Blue Lapis Light flips dance on its side

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette conveying the beauty of the human body in flight,” she says, describing the group’s dancers as “body-integrated” artists with backgrounds in ballet, modern, yoga, Pilates, aerial silks, harness skills and pole dancing. “The movement is both classical in the sense that it’s balletic and athletic in that it’s front tucks and back tucks.”

For Pittsburgh, they’ve prepared a piece in five movements that she calls “a prayer for the planet.”

Her first site-specific aerial project involved a vacant swimming pool with a rope strung across it and a net that pulled a dancer from side to side. She’s also set works on abandoned structures, hotels, power plants, federal buildings and warehouses. One of Blue Lapis Light’s highest-profile undertakings was in June 2006 when dancers floated 75 feet above the ground in the unfinished Intel Shell in downtown Austin, which was demolished the next year. More than 14,000 people attended the show, a tribute to life’s transcendence.

“When we work on architecture, it’s not putting something on something,” Ms. Jacques says. “It’s working with the design of the architecture and what the building is telling us.”

She’s been in talks with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for about a year to plan Blue Lapis Light’s premiere here. Randall Miller, the Cultural Trust’s director of dance programming and special projects, saw one of its works in progress last summer during a trip to Austin. While not the norm for the