Architecture in Motion
January 2014
A daredevil dance company who craft athletic movement and gutsy architectural feats on stage.
The agony of being a dancer is well known; torn ligaments, battered toes and immense amounts of physical strain all come with the job description. While a style such as ballet is incredibly taxing on the body, it is still a rare occurrence to gash blood from the forehead, get fifteen stitches or a broken set of ribs, toes, fingers… and continue to come back to it. It is this “different kind of danger” that Jacques Heim of Diavolo Dance Theater taps into daily.
Each Diavolo dancer must be perfectly synchronised with one another as Heim choreographs pieces anchored by large, human-powered structures, which move with and around the performers. After fifteen years of touring internationally the U.S. company are finally coming to Melbourne as a full troupe.
Diavolo’s February performance at The Arts Centre, Architecture in Motion, is comprised of two acrobatic shows in one. The first, Transit Space, is inspired by the majestic movement and communal stories of young skateboards Heim encountered on the streets. Inspiration came from past and present generations of skateboarders. Heim studied the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys as well as speaking to young men and women about how they still find solace and belonging in skateboarding.
“In a way Transit Space is not about skateboarding but about feeling lost, wanting to be part of a family,” says Heim. “You follow this young character who becomes part of a team, a community, a family. He starts skateboarding and suddenly has a sense of purpose.”
Looming, mobile skate ramps (a common backdrop for Californian street culture) are the “seed of the piece” as Heim affectionately refers to them. The dancers and the set frenetically move together on stage with spoken word poetry narrating and creating the energy of a familiar, developed urban environment.
While the dynamic, gymnastic movement of the dancers is the show, this sense of scene and structure is a consistent part of Diavolo’s performances and Heim’s creative process. “If I had to do a piece on a bare stage I wouldn’t know what to do. As soon as you put a structure in front of me I can see a human using it, that’s how I start.”
The other instalment of Architecture in Motion has similar roots. In Trajectoire dancers stretch themselves across the interior of a 12-feet ship structure, rocking it back and forth while colleagues sway on the deck above. Tension builds like waves and the interaction between humans and architecture becomes more strained.
Heim’s English was so poor when he first moved from France to America that movement and vision were his only tools to use to engage with his landscape. How we wander through our environment and interact with man-made constructions is a language and theme which has never left the choreographer. More than twenty years later, the engineering and human feat that is Diavolo Dance Theater’s Architecture in Motion is the ultimate expression of the same inspiration in thrilling choreographic style.
Architecture in Motion
Arts Centre Melbourne
5-9 February
diavolo.org
Images
1. Photo by Julie Shelton
2. Photo by Kristie Kahns
3. Photo by Kristie Kahns
4. Photo by Angela Weiss
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