Choreographer Jacques Heim founded Diavolo: Architecture in Motion in Los Angeles in 1992, and since then, Heim and the dance company have taken their unique style of dance all around the world.
Their 1995 European debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was a hit of the festival that year. Three years later, Diavolo opened the new Getty Center’s inaugural performance series.
Between 2007 and 2013, Diavolo created L’Espace du Temps, a trilogy of dance pieces commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which it premiered with the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl to music by Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams and Philip Glass.
In “Escape,” the new show from Jacques Heim’s Diavolo: Architecture in Motion,” 22 dancers move through space in interaction with large physical structures. The show runs at Diavolo’s studio L’Espace in downtown Los Angeles through June 14. (Photo by Cheryl Mann)
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In “Escape,” the new show from Jacques Heim’s Diavolo: Architecture in Motion,” 22 dancers move through space in interaction with large physical structures. The show runs at Diavolo’s studio L’Espace in downtown Los Angeles through June 14. (Photo by Cheryl Mann)
In 2017, the company danced its way to the Top 10 and finale of “America’s Got Talent,” dazzling judges and viewers alike with Diavolo’s intensely physical acrobatic dance pieces that incorporated large architectural elements on stage.
In 2024, Heim choreographed Dua Lipa’s broadcast-opening Grammy appearance in which Diavolo dancers performed with her.
At one point, the city of Los Angeles recognized Diavolo as a cultural treasure, and you might think the public knew them as such as well.
That’s not the case, Heim says, which is part of why he and the company created Diavolo’s current show “Escape.”
“You have to imagine that from 1999 to 2019, Diavolo was touring all over the United States and all over the world,” Heim says on a recent phone call. “Suddenly, the pandemic comes; everything shut down. Things change completely. The world is changing, the market is changing.”
For Diavolo, touring was always a pricey proposition due to the size and complexity of the stage pieces with which it traveled.
“Diavolo is not the dance company that you have six or eight dancers, and they just travel with a suitcase,” Heim says. “We travel with an 18-wheeler truck. When we go into a theater, we need two days or three days tech. So it’s a very expensive company.”
Sometimes in life, you have to reinvent yourself, Heim realized. And so he tore up the old playbook and created a new one. Instead of touring from city to city around countries and continents, Diavolo was going to settle into its downtown Los Angeles studio and invite the audiences to come to them.
Whether they’d come, though, remained an open question.
“Usually when you’re a company in a city, you have your own home season,” Heim says. “We never had a home season, so actually most people in Los Angeles have no idea who we are.
“So that was in my mind, my mind of reinvention.”
“Escape” premiered at L’Espace, the company’s studio-turned-black box theater, in October. It proved so successful in its initial run that it returned for a second run that continues until June 14.
In the future, “Escape” will likely return to Southern California, though possibly in a venue that can hold 200 instead of the 95 the studio provides, Heim says. It may also travel to other cities for residencies.
“It became this thing where people loved it in a way that I actually never experienced in all my years of touring with Diavolo,” Heim says. “So what does that mean?
“The people who did not know Diavolo at all in Los Angeles thought that Diavolo was a dance company that we just started,” he says. “They thought, ‘I never saw this kind of work. I can’t even describe it. It’s like circus, but it’s not circus, it’s not pure dance, it’s not theater. It’s like this fusion of all.’
“And the people who knew about Diavolo all those years, who were coming and saying, “I saw you at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Los Angeles in 1995, I saw you in 1998 at the Highways Performance Space,’ they’re saying this is the best thing that Diavolo has done.
“So suddenly it’s like this thing, this beautiful thing, that people see, and it feels like fresh new work that hasn’t been done or been seen.”
Dancing about architecture
In “Escape,” 22 dancers move through space in conversation with the structures – the architecture – that define each piece.
In one, they climb aboard an abstract ship that rocks more and more violently until dancers are tossed high in the air to the arms of those waiting below.
Another employs a surreal cutaway replica of the Moon, which glides on casters around the theater as dancers clamber on and off and through its crater-pocked surface.
A third looks like a small Ferris wheel without the carriages. Dancers wheel it around the floor, some hanging from the spokes, others leaping from it as it turns.
For Heim, this fascination with bodies moving on physical structures goes back to his boyhood in Paris when he was 11 years old.
“I was a rebel even in my early age,” he says. “Let me tell you, I got kicked out of six different schools in Paris because I was a rebel, I was a punk. So I skipped school, and I started kind of vagabonding in the streets of Paris and really connecting with the architecture of Paris.
“Sometimes I was climbing on top of walls, and I had a connection with that, and it made me free,” Heim says. “Then I started a street theater with my friends, and we performed in the street on top of cars, in some buildings. We got arrested by the police, but in that time it was OK, it was a different world.
“So the essence of relation with your environment in your city was always there.”
Eventually, his family told him if he couldn’t or wouldn’t stay in school in France, maybe he should go to America. Heim enrolled at Middlebury College in Vermont, planning to study acting until he says he realized his English needed work.
“Luckily, I had some friends in the dance department who told me, ‘Jacques, why don’t you come and take some dance classes? At least you don’t have to speak,’” he says. “I said, ‘That sounds great.’
“I fell in love with this beautiful universal language called movement,” Heim says. “Then I remembered my connection with the environment when I was asked to create a solo or a piece.”
The bare stage left him cold, so he brought a chair, a table, and a wall he asked the theater department to build on stage for his dances.
“Suddenly I was connected and creating a relation between me and my environment,” Heim says. “Not utilizing the environment as a prop but as an extension of myself, as another performer on stage.
“So now I’m interested in the relation and interaction between the human and that architectural environment, and how it is affecting us in so many different ways, emotional, mental, physical,” he says of the work he’s created throughout his career.
Even today, a bare stage offers little inspiration.
“If someone asks me, ‘OK, Jacques, choreograph with 20 dancers on the bare stage,’ I would go, ‘OK, well, maybe I’m not the best choreographer for that, but I’ll give you some names,’” he says.
Seeing movement
Heim’s choreography is physically demanding, even dangerous, during some of the more daring stunts it includes. Yet Heim has little experience as a dancer himself.
“I was never a dancer, I was never a gymnast, I was never an acrobat,” he says. “I’m the most unflexible and dyslexic creative director of a dance company you’ll ever meet.
“I still cannot touch my toes. I don’t have the body of a dancer. I still eat every day croissant and baguette. I have a little belly. I have skinny legs like the Eiffel Tower.
“People sometimes in the studio look at me, going, ‘Jacques, what are you doing? How come you end up in this world?’ But the crazy thing is, I see movement before movement is created.”
Put a human next to an architectural structure, he says. A chair, a table, a gigantic abstract structure or house.
“I see relation,” Heim says. “I see emotion. I see movement. I see the way the piece can start and how the piece can end. I don’t know why but I see that.”
More than choreographers, his inspirations tend to be architects, Heim says, ticking off such names as Santiago Calatrava, Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel, and Renzo Piano.
“When I walk the streets in any city that I travel to and I end up seeing beautiful architectural structures, I see a story,” he says. “I see movement. I see emotion. I see motion. And that inspires me to create.”
As creative director of Diavolo, Heim is a tough taskmaster with his dancers. “Here is what they will tell you,” he says, and then launches into a description of his methods that holds back nothing of how tough he can be.
“They will tell you the first couple of weeks, ‘I hate that guy,’” Heim says. “‘I want to kill him. I can’t stand him. I want to get to [bleep] out of L’Espace, the studio.’ Because I operated like a drill sergeant and like your football coach.
“And yes, I yell at them,” he says. I put them down. I rebuild them. I push them. I put them into a washing machine for many spins. They look at me like I’m the craziest human being ever.
“But I do it with care and love and knowing what is at the end of the result.”
When one of his current dancers, a woman nicknamed Sanchez, was new in the company, she struggled, Heim says. She was shy, hesitant in her physicality, not fighting for space in the group.
“I brought her into the office, and I said, ‘I am about to fire you,’” Heim says. “‘I can see the potential in you, but you are abandoning yourself. You put yourself down. You won’t attack with the incredible movement that you can do because I can see the potential.’ Then I gave her a mandate.
“I said, ‘OK, Sanchez, during the rest of the process, when I give you a note I want you to insult me back,’” he says. “She goes, ‘What do you mean?’ I want you to answer me back: ‘Jacques, listen to me, you little piece of – ‘”
What follows is a hilariously profane French-accented piece of dialogue, which, as you might imagine, Sanchez the dancer initially protested she could not say to the man who employed her.
“The reason I said that was because I was trying to find a psychological way where she became a rock star,” Heim says. “Suddenly, she sees herself wearing a leather jacket, a tattoo, and she is a badass.”
Sanchez remains in the company today and is one of the 22 dancers in “Escape.”
Veterans and civilians
Ten years ago, when Diavolo decided to add dance workshops for military veterans to its educational programming, Heim himself got a taste of what it felt like to be intimidated in the dance studio.
“Working with the military, I don’t even know what to do,” he says, laughing. “They’re going to kick my ass. I was kind of scared, you know, who they were.”
So Heim more or less went AWOL for the first few days of what has become Diavolo’s dance workshops for veterans.
“Mr. Jacques Heim here got super shy and was hiding in his house going, ‘No, it’s OK, guys, you can do it. Just let me know how it goes,’” he says about the debut workshop in 2016.
Two days after it started, Diavolo’s education director called and told him it wasn’t going well and they needed his help.
“I go, ‘[Bleep], why?’” he says. “She said, ‘Jacques, because you need to do what you do.’”
The drive from his Encino home to downtown Los Angeles included F-bombs and flop sweat, he says.
“I’m talking to myself like I always do, and I say, ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do,’” Heim says. “And then I say, ‘Jacques, shut the [bleep] up.’ Just do what you’ve been doing for all those years with your dancers.”
In the studio, a square platform sat in the middle of the floor. Sockets in surface fit the lightweight poles each veteran carried.
“The pole represents your flag, represents your territory, represents a weapon, represents a tool that you can elevate others,” he says. “And I start to do my thing. I’ve become the drill sergeant.
“I look at them, and I say, “I don’t give a [bleep] about your pain that you felt or you feel,’” he recalls. “I don’t give a [bleep] if you cannot find a job or you can’t find a role in this society. We are going to create a battalion and a community together, and you’re never gonna abandon yourself.
“We’re going to build something today together, and we’re going to rise together. We’re going to cry together. We’re going to bleed together and bruise together. We’re going to find a way to rise because that is what we need to do as human beings.
“Silence in the room,” Heim says. “My dancers look at me like I’m freaking crazy. And they look at me, all of them, the military, and go, ‘Let’s start.’”
Heim and his dancers handled the choreography for the men and women who came from every branch of the service. Diavolo dramaturge France Nguyen Vincent helped them share their raw and emotional stories, and then crafted them into the soundtrack for their public performance.
And in the decade since then, hundreds more veterans in Southern California and around the nation have participated in similar programs, with more than 20,000 people attending the powerful performances the workshops create.
In doing the veterans programs, Heim says he came to realize several things about his life’s work. How the large architectural structures he uses recreate the sense of danger he felt as a boy walking on walls in Paris. How a sense of danger can forge a familial bond, a community, a battalion.
And most of all, how dance can challenge anyone to find their limit and surpass it.
“What I never realized, this is what I was doing for the last 34 years,” Heim says of the connection he found between the veterans workshops and his professional company. “I realized that I’ve been doing with my civilians, my dancers, what I’ve done with my veterans.
“I push them so they can discover what they’re made of and they can rise,” he says. “Because at the end of the game, who is the military veteran?
“Just another incredible human being like you and I. That’s it. That’s the connection. That is connecting the dots.”
Diavolo’s ‘Escape’
When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays through June 14
Where: L’Espace Diovolo, 616 Moulton Ave., Los Angeles
How much: $41.65 to $83.04
For more: See Diavolo.org/escape for tickets and information