Movement
that reveals
our humanity.
Classical rigor. Emotional consequence. The individual and the collective. Stories that stay with us.
Julianna Rubio Slager / 2026I make ballets about what it means to be human. I am drawn to the places where beauty and suffering coexist, where love becomes complicated, where memory shapes identity, and where an individual must find a way to live within—or against—the expectations of a community. I want movement to reveal something that cannot be fully explained in words.
My work begins with attention. I notice the way people hold themselves when they are afraid, the distance between two people who love each other, the moment a crowd turns toward or away from someone. I notice what music reveals before a character understands it. These observations become the beginnings of choreography: a gesture, a relationship, a spatial pattern, a question that can only be explored through bodies in motion.
As a Chicana choreographer, I bring my cultural inheritance into a form with its own powerful history and traditions. I love ballet's rigor, architecture, musical possibilities, and capacity for extraordinary beauty. I also believe its vocabulary is expansive enough to hold more stories, more contradictions, and more kinds of human experience. My work often returns to women whose inner lives have been misunderstood or overlooked, but I am not interested in replacing one simplified narrative with another. I want to make room for their complexity, agency, tenderness, anger, humor, and strength.
Sometimes one body interrupts the whole. Sometimes the group carries what an individual cannot.
One of the defining relationships in my choreography is between the individual and the collective. I am fascinated by the expressive power of the corps de ballet— not simply as a unified visual structure, but as a living force. An ensemble can become a community, a memory, a social expectation, a shared longing, or an overwhelming pressure. Against that scale, a single dancer can become startlingly visible. I return to this tension because it allows choreography to make intimate human experience feel both personal and universal.
I think about partnering in much the same way. A pas de deux is not simply two bodies creating beautiful shapes together. It is a relationship unfolding through action. One person reaches; another resists. Someone offers support that may also become restraint. Weight is given, withheld, surrendered, or reclaimed. I am interested in how movement can reveal the shifting balance of trust, desire, power, vulnerability, and choice between people.
Music is central to how I think. I listen for architecture and emotional possibility: the phrase that refuses to resolve, the rhythm that changes our expectations, the silence that makes a gesture suddenly consequential. I am interested in musicality beyond counting—in breath, suspension, counterpoint, tension, and release. My movement language is rooted in classical ballet, but I allow weight, stillness, contemporary physicality, theatrical gesture, and unexpected textures to enter when the work asks for them. I value precision, but never precision emptied of intention.
My process is collaborative and investigative. I build choreography with dancers whose intelligence and individuality matter to the work. I ask them to notice, imagine, question, and make choices. Sometimes we begin with a character or a piece of music; sometimes with an image, a physical problem, or a relationship between bodies. I am increasingly interested in allowing movement to discover meaning rather than requiring every moment to illustrate an idea I already understand. Structure matters to me, but so do surprise, contradiction, restraint, and the possibility of finding something more truthful than my first intention.
I want my ballets to be deeply felt without telling an audience exactly what to feel. Emotional clarity is important to me, but clarity is not the same as simplicity. A work can hold grief and beauty, conviction and uncertainty, darkness and delight. It can ask difficult questions without resolving them. I want to trust audiences to enter that complexity, bringing their own histories and experiences into the encounter.
Ultimately, I am interested in making dances that remain with people. Sometimes that happens through a story; sometimes through a musical phrase, a startling image, an unexpected tenderness, or the sight of one person standing apart from a crowd. I want to create work that gives dancers something substantial to inhabit and audiences something worth carrying away.
Ballet can be both formally rigorous and profoundly alive.
My work is an ongoing exploration of what this art form can reveal, whose humanity it can illuminate, and how much more it still has the capacity to hold.
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