Over the past week I've had two opportunities to see Ballet 5:8 perform Reckless, Julianna Rubio Slager’s newest full length work for Ballet 5:8. Last Saturday, I was privy to an up-close preview of the work at Ballet 5:8 studios; this Saturday, I saw it in its fullest form at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago…

Walking toward the Studebaker Theater for Ballet 5:8’s premiere of Reckless, you couldn’t escape the gravity of this moment. The marquis of the Auditorium Theatre reads the sad statement of our times, #OneYearDark. One year of careers on pause, one year stepping back from performance art to focus on survival. But on this day, as the first signs of spring peer out through the dirt, you could also experience the first signs of the return of the arts.

“And since the dancers of Ballet 5:8 also hadn’t seen a stage since March, it’s safe to say everyone in that park was feeling happiness. Maybe a little relief. Where there should have been fatigue, there was only joy.”

On the surface, Ballet 5:8 looks like just another dance company. But the creative impulse of artistic director and chief choreographer Julianna Rubio Slager is driven by her Christian faith and a desire to share the gospel through ballet.

60-second Review

Ballet 5:8 premiere of “The Space in Between”, with “Four Seasons of the Soul”, Oct. 6, at Richard and Helen Devos Center for Arts & Worship, Grand Rapids, Mi.

The return of the Chicago-based Ballet 5:8 to Grand Rapids Christian High School’s DeVos Center for the Arts and Worship not only reinforced the modern ballet troupe’s technical prowess but also artistic director/choreographer Julianna Rubio Slager and dancer/costumer designer Lorianne Barclay’s bold ability to create emotional stage production’s that also carry moral and religious meaning.

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.

60-second Review

This weekend’s visit of the Chicago-based Ballet 5:8 dance company, and its original modern ballet/dance program “Compass”, choreographed by Julianna Rubio Slager, offered a welcome addition to what is a quality if not-so-plentiful spectrum of modern dance opportunities in the Grand Rapids area.

Chicago's Ballet 5:8 performed in Denver last season for the first time, and will enchant audiences here again this month with The Stor(ies) of You and Me.

Showcasing five pieces choreographed by Ballet 5:8 Artistic Director Julianna Slager and former Houston Ballet dancer Caleb Mitchell, the performance will explore various perspectives on love. Of the twelve dancers in the company, two hail from Colorado and will perform in the piece on Saturday, March 25, at Cleo Parker Robinson Theatre.

Westword recently caught up with Slager to talk about her work and creative process.