Concetta Chiaramida

I often see Yuzuru Hanyu’s performance style described in terms of softness and grace. That is not wrong. This aesthetic, often read as feminine, is indeed one he has spent more than a decade developing and deepening. But it is not, by itself, an adequate account of his style. Unlike many other skaters who are also gifted performers, Yuzu does not allow a single, stable performance persona to govern every program. Most of the time, especially in his most important competitive works, he subordinates the performance persona to the work as a whole. What remains constant across these works is not a particular expressive manner, but the way he organizes movement. His programs are packed with choreography of extraordinary density, precision, and complexity, yet they feel utterly effortless. Technical elements do not alternate with performance; each grows out of what precedes it and flows into what follows, and together they become the performance itself. So much is happening, yet one never feels how much. Yuzu’s most fundamental artistic quality is his ability to absorb immense choreographic complexity into a single, unbroken movement, leaving no trace of its construction. When Yuzu won Olympic gold in 2018, he said, “Art is built on technique.” He was right. But I believe that the technical mastery and artistic consciousness he has since developed have taken him beyond that statement. The terms can now be rearranged: art is no longer built upon technique; the entire physical logic of technique in operation directly becomes art. This ability also gives him an extraordinarily rare degree of authorial distance, perhaps unmatched by any other skater. It is a form of dual consciousness: he enters the work fully as a performer while simultaneously observing the performing self from an authorial position and retaining command of the work as a whole.