PERKIER CIRQUE; CHINESE ACROBATS LIFT `DRALION' TROUPE ABOVE PAST DARKNESS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Theater Critic

Question: How many dralions can you balance on top of a large moving ball? Answer: Two or three - depending on where they put their feet, of course.

This raises such questions as ``What is a dralion?'' If you have to ask, beware: This may indicate that for the past 15 years you've somehow managed to seal yourself off from the global entertainment juggernaut that is Canada's Cirque du Soleil, which could indicate that you're living on an ice floe in the Bering Strait.

Dralions, as it happens, are the colorful, whimsical, half-dragon, half-lion creatures that Cirque has invented to symbolize the pairing of Eastern and Western sensibilities at the heart of its newest high-flying spectacle, ``Dralion.'' And while ``Dralion,'' the show, doesn't quite live up to that exotic anthropomorphism, it does send you out into the Santa Monica sea fog feeling that the world is, indeed, a small and a magical place after all.

With a musical sextet supplying funky World Beat pop, and two winged, warbling androgynous beings presiding over the proceedings with shamanistic incantations, ``Dralion'' occasionally suggests a United Nations-sponsored virtual-reality space opera.

But compared with other recent Cirque productions, ``Dralion'' goes light on hip ambience and performance-art pretension. Instead, it keeps its focus on a troupe of 35 Chinese acrobats, half of them children or teen-agers, who leap, dive, somersault, skip, teeterboard and tumble their way through routines that look more difficult than half the events in the Olympic decathlon.

Perhaps most impressive are the hoop divers, spiky-haired young men leaping headfirst, backward, upside down and every which way through hoops that are probably even smaller than they appear, sometimes narrowly avoiding midair collisions. For daring and athleticism, you'd be hard-pressed to find its equal on any given NFL Sunday.

The show's other high point comes from an unusually funny and versatile troupe of clowns, including Joe De Paul, Johnny Filion and Soizick Hebert. Their sly Cirque du Soleil parody alone is worth a trip to the blue-and-yellow Big Top between now and Nov. 7.

Most of the remaining acts, though artfully performed and exultantly directed by Guy Caron, hold little in the way of surprise. Girls and young women in emerald-green costumes somersault backward off a teeter-board to form a human totem pole. Other girls perform a slightly brittle ballet across multiple rows of light bulbs.

Trapeze artists execute semi-erotic aerial pas de deux. A contortionist in a flesh-covered body stocking pops out of a giant spider and juggles five, then six balls, twisting his cantilevered physique into arachnid shapes before somehow trapping the spheroids on the nape of his neck.

Other performers scamper like insects up and down designer Stephane Roy's set, which resembles a gargantuan car radiator grille, while Jeanne Dioman Gbou, a dancer from Ivory Coast, acts as a sort of multicultural high priestess, circling the stage to the band's uptempo, percussion-driven jams.

``Dralion'' makes a welcome change from the dark, vaguely sinister ``Quidam,'' which toured Southern California in 1996-97. If Sigmund Freud's ghost hovered over ``Quidam's'' millennially distressed tableaux of isolated family members and headless men in bowler hats, then Carl Jung rules the hopeful, forward-looking ``Dralion'' with its primitive-cool aesthetic and stylized depictions of tribal initiation rites. Though a bit less technically astonishing than its predecessor, ``Dralion'' is also warmer and more human - not at all a bad prescription for the new global cycle straight ahead.

The facts

What: Cirque du Soleil presents ``Dralion.''

Where: Under the Big Top next to the Santa Monica Pier.

When: Tonight through Nov. 7. Performances at 8 tonight and Friday, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 5 p.m. Sunday; and thereafter at 8 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 5:30 and 9:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 5 p.m. Sundays.

Tickets: Adults $34 to $55; children $23.75 to $38.50. Call [phone]; www.admission.com on the Web. The Cirque du Soleil box office on site opens at 10 a.m.

Our rating: Three stars

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2 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- 2) Acrobats perform a delicate ``ballet on lights.''

David Sprague/Staff Photographer