POINT LOMA – It’s all creative expression, but arts are often categorized as visual or performance, and never the twain shall meet. But a San Diego Ballet residency at the San Diego Museum of Art is challenging that narrative.

The relationship is closer than ever for the museum’s centennial year, as the 35-year-old San Diego Ballet is key in sharing the history of the museum’s 100 years through a series of performances where dance and fine arts meet.

At Valentine’s weekend performances coinciding with the museum’s opening date 100 years ago, ballerinas will celebrate San Diego’s first and largest art museum.

This latest show, named “Perspective,” references both the artistic method meant to give flat surfaces the illusion of depth and the process of looking back, in this case, to the past 100 years in San Diego arts.

The show is 80 minutes with no intermission at the San Diego Museum of Art. Tickets come with free admission to the museum. Performances will be on Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. General admission is $55.

“We are the heritage. We’re the history. We date back to the origins of San Diego,” said Diedre Guevara, the museum’s director of community engagement. “It’s 100 years of an institution, 100 years of a building, 100 years of a collection.”

In addition to sharing history, the dance concerts also meet the goal of being a museum for all. These collaborations attract new audiences and become a unique way for people to understand and engage with the museum’s pieces.

“San Diego Museum of Art has this philosophy that museums are for all, and we really believe in that, and we really believe that it needs to be a place where the collection talks to everybody in the community,” Guevara said.

Javier Velasco, artistic director of the Liberty Station-based ballet, says dance is the performance art most closely related to the fine arts. After all, both are taken in primarily through the eyes.

“Dance is primarily a visual art. You look at it. I mean, that’s a visual stimulus,” Velasco said.

For the new shows, Velasco choreographed dances to key pieces in the collection. Ahead of choosing which pieces, he spent a day with a docent in the museum, learning the significance of works and mining their meaning.

One dance was inspired by the world’s oldest surviving sculpture of Shiva as the Lord of Music. The sculpture will be projected behind the dancers in a piece Velasco says will complement the religious artifact.

“We’re not trying to recreate an artwork before your very eyes. We’re trying to do dances in harmony with works of art,” Velasco explained.

In other dances, Velasco took a more literal approach. For instance, it will be as if the “Young Shepherdess,” painted in 1885 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, leapt from the frame and onto the stage for a pastoral dance.

“We are actually trying to sort of create this illusion of the young shepherdess and what her life would be, right?” the choreographer said. “So she sort of pops off the page.”

The second half of the show switches tack to San Diego history as a whole. Dances extoll particular neighborhoods in the area, set to the soundtrack of the radio station KGB’s “Homegrown” albums, made by local musicians in the 1970s.

“It was very important in the celebration of the San Diego Museum of Art that we celebrated the San Diego side of that as well, not just the art side of it,” Velasco said.

“I truly hope that that is an experience that they come away with going like ‘I feel invigorated, because I feel like I just celebrated,’” Velasco said. “I celebrated 100 years of the San Diego Museum of Art.”

A bonus? The performances are at night after the museum is typically closed.

“When we have these events at night, it’s a second life for the museum,” Guevara said.

Museum officials say the dialogue between those historic artists and contemporary dancers forges new meanings.

“All the arts, the more connected they are, the stronger the statement is,” Guevara said.

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