“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.Patricia Zhou in her role as choreographer, at Belmond’s Villa San Michele, in Florence. Photo: HandoutZhou 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.”Patricia Zhou in a rehearsal for Cats. Photo: Mark SeniorBorn 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.”