Alonzo King’s new “Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled” begins with a stunning image: A thin plastic sheet, like the kind painters use for sealing off walls, billows in a breeze, the sound of its rustlings like soft static. The 12 dancers of King’s Lines Ballet stand in silhouette behind, reaching and twisting with sculpted elegance, until their hands grab the brightly lit scrim, sparking light that shoots every direction like bolts of electricity.

Despite this arresting opening during a glitzy gala premiere Saturday, April 15, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Blue Shield of California Theater, the hourlong visual and sonic spectacle that followed is far more contemplative than crackling. And this is surely intentional. King, whose 41-year-old San Francisco company tours the world to acclaim, aims not to entertain but to spiritually inspire.

That said, the degree to which “Let Not Your Heart” stirs your spirit may depend on whether you submit to its circling nature, or desire arc and escalation.

King’s top-billed collaborator on “Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled,” which repeats through Sunday, April 23, is Richard Misrach, the famed Berkeley-based photographer known for large-scale color prints whose work is widely exhibited and held in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. Misrach has photographed everything from the Mexico-U.S. border to urban graffiti, but last December he flew to Hawaii for a month of photographing King’s Lines dancers. Their physicality as captured among sea cliffs and beaches makes perfect sense for Misrach’s photographs; in King’s extensively developed aesthetic, Lines dancers are always moving as though stepping carefully across a crevasse or tenderly pawing raw earth. Several of these photos were featured in the gala program.

As for the visuals onstage, Lines creative director Robert Rosenwasser is credited with the video design and Clayton Talmon de l’Armée with cinematography. A program note thanks Misrach for sharing “some of his special working locations and techniques.” But whatever the breakdown in contributions, the sum effect as illuminated by Seah Johnson’s lighting is immersively wondrous, as curious black dots reveal themselves to be spots on the ocean’s surface — or, later, as a camera angle places viewers underwater, looking up at the flows of wave-swept sand.

The sonic environment is equally immersive and entangled, but at the center of it is Lisa Fischer, the Grammy-winning singer who has toured with the Rolling Stones since 1989 and began collaborating with King in 2015. She takes the stage with the dancers, two microphones in hand, unleashing ghostly echoes and soul-wounded cries. She hums and howls beneath several works by MacArthur “genius” jazz composer Jason Moran, another frequent King collaborator, and echoes the melody of the Eden Ahbez song “Nature Boy,” as one by one the Lines dancers cross the stage, unfurling alongside video silhouettes.

What King wants us to contemplate is clear in the famous lyrics:“The greatest thing/You’ll ever learn/Is just to love/And be loved in return.”More elusive is what has the dancers troubled, other than a universal unease.

Individually, the 12 episodes are exquisite. Madeline DeVries and Ilaria Guerra balance like egrets; Theo Duff-Grant clutches his hand to his mouth, then presses his face to the floor as he lies on his side in a most extraordinary diamond-legged shape; and Maya Harr moves with muscular power, commanding the whole bewildered group. But other than one section incorporating what sounds like some form of African drumming, there is not much contrast in the work.

听觉基础做公关几乎浑然天成ogress from wind and water sounds to seabirds and creatures to human voices. If a primary troubling factor here is human destruction of the environment, that implication is subtle indeed. Would the sections feel less repetitive if the menace were more concrete? Perhaps. But I also know, and respect, the challenge of finding the meeting place of the particular and the universal in a work of art.

In the final section, transcendence finds a way. Adji Cissoko dances with Shuaib Elhassan en pointe — the only section en pointe — the better to extend her reach beyond. She glistens in a tunic that sparkles like the ocean surface, and she keeps her eyes mostly closed. The music is piano (Bach) as she rests against Elhassan, head to head, in connected surrender.

Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.