Julianna Rubio Slager | Artist Statement

My choreography is a response to absence—of truth, of nuance, of voices like mine on the ballet stage. As a Mexican-American woman in leadership, I don’t take that space for granted. I feel a responsibility to shape the canon, not just inherit it. Ballet has long idolized women without listening to them. In my work, I invite audiences to do just that: to listen. To stories that are layered, raw, sacred. To women and communities too often romanticized, marginalized, or erased. I want to create ballets that don’t just decorate the stage but leave a mark on the heart and memory of those in the room.

Dance is my form of journalism. It’s how I grieve, how I protest, how I hope. Each piece is a reckoning with the world as it is—and as it could be. I’m drawn to narratives that explore faith, justice, and the ache of loss. I center the perspectives of women, of the displaced, of those who carry generational wounds. My work isn’t meant to resolve. It’s meant to open.

The physical language I use is steeped in classical ballet, but I bend that tradition when the story demands it. I don’t shy away from sharp edges or silence or stillness. I trust the music. I lean into its structure—and sometimes break it to find something more honest. My vocabulary includes breath, weight, tension, release. The dancers I work with are collaborators. Together, we build the emotional world of the work through shared memory and somatic truth.

I begin with a simple premise: the body remembers what history often forgets. When I create movement for a character, I ask what their pain looks like—not in words, but in rhythm, in gesture, in resistance. If we’re telling the truth, the movement comes. And when it does, the audience sees themselves—maybe in ways they never expected.

At a time when much of dance has been reduced to spectacle or content, I am committed to work that lingers—not just in the mind, but in the gut. I want audiences to carry it with them. To talk about it days later, to see someone differently, to ask new questions. If the stage can become a place for wonder, conviction, and shared humanity, then it’s doing its job. That’s the dance that haunts my soul - the work I need to make.