Blue13 Dance Company will perform at The Wallis on May 12 and 13. (photo courtesy of Blue13 Dance Company)

Blue13 Dance Company, the celebrated Los Angeles-based dance ensemble living at the intersection of diaspora and disruption, returns to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts with five culturally daring Bollywood-inspired works by artistic director and prolific choreographer Achinta S. McDaniel, on Friday, May 12 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, May 13 at 7:30 pm, in The Wallis’ Bram Goldsmith Theater.

The program includes a preview of “Sounds Like a Whoop, Looks Like a Flash,” a work in progress exploring invisible disability and addiction. There are also excerpts from Shaadi Medley featuring Bollywood and Bhangra dance.

Blue13 also presents “Dear Mr. Khan,” a piece challenging gender norms and impossible ideals set forth for Asian American women. It is the first part of McDaniel’s triptych, “Terpsichore in Ghungroos,” which premiered at The Wallis in February 2020.

“I am overjoyed and grateful to return to The Wallis with Blue13,” McDaniel said. “We are so lucky to have such an incredible group of dancers performing. A deeply collaborative process between us has created the works in the program, which exemplifies American dance and the Indian diaspora. It is illustrative of our multiplicity as South Asian Americans, from Bollywood and Bhangra expressions of radical joy in Shaadi, to 1947, a piece about the aftermath of the India-Pakistan partition. The audience also has a chance to join in the art-making during our newer repertory piece, “Restless autumn, restless spring.”

Blue13 Dance Company employs a powerful spectrum of joy and resistance through rhythm, Bollywood, and emotional expression. The company’s work rejects monolithic representations of both Indianness and contemporaneity, and reveals complexities intrinsic to South Asian and intersectional identities via provocative and boundary-exploring new works.

McDaniel, at the forefront of L.A.’s Bollywood dance and cultural scene for nearly two decades and a go-to choreographer for the film and television industry, has been integral in shaping Hollywood’s depiction of Bollywood dance.

Dance @ The Wallis is sponsored, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Tickets, priced $29 to $79, are on sale now. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd. To purchase tickets and for information, call (310)746-4000 or visit thewallis.org/blue13.