There’s an art to just being a dance company, but it’s a complex one. There’s a choreography to all of the moving parts, a movement to all of the emerging challenges and a design to how they’re met. At Ballet 5:8, you can see this art a lot of ways, and one of them is the way the Company presents to the world what it is they have to share. This is usually called “marketing” or “promotion”, but when done well, it’s a real art, not that different from arts like choreography and music composition, where an artist shares a vision, or a feeling, or a perspective, or a hope. At a dance company, marketing at its best is the art of sharing what the company’s artists have to share, both telling people about a program like Compass (Ballet 5:8’s evening length work at Chicago’s Athenaeum Theatre on November 10th), and making it possible, through all the arts of content creation, for people like us at DancerMusic do so as well.

There’s an art to just being a dance company, but it’s a complex one. There’s a choreography to all of the moving parts, a movement to all of the emerging challenges and a design to how they’re met. At Ballet 5:8, you can see this art a lot of ways, and one of them is the way the Company presents to the world what it is they have to share. This is usually called “marketing” or “promotion”, but when done well, it’s a real art, not that different from arts like choreography and music composition, where an artist shares a vision, or a feeling, or a perspective, or a hope. At a dance company, marketing at its best is the art of sharing what the company’s artists have to share, both telling people about a program like Compass (Ballet 5:8’s evening length work at Chicago’s Athenaeum Theatre on November 10th), and making it possible, through all the arts of content creation, for people like us at DancerMusic do so as well.

Ballet 5:8 is an imaginative, hard-working group of artists with some very carefully thought out ideas. Founded by Julianna Rubio Slager and Amy Kozol Sanderson in 2012, they have steadily built Ballet 5:8 into an aesthetically ambitious gathering of dedicated dance artists. From just six dancers their first year, “performing wherever there was an opportunity” as their site tells the story, their season — still growing — now includes forty performances a year.

Ballet 5:8 is an imaginative, hard-working group of artists with some very carefully thought out ideas. Founded by Julianna Rubio Slager and Amy Kozol Sanderson in 2012, they have steadily built Ballet 5:8 into an aesthetically ambitious gathering of dedicated dance artists. From just six dancers their first year, “performing wherever there was an opportunity” as their site tells the story, their season — still growing — now includes forty performances a year.