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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/diamondsandglass on 2024-08-21 23:16:41+00:00.
Disclaimer: this post is based on the stories of former dancers/employees and on my own opinions. I am not and have never been affiliated with Ballet 5:8 and don’t know the people involved personally. Also apologies for any formatting errors, I'm on mobile.
This is a little different from my usual ballet drama posts because there are no articles about it. I usually like to include additional reading at the end of my posts, but in this case this information is majorly sourced from a single podcast episode and personal testimonies here on Reddit. These are generally not the most reliable sources, and most middle school teachers would give me an F for academic sources. However, there are reasons dance journalists probably aren’t covering this.
Most of the time when ballet company stories break into mainstream news it’s because there’s a major lawsuit being filed. This was the case with the New York City Ballet texting scandal, something I will probably cover in a future post. In this case however, there has been no lawsuit filed against Ballet 5:8, nor is there likely to be. Without mainstream attention or a high-profile sponsor, it’s prohibitively expensive for dancers to stage a lawsuit against their company (which is likely to already have a lawyer and more resources than individual dancers).
In addition, ballet is very quick to protect its own. It’s a fairly niche industry with not a lot of outside oversight. Artistic directors of various companies often danced together growing up and still communicate with each other. If a dancer at one company speaks out about mistreatment, they’re likely to get labeled as difficult to work with and find it hard to get hired elsewhere. This leads to a culture of silence around things like eating disorders, harassment, and even cult-like behavior. Sometimes all three.
Luckily, I am an internet rando who has nothing to lose. The stories shared by former dancers at Ballet 5:8 deserve to be shared more widely. If this story stays in niche ballet communities it’s likely to die out. More importantly, when people Google Ballet 5:8 to find out whether they should send their kid there, I’m hoping this post comes up to give them second thoughts.
Content Warning: verbal abuse, eating disorders, religious trauma
What is Ballet 5:8?
Ballet 5:8 is a ballet company based in Chicago, Illinois. The company is named after the Bible verse Romans 5:8, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” They’re explicitly Christian, with their mission including to “engage audiences in a conversation of life and faith.” Anyone looking for a job with them is asked to include a statement about their Christian faith along with a resume and headshot. If hired, dancers are required to affiliate with a local church and attend service every Sunday. According to former dancers, every rehearsal would begin with a round of prayer, which later became an hour of prayer during lunch. These prayer rounds would be led by rehearsal directors and sometimes the owner of the company.
Why is it being called a cult?
For those not familiar with ballet’s customs, taking time out of a busy day of rehearsal for everyone to pray together is abnormal (most ballet companies are completely agnostic), but that prayer being led by the company’s staff is downright unethical. Former dancer Summer Smith, who appeared on the podcast “Was I in a Cult?” to talk about her experience, says that staff would often use confessions that dancers made in the sanctity of these prayer circles later in rehearsals to “motivate” them. She also says that dancers who were having or believed to be having premarital sex would be pressured out of the company.
These are just the start of the allegations against 5:8. An anonymous dancer posting on the Reddit community r/ex58, talks about how professional trainees were often belittled by being forced to do pre-pointe exercises like those that would be given to children half their age. She even forced them to take class with actual children a few times. Trainees or recent hires were also forced to play the least desirable roles in productions (not uncommon), which, since all their ballets are based on Bible stories, meant they always play slaves (wtf).
Stories by Smith include dancers being underpaid/having to work other part time jobs while having a full rehearsal schedule, being forced to dance through injuries (making them take much longer to heal), and dancers generally being told to pray their problems away. The part that makes this cult-like is how the company exerts control over dancers by telling them that the rest of the dance world is corrupt, and that by staging ballets based on Bible tales, they were going to inspire the masses to become saved. Many of these accounts attribute the company’s toxic culture and cult-like religious tendencies mainly to one person, the company’s founder Julianna Slager.
Julianna Rubio Slager
Slager was a former trainee at the US’s first Christian ballet company, Ballet Magnificat. According to Summer Smith, Slager had never been a full time professional dancer before moving to Chicago for her pastor husband’s career. In this new city she decided to start her own ballet company, with ~~blackjack~~ Jesus and ~~hookers~~ lots of yelling.
Former 5:8 employees say that Slager is extremely mercurial. Everyone at the company works around her temper, even though one can never be sure what exactly will incur her ire. If a dancer angered her in any way, they would be replaced in productions, ignored in rehearsals, or even fired without warning. According to Smith and another anonymous source, Slager would ignore or even promote eating disorders, an already rampant problem in ballet made worse by the anxiety of being verbally abused. She would act wildly different based on who she was talking to and what she wanted to get out of them.
All of this created a culture of anxiety within the company that seems to persists today. Slager is still the head of Ballet 5:8 as of writing. Even if she were by some miracle (no religion joke intended) to step down, the company she has cultivated is used to running on aggression and fear. The only way to change this would be a complete overhaul of staff and procedures, which would require someone in power to make that decision. And Slager is determined to be the only one in power here.
Ongoing Conclusion
Ballet 5:8 doesn’t seem to be doing that well. If you go to their Jobs & Auditions page you’ll notice there are a lot of positions posted, including for summer internships that should have been filled by May/June. Job turnover has been very high at 5:8 for years. A former staff member says that the Marketing/Advertising role they worked in had been filled by multiple people over the course of a year because no one wanted to stay with the company for very long. They only managed to stick it out for 4 months, and in that time developed what sounds to my untrained ear like an anxiety disorder.
In addition to this high job turnover, there are rumors of an either partial or complete resignation of board members. Prior to the release of the episode of “Was I in a Cult?” Ballet 5:8’s board was posted publicly on the website. The page has since been removed, and there are currently listings on the job page for board members. Supposedly this is also a recurring issue for the company (there was allegedly a complete board walkout in the past).
Ballet 5:8 has proven to be incredibly conscious of their public image in the past. According to at least one parent testimony, they personally call people who leave them bad reviews online to cajole them into taking them down. This is part of why I made that disclaimer at the top, along with not wanting to get the dancers telling their stories in any more hot water.
If you look up Ballet 5:8 articles, most of what you’ll find is glowing praise of their upcoming shows from local Chicago papers. There has been no journalistic coverage of the allegations of former dancers outside of Reddit and that one podcast episode. So, despite the apparently dire conditions inside of the company, few people outside are hearing anything about it.
I didn’t make this post to bash on Christians inherently, or even the concept of a Christian ballet company. It might not be my cup of tea, but it takes all sorts to make the world go round. However, Ballet 5:8 is at best a bad example of what this kind of company could be, and at worst, an abusive cult. The reason I made this post is to hopefully spread awareness. Even if you just killed 10 mins taking this all in and never think about any of this again, thank you for reading.
Additional Reading
As I said at the beginning, most of my information from this post is sourced from a podcast episode and various Reddit posts. I’ve linked the Reddit posts as they came up, but the podcast is called “Was I in a Cult?” and the specific episode “Pray then Plié.” Quite honestly I found the hosts annoying and their attempts at jo...
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