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…

“With a moving score featuring composers John Adams, Oliver Davis, and Ezio Bosso, lovely classical choreography, and superb performances by the cast, I expect Golden Sessions will offer a fresh and uplifting experience for Ballet 5:8 fans and newbies alike, regardless of their interest in Lewis or literature.” - Executive Director Emeritus Amy Sanderson

Ballet 5:8, a Frankfort-based nonprofit arts organization, has been awarded a second grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency in the amount of $12,900 for general operating support. The grant will be partially supporting operations between September 2018 and August 2019. Ballet 5:8 is committed to investing in Illinois communities, artists and residents through high-quality, accessible dance education and performance and is thrilled to have this operating support for the 2018/19 season.

Ballet Five Eight NFP (Ballet 5:8), a nonprofit arts organization located in Frankfort, has been awarded a $8,800 grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency for general operating support. Ballet 5:8 has been located in the Chicago South Suburbs since its creation in 2012 and has a mission to engage communities in Chicago, the Midwest, and the nation in conversation of life and faith through innovative storytelling and breathtaking dance. The IACA grant will be partially supporting Ballet 5:8’s operations between Jan. 1, 2017 and Aug. 21, 2018.

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.

For Amy Kozol Sanderson, ballet is much more than a transcendent art form. It's a spiritual mission.

The 29-year-old Eldridge native is the executive director and co-founder of Ballet 5:8, which will perform in the Quad-Cities for the third time, on Saturday in Moline, after previous stops at Davenport Junior Theatre in 2014 and 2015.