Leonis Works

From El Paso to a Berlin car park

The person at the centre of Leonis Works is Renato De Leon, a dancer born in El Paso, Texas, on the Mexican border. He graduated from the Kirov Academy of Washington, D.C. in 2014 and went straight into Houston Ballet II the same year, later appearing as a guest with the Houston Ballet main company. From there the path was the classical one: the Polish National Ballet in Warsaw, then the Czech National Ballet in Prague, with principal roles in Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Firebird and repertoire by Jiří Kylián, Krzysztof Pastor, John Cranko, George Balanchine and John Neumeier. National company tours took him through China, Russia and Europe.

After close to a decade inside institutions, De Leon moved to Berlin to work freelance, teaching beginner ballet at the Studio für künstlerischen Tanz and picking up music videos, television and commercial work. More importantly for what came next, he founded Ballet Sur_real, a collective built on the premise that classical technique and electronic music belong in the same room. By March 2025, when Berlin Art Link interviewed him as a director of the performance collective DANCÆ, that idea had a physical address: Körperfabrik, a ballet piece with choreography from Anthony Nakhle, Alvin Collantes and Ballet Sur_real, staged inside the former Kant-Garagen car park with an installation by AUSGANG Studio and a gallery exhibition alongside.

His argument then is the one that still drives Leonis Works. 'Ballet can be shown anywhere,' he told the magazine. 'It doesn't need to be confined to a big theater or feel so distant. It can be molded into any space and placed in different situations or contexts.' On the music: 'Ballet is a very old, very traditional art form but we're using electronic music. We're trying to evolve it by pushing it in a more unconventional direction.'

A platform rather than a company

Leonis Works does not describe itself as a dance company. Its own site calls it a Berlin-based creative platform, production network and interdisciplinary studio, one that assembles a roster of collaborators for each project: choreographers and dancers, projection and lighting designers, filmmakers, sound artists and DJs, fashion and costume people, spatial designers, and the venues themselves. It develops commissioned work for institutional and commercial clients as well as producing its own pieces, which is why its programme reads as a mix of art production and event promotion.

The organisation announced itself with a two-night launch at Backspace in Berlin: an open-format showcase of local artists, performance, immersive projection and fashion on the first night, and a similar programme on the second running into an all-night after-party played by DJs attached to the agency. The line-up included Amaury Browaeys, Jan Baszak and Janosch Raabe among others, with a 360-degree projection showcase as the centrepiece. It set the template that its productions have since followed: dance as the core event, wrapped in exhibition, sound and a club-adjacent social evening.

Urgency: pointe work in the crowd

The first full production under the Leonis Works name was Urgency, staged at Haus der Visionäre, Eichenstraße 4A in Treptow, on 2 and 3 April 2026, with two performances a night at 19:15 and 21:30. Tickets were priced at €32 to €36. The piece ran one hour and ten minutes and was directed by De Leon, who shared concept and choreography with Dan Ozeri.

Ozeri's route into the project mirrors De Leon's. Trained at the School of Music and Dance in Jerusalem and then the Academy of the Dutch National Ballet, he danced with the Israel Ballet and the Polish National Ballet before becoming a soloist at the Chemnitz theatre. Since 2024 he has worked freelance across Warsaw, Stuttgart, Berlin, Hamburg, Erlangen and Wales, and in Berlin he has performed as part of Ballet Sur_real alongside De Leon, Michael Beliov, Imogen Rose Walters, Molly Rumble and Soraya Schulthess.

Urgency was billed as a site-specific, multidisciplinary work about borders, conflict and pressure: how bodies hold tension, and how identity is shaped by belonging and exclusion. Its makers described its narratives as rooted in conflict, particularly along the Mexican American border, which is De Leon's own biography. The cast of five, Caterina Politi, Jade Albrieux, Dan Ozeri, Dafni Krazoudi and De Leon himself, performed a fusion of contemporary dance, performance art and classical ballet, with pointe work used regardless of gender. Krazoudi also delivered the prologue.

The technical build was substantial for a first production. Sound design and editing came from Morelian, the lighting concept from MDR_Light and visuals from the artist Antidote.psd, with Marcus Gaab directing video and photography and the Berlin label Haderlump supplying a fashion collaboration. Motion tracking fed the dancers' movement into 360-degree projection, and the audio ran through a d&b audiotechnik spatial system. There was no single stage. The choreography moved through the whole venue, with dancers crossing the space in real time and the audience standing among them.

What the room said

Critical coverage of Urgency was thin, as it usually is for a two-night run by a new producer. KALTBLUT Magazine ran a preview by Marcel Schlutt on 17 March 2026 that laid out the credits and the concept without passing judgement. The Berlin newsletter The Next Day, written by Lalai Persson and Mateus Furlanetto, picked the piece for its Easter weekend guide on 1 April 2026 and gave the most direct verdict on record: 'Site-specific dance piece on borders, conflict and the body under pressure. Performers move through the audience, while motion tracking turns movement into projected visuals. Rooted in the Mexican-American border experience. It's beautiful and intense.'

No full-length review from a dance critic has surfaced, and there are no published audience surveys or ratings to draw on. What can be said with confidence is that the production sold as a ticketed event at club-night prices rather than at theatre prices, that it filled four slots across two evenings, and that the platform moved directly on to announcing a longer second run.

Metaxy and the autumn ahead

The next production is Metaxy, an immersive dance piece scheduled for Atelier Gardens in Berlin on 30 and 31 October and 1, 6, 7 and 8 November 2026. Concept, choreography and artistic direction are again by De Leon for Leonis Works. The music is by Norman Nodge, the long-standing Berghain resident, and the listings describe it as mixed live, which puts a working techno DJ in the role a ballet company would give to a pit orchestra.

The material is Nietzsche. Drawing on The Birth of Tragedy, Metaxy follows a central figure pulled between the Apollonian world of order, discipline and ambition and the Dionysian world of emotion, desire and freedom. Four performers work through contemporary dance, live electronic music, video projection, light and special effects as the two forces collide and search for balance. As with Körperfabrik and the Backspace launch, the performance sits inside an exhibition: an immersive installation extends the world of the piece and invites the audience into the space before and after the show. Tickets are being sold through Universe. Running time and prices had not been published at the time of writing.

Metaxy is also the clearest test yet of the Leonis Works model. Urgency was two nights; Metaxy is six dates across two weekends at a venue built for exactly this kind of hybrid event, with a headline musical collaborator who brings his own audience. Whether the platform can hold a full house for a fortnight of dance rather than a weekend will say a great deal about whether Berlin's club-going public wants ballet in its evenings.

Standing, September 2026

Leonis Works is, by any measure, a young operation: one completed production, one announced, no awards, no recordings, no touring beyond Berlin. Its standing rests on the pedigree of the dancers it draws from national ballet companies, on the technical ambition of its staging, and on a coherent argument that De Leon has now been making in public since at least March 2025. The pieces themselves are site-built and unlikely to travel in their current form, so anyone wanting to see the work will need to be in Berlin between 30 October and 8 November 2026.