Joburg Ballet | Breaking Ballet | 2018
The madness of turning ballet into breaking news in 3 to 5 days / Joburg Ballet "Breaking Ballet"
A lot of millennials saw ballet as old-fashioned. Swan Lake and Shakespeare are wonderful, sure, but to young people in Johannesburg, it felt like "an art form that has nothing to do with me." To flip that perception, a ballet company did something bold: it turned the trends on social media themselves into ballet.
The problem
Joburg Ballet needed to sell more tickets, which meant appealing to a younger, more diverse audience. So they asked TBWA\Hunt Lascaris to show that ballet isn't outdated, but a modern, relevant form of expression. The media budget was zero. That meant if the target audience wasn't coming to the ballet, the ballet had to go to them. There was a real necessity to post at the exact moment something was trending, or it simply wouldn't spread.
The insight
The idea was to create "bite-sized ballet" inspired by the biggest online story of the day, and seed it directly into that trending conversation. They responded to a wide range of topics: gun control, LGBTQI+ rights, violence against women, the Cape Town drought, Mayweather vs. McGregor, Black Panther, Game of Thrones. I think the question "Is this even ballet anymore? Isn't this more like contemporary dance?" was exactly the point—deliberately blurring that boundary is what made people pay attention.
The idea
The entire process—spotting the trigger, briefing the dancers, shooting the film, and seeding it—took just 3 to 5 days. Normally, creating a ballet piece takes months of concept development, choreography, and rehearsal, so doing it in a matter of days was genuinely crazy. The campaign was shaped 100% by real-time data mined from social media, then artistically reinterpreted as new ballet. CCO Peter Khoury said it was crucial to work with production company Darling, bringing in a wide range of talented directors who each offered different perspectives and filmmaking approaches.
What happened
The films were released across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. By feeding highly relevant stories back into trending conversations, the campaign succeeded in getting ballet—and Joburg Ballet in particular—talked about in places it never could have imagined. Ticket sales hit an all-time high and kept growing with each show. In 2018, the campaign won two Cannes Lions, six awards at the Loeries in Durban in August, plus the SANBS Public Service Award. It also picked up a One Show Gold Pencil, a Gold at the Clio Awards 2018, and a shortlist at D&AD 2019. But the biggest win of all was that by taking ballet out of the theater and into the messy real world, the audience's average age hit an all-time low.
Afterthought
It seems the goal was achieved with overwhelming force. There's something gentle in the observation that "even classic things need to change—little by little." But this campaign wasn't "little by little" at all. With a production cycle of just 3 to 5 days, it stretched the very definition of ballet as an art form. No budget, no time—but with passion, structure, and speed, you can still change the world. That's what this proves.
