A few weeks ago, we welcomed women from the Adanola community, including martial artists, designers, photographers and Pilates instructors, into Balletic Athletic for a morning of movement and drawing.

My goal isn’t to turn everyone into dancers. It’s to take some of the extraordinary physical intelligence developed through dance and make it available to more people, so they can experience what it can do for the bodies they already have and the things they already love to do. I’ve been circling this idea since I was a kid.

Growing up, I spent nearly every hour outside school bouncing between the dance studio and the basketball court. My heroes were NBA players and Alvin Ailey dancers who somehow made enormous physical effort look effortless. To me, they were the ultimate athletes and artists.

But their worlds looked nothing alike. Hardwood floors, jerseys and scoreboards versus marley floors, leotards and theatre lights. As a kid, you internalize these distinctions quickly. Sports are athletic. Dance is expressive. One belongs on a court, the other on a stage. Pick a side. I tried not to.

Then I read a line in my brother’s SLAM magazine comparing Michael Jordan’s Jumpman logo to a grand jeté (one of ballet’s great leaps) and something clicked. Watch an Alvin Ailey dancer leap. Watch Jordan elevate. Same suspension, same command over gravity. Pure human flight.

I couldn’t unsee it. In the design studio, I began recreating iconic sports photographs of dunks, kicks and backhanded layups with dancers in my company, using dance technique to reveal the movement intelligence shared across the two disciplines. It eventually became my college thesis, Dancer as Athlete: Athlete as Artist.

Then life started testing the theory.

When my older brother tore his hamstring playing college basketball, I brought him to my dance teachers. Dance training gave him a different path back to coordination, balance and agility.

Years later, in New York City, an 18-wheeler ran over me in a crosswalk. Bedridden and then on crutches for months, I had to relearn what my body once knew instinctively. Strength training rebuilt my stability, marathon training restored my rhythm, dance renewed my confidence.

In 2025, when my home burned in the LA fires, physical practice was again where I focused my attention when everything else felt impossible.

Through all of it, I became less interested in whether a practice belonged to dance or sport and more interested in what each could offer the other. That crossover gave my body different tools for different moments, and taught me how much these disciplines have to learn from one another.

That is the origin of Balletic Athletic.

We’re a movement studio rooted in the precision and expansiveness of dance, paired with athletic training. We explore the qualities that keep a body capable: mobility, strength, coordination, balance and body awareness. It’s for anyone devoted to a life of movement, however they move.

Movement classes are only one way we explore that idea. At the Adanola event, we also invited attendees to draw bodies in motion and spend time with our growing research library. Moving, watching, drawing, reading. Different practices, all sharpening the same thing: attention.

Because dance asks you to notice: Where is my weight? Where am I in space? What is moving and what isn’t? Can I create more range without losing control? Can I generate force and still be fluid? Those aren’t dance questions alone. They’re human movement questions.

Dance can feel like an intimidating world to enter: the technique, the fine-tuned bodies, the uniform. I want to make some of what dancers know available to more people. The uniform of dance deserves its own conversation (I’ll come back to that), but Balletic Athletic is really about the body underneath.

So go run. Lift weights. Play tennis. Dance. Surf. Train for something ridiculous. Try something you’re terrible at.

Then come to Balletic and get to know the body you’re asking to do all of it.

You don’t have to call yourself an athlete to want to feel capable in your body, and you don’t have to be a dancer to benefit from how dancers move. Here, athletic training and artistic expression don’t just coexist. They amplify each other.

I’m still a student of all of this myself. That’s part of the fun.

We don’t have all the answers, but a life full of movement keeps giving us more to work with.

Alexis Copithorne
Founder, Balletic Athletic
Instagram: @lexycop @balleticathletic

We hope by now you’ve seen all of the beautiful content across our socials, but we want to bring you behind the scenes on what it takes to produce a trip like this; the potentially not-so glamorous side of the making-of. We know it sounds cliche, but it’s true that an event of this scale requires all hands on deck for our small but mighty Brand Marketing team. Whilst working towards a tight deadline, we’re juggling things like: packing and organising all of the product (9 suitcases worth), meeting printer deadlines to collect all of the branded elements and booking travel for all team and guests, whilst still liaising with our contacts over in Ibiza to ensure things are running smoothly ahead of our arrival. As we know, all the planning in the world doesn’t mean things will always go to plan…

4 Adanola team members across the Events, Partnerships and Social teams flew out for the trip and were joined by 10 friends of the brand. The guests all flew in from different parts of the world; all the way from New York to Copenhagen and Canada to Paris. Introducing the girls to one another and watching them form their own friendships is one of the many joys of events. From as early as the evening welcome drinks we saw these connections start to form, starting with introductions to very quickly wanting to capture each other’s content and laughing over custom cocktails (is this not peak girlhood).

As you’ve probably seen, we don’t mess around when it comes to the branded moments on our trips. From the cocktail car at dinner, the whole of the guest’s suites, the poolside cabanas and more - these are the elements that really make the content that we all love to see. Here’s the inside scoop of what the physical itinerary our guests received looked like, along with pictures of the incredible suites (here’s Carla Ginola’s room tour in case you missed it). Every time we walked into each room, there was an audible gasp from the team - they were truly sensational!

Let’s talk about the itinerary. We always want our events to seamlessly cover active and lifestyle elements, with bits of down-time in between so it’s actually enjoyable for everyone. With a location like Ibiza, it was only natural to plan a sunrise hike along the coastal mountains (we won’t talk about what time our alarms were set for). Of course, in true Adanola style we had to include some slow movement by hosting a morning reformer pilates class on the wooden wellness deck, which was nestled within lots of greenery making it feel like a zen rainforest.

Food and beverage has always been something we love to do for our IRL experiences, it gives us a chance to be creative and playful, sharing a moment that feels more than just a product offering. We’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to have a Jelly element in our F&B, which has been an obsession of our events team for a while and sure enough it made a super fun dessert centrepiece and seamlessly fitted in with the wellness element of our trip. The organic jelly was packed with vitamins as was the fresh fruit bags given to the guests during down-time by the pool. With Aisha Potter in attendance, it was only right we offered a tray of freshly made carrot juices, which both she and our guests loved - and yes we are obsessed with her recent announcement of her D.Y.S carrot juice collab with Joe and the Juice!

The team feel so lucky that this is our job even during those de-lulu moments; picture 9 suitcases full of product sprawled across the hotel floor, 4am alarms on multiple occasions, one steamer vs 10 wardrobes of product, vinyls pouring out of every bag, and a fair few blank stares to each other when we can’t quite figure out solutions as quick as we’d like. We may have been running on fries, house lemonades, team spirit and simply being in awe of our beautiful setting but it’s safe to say we pulled it off. It’s straight back to our event moodboard for us now, and without giving too much away, we may or may not need to invest in some pointe shoes…

Love,

Team Adanola