Embodied Ballet
Refinement • Awareness • Artistry
by Xiomara Reyes and Rinat Imaev
Embodied Ballet is a space where classical ballet becomes lived experience, and where advanced dancers and young professionals are invited into a more integrated relationship to technique, artistry, and presence. Rooted in classical technique, mindfulness, and embodied artistic practice, it is an invitation to come into deeper relationship with the intelligence already living within movement.
Created by Xiomara Reyes and Rinat Imaev, this work grows from decades of shared and individual practice within some of the world’s most renowned ballet traditions, including the National Ballet of Cuba, the Royal Ballet of Flanders, the Mariinsky Ballet lineage, and American Ballet Theatre.
Together, Xiomara and Rinat bring a living transmission of the classical repertory alongside an evolving inquiry into embodiment, attention, and artistic presence. Their work spans performance, choreography, and pedagogy, unified by a single intention: to support dancers in becoming more fully present in their dancing bodies.
What emerges here is not a departure from classical ballet, but a deepening into it—into the breath that sustains virtuosity, the awareness that transforms repetition into meaning, and the intelligence that lives beneath form.
In this work, technique is not separate from awareness. Movement is not only executed, but inhabited. The studio becomes a space of refinement—of physical precision, perception, imagination, and inner listening.
Over time, this practice has expanded to include the staging and adaptation of classical ballets, original choreographic creation, and the integration of mindfulness and reflective practice within professional training environments.
Yet at its core remains something simple and essential: the dancer as a whole being—physical, intelligent, and alive in the moment of movement.
Embodied Ballet is an invitation into that space.
Picture © Gene Schiavone - Courtesy of ABT