Look up! Look down! Look out! Then look back up!

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The Intersections New America Arts Festival barrels headlong into the second of its three weekends today, and while the middle chapters of trilogies are typically rife with flash-frozen-in-Carbonite misfortune, this one promises to be uplifting. Literally! And metaphorically. Unless, I suppose, trapeze acts really bum you out. Which could only mean that you are, in fact, Robin, the Boy Wonder, whom you will doubtless recall lost his parents in a horrific, Julie Taymor-esque trapeze accident that turned out upon Bat-investigation to have been no accident at all.

But stop interrupting me! Zip Zap Circus USA — the domestic wing of a group founded in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1992, that teaches kids teamwork and self-discipline via circus training — is crossing streams with the exclamatory aerialists of AirBorne DC! to present Getting AirBorne: Where Dance and Circus Meet, a vertiginous performance exploring “the intersections between...poetry and comedy, youth and age, America and South Africa, and ultimately the ground and the air.” About 25 artists and technicians are donating their time, with at least one, the aerialist and dancer Sara Deull, flying in from Montreal to take part. The Baltimore-based aerial artist Mara Neimanis will serve as the audience’s guide through the various routines that comprise the two hour-long, family-friendly performances, set for tomorrow at 4:30 and 7 p.m. in the Atlas Performing Arts Center’s Sprenger Theater.

Zip Zap’s program coordinator, Megan Hislop, says that your $25 ($15 for kids) ticket price will benefit the organization’s after-school programs here in D.C. as well its work in South Africa. When I reached her by phone Tuesday afternoon, Hislop was on her way to teach a group of scholars — as enrollees in the Higher Achievement academic program are known — at the Ward 6 Achievement Center at Center City Public Charter School, not far from RFK Stadium. Hislop works three afternoons per week with a group of 15 to 20 students ranging in age from nine to 14, teaching juggling, wire-walking, tumbling, yoga, stretching and body alignment, among other disciplines.

Airborne: Where Dance and Circus Meet

Essential life skills? Absolutely, says Hislop. “We talk a lot about communication,” she says. “We’re really using it as leadership training. The kids see, ‘‘Oh, I put the time in; now I can do this really difficult thing.’ If you can ride a unicycle, you start getting confidence in other areas.”

Hislop will be among the Zip Zap staffers in the Atlas lobby on Saturday afternoon from 1 p.m. until 6 p.m., offering free lessons in wire-walking. The wire, she assures is, will be rigged “only a about a foot” off the ground and will have a padded mat underneath it.

Another promising entry among the more than 40 festival performances booked at the Atlas between tonight at Sunday evening is Paige in Full, Paige Hernandez’s self-described “B-girl’s mixtape” incorporating elements of dance, hip-hop, poetry, and film to chronicle her voyage of identity as a person of Africa-American, Latino and Asian extraction. (Tonight at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m.; $20/$15 seniors & students.)