If you had a chance to read our PRE-View for Ballet 5:8’s Compass (which you can read here), then you know that Artistic Director Julianna Slager and her company of incredibly expressive dancers have committed their season thus far to spreading compassion in every community they touch. This past Friday, Ballet 5:8 took the stage at the Athenaeum Theater in Chicago and delivered an evening of inspired choreography and thought-provoking performance. The program touched on a number of politically sensitive topics including race, abortion, and immigration, but when these charged topics are approached through Julianna’s choreographic lens of compassion, it is clear that the purpose of the program is not political at all. Its true purpose is to inspire empathy and kindness, and all artists involved in Compass deserve congratulations for successfully emoting and delivering this message with grace. DancerMusic’s Kristi Licera was in the audience for this one-night only performance, and invites you to join her as she RE-Views Ballet 5:8.

If you had a chance to read our PRE-View for Ballet 5:8’s Compass (which you can read here), then you know that Artistic Director Julianna Slager and her company of incredibly expressive dancers have committed their season thus far to spreading compassion in every community they touch. This past Friday, Ballet 5:8 took the stage at the Athenaeum Theater in Chicago and delivered an evening of inspired choreography and thought-provoking performance. The program touched on a number of politically sensitive topics including race, abortion, and immigration, but when these charged topics are approached through Julianna’s choreographic lens of compassion, it is clear that the purpose of the program is not political at all. Its true purpose is to inspire empathy and kindness, and all artists involved in Compass deserve congratulations for successfully emoting and delivering this message with grace. DancerMusic’s Kristi Licera was in the audience for this one-night only performance, and invites you to join her as she RE-Views Ballet 5:8.

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.

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.

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.

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.