Diavolo|Architecture in Motion: ‘Escape’

A Thrill Ride Like No Other

Cue the Dramamine! Seriously, call it Brutalist dance, hyperphysical dance or dancing on the edge – as well as over, under and around bespoke structures – but whatever it’s called, it’s created by Diavolo|Architecture in Motion, the Los Angeles-based troupe founded in 1992 by Jacques Heim. Continuing to challenge the conventional wisdom surrounding dance by pursuing unique and inventive ways of storytelling, Heim and crew, after performing in more than 250 cities spanning 14 countries and having been seen on television by 100 million people worldwide, are presenting Escape on their home turf, recently dubbed L’Espace Diavolo.

With 17 performances running through November at their 6,000 square foot performance space at the Brewery, Escape is an up close and personal experience that promises to be a thrill ride unlike any other. Happily, this reviewer can attest to the fact that it most certainly was! Divided into two acts, the 70-minute work, directed and choreographed by Heim, features 22 performers and structures from the troupe’s past performances, a “best of,” if you will.

Indeed, from cubicles, ramps and a cage, to the two-and-a-half ton aluminum wheel (Humachina) and the 14-by-17-foot undulating boat showcased in the troupe’s 1999 classic, Trajectoire, Escape is set to a soundtrack that includes pop tunes by, among others, Pink Floyd, Alicia Keyes and Harry Styles. The dance-making was also updated, with Kate Dougherty billed as associate choreographer.

Escape/The Cage, featuring Chloe Reynolds, photo by Cheryl Mann ©  2025

Jean-Yves Tessier’s moody lighting – deep crimsons, sultry blues and varying spotlights – added to the fervency and beauty of the work, while the performers were akin to a brigade of brilliance: Sliding, breaking and back-flipping through a giant jungle gym-like cage to the strains of Pink Floyd’s The Wall (sound design by Simon Larson Greenberg), this is no children’s playground, but a scenario where commitment, trust and joy are not only front and center, but essential, with Chloe Reynolds, seemingly suspended in mid-air and showing no fear as a crew of able-bodied dancers support the prop from below while gazing upward.

That the dancers, clad in all-black (costumes by David Touster) are mere feet away from the audience, compounds the heart-stopping effectiveness of the experience. A voice-over (dramaturgy by France Nguyen-Vincent) intones that Escape is “a chance to feel something I haven’t before,” which could have been the evening’s mantra.

Moving fluidly from a cage to a series of cubicles, the performers, among them, Chris Borrero, Gabriela Collazo, Aaron Franco and Caribay Franke (she’s also the troupe’s project and production manager), ebulliently eject themselves off the multi-purpose structures when not deploying helium-like leaps and backwards flips.

Escape/Passengers, © Cheryl Mann 2025.

And while the first act was, according to Heim, “very intense, fast, in your face,” and Act 2 was “more peaceful and elegant,” this writer found both acts equal in über-human feats, i.e., with strength and quasi-insanity ruling, the latter meaning, “Don’t try this – any of this – at home.”

If one wonders whether a door can be dangerous, Diavolo’s door, albeit one on wheels, proved to be next level furnishings. With dancers entering, exiting, and perching atop it – hello, Larson Greenberg and Daugherty – and the width looking to be the size of an Olympian’s balance beam, this was funhouse frippery taken to the max. And, at times, the performers even seemed to be suspended from the prop…horizontally!

As a door can also be a metaphor for a transition, an opportunity, or rite of passage, this door then led the performers to a work featuring ramps. With U2 bursting forth from the speakers, there was a plethora of jumping, somersaulting, cartwheeling and tumbling. A Beautiful Day, for sure, with several of the cast, among them, Jarel Lewis, Ryan Ruiz (he’s also an assistant choreographer and rehearsal director), Claire Schick and Emrose Seidenberg, appearing as if they’d been shot out of a canon. In other words, the energy was fusillade-level.

Escape/Transit Space, © Cheryl Mann 2025.

Part of the exhilaration of a Diavolo concert, though, is the (literal) ride. And ride the dancers did in Passengers (2016), wherein the company assembles and disassembles the ingenious structure designed by longtime collaborator, Adam Davis, who, along with Daniel Wheeler, Mike McCluskey and Tina Trefethen, comprise the team that designs, fabricates and engineers the structures, respectively, with Mark Baker credited as technical production consultant.

That said, this is an emotional roller coaster jaunt on a set that also breaks apart and comes together, alternately resembling, among other things, a locomotive, a subway car, a submarine and a stairway—to heaven or hell, depending on your viewpoint – and recalling the staircase of Heim’s 1995 work, the Magritte-influenced farce, Tête en L’Air, a set also featuring trap doors. Kudos to the dancers, among them, Chadwick Gaspard, technical director Steven Jasso, Nick Signor, and Liana Kulchin, passengers with whom we would be honored to share a ride, just not this one!

In Transit Space (2012), Heim appropriated skateboard culture as a metaphor for finding one’s way – through public space and in life. The set, movable wooden skateboard ramps and interlocking metal bridges serving as springboards for a flurry of skittering, running up and down, and several hip-hopish solos and duos, the journey is one of confidence, ebullience and youth, all in service of – pardon the pun – a well-heeled community, an artistic society, a cult, if you will, of fantastic bodies in motion, here featuring Jarel Lewis, Dae Marcuz, Abraham Meisel, Mia Moraru and a slew of others.

Escape/Fluid Infinities, featuring Emily Grable, © Cheryl Mann 2025.

But wait: There’s more; a lot more. Humachina’s wheel, which has more configurations than a Rubik’s cube, saw the dancers balancing on untethered portions before they were then shuttled across the floor by their comrades, ending in a giant wheel, sans the ferris portion. Talk about a big rig! Set to a thrumming percussive score, this number seemed to literally shake the studio rafters as various terpsichores – Kittrell Poe, Isabella Reveles and Co-El Rodriguez (she’s also Diavolo’s director of education programs) – again strutted their superhuman stuff.

Continuing to pull from Diavolo’s large repertory, the dancers were then ready for take-off in Fluid Infinities, the third part of the trilogy, L’Espace du Temps, that the Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned from Heim in 2007 and was performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 2013. With a 1,600-pound dome the central structure (according to Heim, that dome could be an egg, a spaceship or even somewhere in the unconscious), the dancers executed thrilling duets, trios and Rockettes-like unisons, alternating, at times, with popping out of the Swiss cheese-type holes, its crevices luminescent.

Escape/Passengers, featuring Evan Hernandez, © Cheryl Mann 2025.

Clad in Touster’s white and cream costumes, the capeless but superhuman performers seemed safe within the orb’s confines, yet were constantly on the move: exploring, bonding, wondering, stirring. Beholding this spectacular morphing scenario, this action painting of beautiful bodies, this Einsteinian world of physics made fleshly, we symbolically rode along with the troupe as they glided/crawled/pulled/pushed themselves through the half dome, with Emily Grable emerging from an elongated Plexiglas tube in yet another nod to outer space.

“Houston, we don’t have a problem. What we have here…is art.”

And yet, these tireless movers, including Allison Slamann and Matt Wagner, had a grand finale to perform, Diavolo’s legendary Trajectoire. Call this writer a Diavoholic, but, after seeing the work countless times since its 1999 premiere, and first writing that it “was more Dramamine than drama,” it is, without a doubt, a masterpiece of movement, a complete merging of story and skill, what the composer Richard Wagner would term, Gesamthkunstwerk, a total work of art.

Escape/Humachina, © Cheryl Mann 2025.

Set to Nathan Wang’s original score—a propulsive, synthesized affair punctuated with harp sounds and Taiko drums – the piece is not exactly Titanic or Pirates of the Caribbean, but watching the gravity-defying feats of these astonishingly courageous performers indulging in rounds of jumping, sliding and even pirouetting on the lit-from-within craft, leaves the viewer in a state of heightened apprehension: Will they or won’t they get crushed under the structure; land safely into the hands of their dexterous partners after swan-diving through the air; stay upright while the roiling turbulence of their own devising never seems to abate?

Such stomach-churning moments are electrifying, and, together with the notion that a human being is both fragile and powerful, reckless and cautious, ecstatic and sad, but most of all, alive, makes a Diavolo concert a singularly profound and entertaining experience. As Heim’s philosophy explores the relationships and interactions between the body and an architectural environment, one leaves the troupe’s program of peak daredevilry with a heightened sense of self.

Truly a performance unlike any other, Escape has this reviewer pondering the question she posed in a Los Angeles Times review in 1996: “One wonders if next time Diavolo might attempt going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”

Whatever the troupe does next, the memory of Escape shall reign supreme in the annals of Los Angeles dance history, because Diavolo – and its bold and innovative founder, Jacques Heim, the embodiment of rizz – make this world a better, more hopeful place. And hope is the highest form of art.

Escape/Trajectoire, © Cheryl Mann 2025.

Cover image: Escape/Trajectoire, © Cheryl Mann 2025; Escape is playing at L’Espace Diavolo at the Brewery through November 23. For tickets: diavolo.org/escape