[photo credit: Lineage Performing Arts Center]
Lineage Performing Arts Center has been presenting “Healing Blue” since 2005, a 70-minute production in which women share their real stories of living with and after cancer, and those words are translated into movement and spoken word onstage. This year’s production, which Lineage describes as the show’s 20th anniversary, features storytellers from the Living Beauty Cancer Foundation, a nonprofit that provides wellness and support services to women with cancer.
Choreographer Hilary Thomas, who founded Lineage in 1999 and serves as its artistic director, creates new choreography each year drawn from the women’s words. The production has been a constant in the company’s repertoire even as Lineage has grown from a small group of dancers organizing benefit concerts into a multidisciplinary performing arts center on East Mountain Street.
Thomas has said the cancer-survivor performance grew out of Lineage’s early touring years, when the company traveled the country in rented vans doing fundraisers for women’s health and cancer centers. The tours, which ran from roughly 2002 to 2010, always ended at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston.
“I think it’s so important to provide spaces right now where people who have lost their homes or have been displaced can come together and experience art and joy and connection,” Thomas said in a 2025 interview about Lineage’s community role. “We give them a safe space to just feel and experience some beauty together and connect.”
The Living Beauty Cancer Foundation, which has been based in the Pasadena area, has provided free wellness services to more than 1,400 women with cancer since its own founding in 2005, according to prior Pasadena Now reporting. Its services include retreats, movement classes, and workshops.
Sunday’s cast includes performers Nola Gibson, Caterina Mercante, Ericalynn Priolo, Thomas, Teya Wolvington, and Meghann Zenor. The production includes descriptions of cancer experiences and photographs of breast cancer survivors after surgery; Lineage recommends that parents exercise care when considering whether to bring children.
Tickets are $30 general admission and $20 for students and seniors. The performance begins at 4:00 p.m. at Lineage Performing Arts Center, 920 E. Mountain St. For more information, contact Executive Director Cynthia Crass at 626-844-7008 or cynthia@lineagepac.org.
Thomas, reflecting on Lineage’s trajectory from a one-time benefit concert in 1999 to an organization now more than a quarter-century old, has said the production’s longevity was never part of a plan. “I continued to say yes to opportunities and follow what, really follow my own passion in storytelling and making art, and we kind of landed here through that,” she said.
