---
There's a moment—just before the curtain rises or, in this case, before the sky ignites—when everything goes still. You bundle up in sub-zero cold, crane your neck upward, and wait. Then it happens. A ribbon of green light unfurls across the darkness like a dancer sweeping across a stage, followed by ripples of pink and violet that cascade and fold into each other. For about seven minutes, the sky performs, and you forget you're freezing.
That's essentially what happened over Summit County and much of the U.S. recently—the Aurora Borealis put on a show that reminded people why they bother standing around in dark fields at 2 a.m. The reactions told the story: "I'm kicking myself for missing them," one person wrote, and you could feel the genuine grief through the screen. Missing an aurora isn't like missing a bus. You can't just catch the next one.
The good news? The aurora forecasts from The Weather Channel and CBS News gave people a roadmap. They traced the geomagnetic storm's path, showing where the lights would be visible and when. For the aurora-chasers—yes, that's a real thing—these maps are as essential as a rehearsal schedule is to a dancer.
Truth is, the Northern Lights and dance have more in common than most people realize. Both are about flow and unpredictability, about knowing when to extend and when to contract. A dancer who has ever watched footage of the aurora might notice how the lights mirror a grand battementEXTENSION or the way a torso spirals through space—the same sense of continuous motion, the same feeling that the movement never really stops, it just changes shape.
The dancers I know who've witnessed the aurora describe it in language that would fit right in a studio: "It felt like watching improvisation in the sky," one told me. "Nothing planned, everything responding to something invisible." She'd been studying contact improvisation at the time, and she said the aurora looked like two bodies in dialogue without touching—pulling and yielding, pushing and following.
That's the thing about these natural spectacles, whether it's the aurora or a Balanchine ballet: they work because they tap into something universal about how we experience being alive. The lights are ephemeral—instantaneous, even—and so is every performance. That transience is part of the magic. You can't stop it. You can't rewind it. You just have to be there, fully present, when it happens.
So here is your invitation: the next time there's a geomagnetic storm forecast and the skies are clear, find somewhere dark, look up, and watch. Maybe you'll see a dancer in those lights. Maybe you'll just feel something you can't name. Either way, you'll be paying attention—that's what dancers do, and that's what the sky asks of us too.
The next performance is already being scheduled. You just have to show up.
