“Every performance entails risk,” I thought to myself as I stepped out of North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre last Friday night. I had just seen Luminario Ballet perform excerpts from their fifth season repertoire. Their eclectic weekend headliners—a ballet about climate change in California and aerial works to the tunes of Led Zeppelin—had enticed me to see their show. This was definitely not Swan Lake, and I was certainly intrigued. 

Aerialists and dancers of Luminario Ballet perform in "Trails." (By Emerson Chen)

Prior to the show, I hopped onto the metro with my reporter’s notebook in hand, while visions of Cirque du Soleil and ballerinas danced around in my head. Expecting a rock n’ roll mash up of earth science and guitar kings, I was jarred by the sequence of the opening numbers. A stylized Spanish number, entitled “Casa Cuarteto,” performed with gusto by six of the company’s dancers, was followed by variations from The Nutcracker, danced skillfully by students from the Marat Daukayev School of Ballet. From the Christmastide classic, the program moved to an aerial silk solo, which seemingly had no connection to global warming or Led Zeppelin. 

Was this the show I had intended to see? I felt as if I had accidentally stumbled upon a dance recital, not an edgy rock ballet or an artistic statement on climate change. With intermission quickly approaching, I frantically flipped through my program, making sure that I had come to the right theatre, on the correct night, to see the right company.

But I started to pay closer attention when a revolving globe caught my eye. A projection of a glowing earth illuminated the stage’s backdrop as a single dancer in a white unitard stretched her body forward into an elegant flat back. 

This adroit solo by Emilie Livingston initiated six movements, collectively titled “Trails.” The work-in-progress featured additional satellite imagery from NASA and body-mapping video projections by Paul Ackerman. A slideshow of giant, rainbow weather patterns, pulsing water ripples and geographic maps of the American Southwest created a luminous scenery for the dancers and aerialists.  Meanwhile, the strains of Philip Glass’s “Mishima,” performed by the New Valley Symphony Orchestra, rose with urgency.

As I watched the dancers execute technically flawless steps, the beauty of their movements seemed strangely disconnected from the foreboding images playing overhead. 

The dancers’ graceful arabesque lines and dainty bourées clashed with the enlarged diagrams of jagged earthquake fault lines and volcanic hot zones. It created a strange type of tension, as if the dancers were unaware, oblivious and indifferent to the imminent dangers ahead. This left me feeling as if their movements were paltry in comparison to the enormity of the theatre-size images and the global scale of climate change. Then again, I reflected, my obsession with seeing a Led Zeppelin inspired aerial ballet suddenly seemed trivial in comparison to the incredible risks these artists were taking—dangling from lyra hoops and accomplishing fantastic feats amidst a chaotic light show.   

Dancers of Luminario Ballet perform a duet in "Trails." (By Emerson Chen)