhou on finding creative freedom and joining the Cats cast

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The award-winning dancer, choreographer and filmmaker talks to Style about how she learned to embrace uncertainty and take ownership of her work

The award-winning dancer, choreographer and filmmaker talks to Style about how she learned to embrace uncertainty and take ownership of her work