A Story in Motion: Ballet 5:8 Adapts ‘The House On Mango Street’
By Ren Willis, PhD candidate in English Literature, Logan Center Editorial Intern
7 July 2026
Photo courtesy of Ballet 5:8
This May, the Logan Center welcomed Ballet 5:8 for two performances of The House on Mango Street, Julianna Rubio Slager’s new adaptation of the critically-acclaimed novel written by Chicago-born author Sandra Cisneros. Slager, who is the artistic director and choreographer of the production, describes the year-long process of adapting the novel after receiving funding through the Big Read grant, a collaboration between the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest:
“For me as a choreographer, I work with a lot of different impulses to create performances. Sometimes it’s the music, sometimes it’s a book, sometimes it’s my own lived experience. But what I think was really unique about this choreographic process is that I actually used the book in rehearsal, and we would improv just to Sandra’s words themselves before we even started getting into the music,” she says, “And then from there I layered on music, and I brought in a lot of other elements. But I think that’s why the story is so beautiful and so poignant, because at its root, it is a physical embodiment of the beauty of Esperanza’s story.”
This adaptation joins a longstanding artistic tradition of transforming novels into the visual storytelling form of the ballet. From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Orwell’s 1984 to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, dancers have long reimagined textual meaning as movement, and wrestled with the challenging task of translating plot, character, setting, and tone into gesture and physical expression without speaking a word. But adapting a novel like The House on Mango Street, I’m sure, comes with a multitude of additional stakes: How do you choreograph the emotional life of a teenage girl, and frame it alongside the retrospective wisdom of a woman looking back on her girlhood? How do you translate the sights, sounds, and feelings of a Mexican-American neighborhood into the European language of ballet without sacrificing cultural authenticity? And how do you stage a decades-old coming-of-age story so deeply tied to Chicago in a way that resonates with the youth of Chicago today? These were some of the questions I had going into the performance on Saturday.
Photo courtesy of Ballet 5:8
What became clear during the performance, gallery pre-show, and post-show Q&A was that Slager and the show’s ensemble approached the novel not simply as a story to retell, but as a living, collaborative cultural text. Reflecting on her creative process, Slager writes that she “knew the work had to be rooted in listening,” prompting her to seek out family members for interviews and draw from her own childhood experiences in addition to incorporating the lived experiences of dancers from the ensemble into the show itself. The choreography fuses together an eclectic combination of different styles: ballet, modern, jazz, bachata, cumbia, Latin ballroom, and more. During Saturday’s Q&A, Slager also discussed the broader programming initiatives scaffolded around the production, including partnerships with public schools, libraries, and institutional organizations like the Logan Center aimed at ensuring that young audiences who see themselves reflected in Cisneros’s story—but don’t often see themselves reflected in the elite world of professional ballet—would have opportunities to experience the performance firsthand. As a result, Ballet 5:8’s The House on Mango Street comes together as a beautifully-rendered adaptation teeming with life and vibrance shaped not only by Slager’s artistic vision but also by the dancers, educators, librarians, local audiences, and youth encountering Esperanza and her story in an entirely new form.
Ahead of the matinee, I spoke with Slager and three members of the ensemble—Lauren Rios (young Esperanza), Sophia Yoo (older Esperanza), and Darissy Matias (Esperanza’s Mama)—about the process of bringing The House on Mango Street to the stage and adapting a work that holds deep significance for Latino communities in Chicago and far beyond. Click the video below to hear more and see behind-the-scenes footage from the production. You can also learn more about Ballet 5:8’s productions by following the social media pages linked at the end of this post.
Video credit: Polly Wang, Logan Center Communications Intern
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