Why We Still Need New Ballets

Many of the world’s most beloved ballets were created more than a century ago.

Swan Lake.
The Nutcracker.
Giselle.
Sleeping Beauty.

These works remain essential to ballet’s history. They carry technique, tradition, music, and theatrical imagination that continue to shape dancers and audiences today.

But ballet cannot remain relevant by only repeating the past.

If ballet is a living art form, then it must keep asking new questions. It must keep making room for new stories, new voices, new cultural conversations, and new ways of seeing the human experience.

At Ballet 5:8, we believe ballet is not simply a museum for preserving great works. It is a living, breathing language, one capable of wrestling with the questions, tensions, griefs, hopes, and complexities of our own time.

That is why original work remains central to who we are.

New Stories for New Generations

Today’s audiences bring different experiences into the theater than audiences did 100 years ago.

They are asking questions about identity, family, faith, culture, justice, grief, resilience, womanhood, belonging, and what it means to live with courage in a fractured world.

Original ballet gives artists a way to enter those questions through movement.

It allows the stage to become a place where the body speaks before language can. A place where beauty does not avoid difficulty, but helps us look at it more honestly. A place where story, music, design, and physical expression can hold complexity without reducing it.

In Ballet 5:8’s 26/27 Season, Artistic Director Julianna Rubio Slager continues this commitment to new ballet through three new works: Shrewd, Chingonas, and Women Who Carry Water.

Each title invites us into a different facet of strength.

Shrewd asks us to reconsider a word often used to diminish women who are perceptive, strategic, discerning, or unwilling to be easily controlled. What happens when shrewdness is not treated as suspicion, but as wisdom? What happens when a woman’s clarity is recognized not as a threat, but as a form of survival?

Chingonas brings forward a bold and culturally charged expression of feminine power. The word carries grit, confidence, defiance, and command. In the context of ballet, it opens a conversation about whose strength has historically been seen, whose has been misunderstood, and whose has been left outside the frame of classical tradition.

Women Who Carry Water turns our attention toward endurance, labor, memory, and care. To carry water is to sustain life. It is also to bear weight, to move with necessity, to serve, to remember, and to continue. The image suggests generations of women whose strength may not always announce itself loudly, but whose presence makes survival possible.

Together, these works expand the emotional and cultural vocabulary of ballet. They ask what strength looks like when it is strategic, when it is fierce, when it is inherited, when it is communal, and when it is carried quietly.

Literature, History, and Culture

Many Ballet 5:8 productions begin with a story.

Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.
The folklore of La Llorona.
The life and writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

These works remind us that ballet can be a bridge between disciplines, generations, and communities.

When literature, folklore, history, and cultural memory enter the studio, ballet becomes more than a display of technique. It becomes an act of interpretation. It asks dancers not only to execute movement, but to embody meaning.

That process expands what ballet can hold.

It allows the form to speak across cultural contexts. It invites audiences who may not see themselves in traditional story ballets to encounter ballet as something immediate, human, and connected to their own questions.

Original Work Expands the Art Form

New ballets challenge everyone involved.

They ask choreographers to build new worlds.
They ask dancers to become collaborators, interpreters, and storytellers.
They ask designers to imagine visual environments that have never existed before.
They ask audiences to meet ballet not only as something inherited, but as something still unfolding.

Original work creates space for new voices and perspectives to shape the future of the art form.

More importantly, it reminds us that ballet is not finished.

It is still becoming.

That is why Ballet 5:8 has created more than 60 original ballets and continues commissioning and producing new work each season.

Because tradition matters.

And so does imagination.

Because the past has given ballet a rich inheritance.

And the future requires artists willing to create what has not yet been seen.