An exciting occasion for one of Los Angeles’s most fun and resilient dance companies is its debut at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts, aka The Wallis, in mid-February. Luminario Ballet of Los Angeles. is a repertory ballet, aerial, and modern dance troupe founded in 2009. A hearty crew, it has trod all channels of music videos, television, film, virtual reality. And now to the Wallis concert hall stage.
These are daring dancers. Their mission has them up, down, and inside out …. any which way but loose. They fly, they soar, they touch terra firma, then they bounce back up again. But there is a method to the madness. Luminario people are skilled aerialists and acrobats. They are very well trained, highly disciplined and artful in pursuit of their mission to engage with props and devices to countervail the force of gravity; in doing so they widen the range of expressive dance possibilities. Gravity is a bummer! It brings you down…
Luminario’s repertory encounters “luminaries” of the past 50 years – Los Angeles modern dance legend Bella Lewitzky, San Francisco Ballet’s Michael Smuin, to choreographers of the here and now: Jamal Story, ballet Maestro Stefan Wenta, Cirque du Soleil’s head choreographer Debbie Brown, and the award winning artistic director Judith FLEX Helle’s classical to dance theater and aerial dance choreography – whose wild imagination and passion for our culture won the accolade of ‘cultural ambassador abroad’ from the US State Department in 2020, trusting Luminario Ballet to tour India as representatives of US democratic values of Equality, Justice, and Diversity.
The company’s two Wallis programs include Heroes, Sheroes, and Eros, in which a collective of Luminario Ballet choreographers and special guests explore the tangled paths of history/herstory/ourstory; and The Last Supper – a rollicking tale of Jesus, Judas and Mary Magdalene’s visit to the Coachella Music Festival in 2017. This wild tale of the ages looks at themes of personality, Black Lives Matter, relationships, sexuality, drug addiction, betrayal, and resolution through explosive, emotional dance theater choreography from ballet to acrobatics to aerial dance.
Luminario Ballet | Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts | Feb 17, 18