d. Sabela grimes

Choreographer and performer d. Sabela grimes may be the Los Angeles dance world’s best-kept secret. Since relocating here from Philadelphia three years ago, the former Rennie Harris Puremovement collaborator has appeared around the world yet avoided showcasing any of his highly original dance theater work locally.

But that changed Friday night with the premiere of the riveting 45-minute solo “Bulletproof Deli” at Highways Performance Space. One of a mere handful of artists who make up the vanguard of hip-hop fusion, grimes offered a nonstop imaginative feat well worth the wait.

Some audience members might have recognized grimes as Ben V. from Harris’ “Rome and Jewels” (seen here in 2000), but nothing could have prepared them for grimes’ electric stage presence. It’s as if his every nerve and muscle was illuminated from within.

A master storyteller, grimes spun hip-hop moves and poetic monologues to evoke the world revolving around the titular Chinese-run soul-food deli/convenience store, a late-night joint where locals negotiate cultural and class differences and encounter friends or enemies on the street outside.

Here we meet the thuggish, basketball-dribbling Dat Boy, who slides along a razor’s edge of emotion, joking one moment, ready to explode in anger the next.

Barely containable, Dat Boy is always in motion, whether performing to the convenience store’s security cameras or frenetically rhyming about the inescapable roundelay of retribution that defines the contours of his life.

Here too we meet Dat Boy’s polar opposite, the hymn-singing, HIV-positive Tender Boy, who reflects on his Saturday night dance floor indiscretions in one of the evening’s highlights, an affecting display of funk dancing and voguing.

Grimes imbues these characters with complexity, etching each detail of their struggles with the subtlest of articulations, which ricochet through him when words fail.

Likewise, he fleshes out the universe of the deli, using his extensive repertoire of pop and lock moves to express everyday transactions such as the passing of money beneath its smeared-glass cashier’s window.

As grimes explained in a discussion after the performance, “Bulletproof Deli” has been an ongoing contemplation of the many vectors on which anonymous lives intersect or, as in the final, shocking moments of this new version, collide.

That he is able to convey all this on an empty stage with just bare-bones lighting effects underscores grimes’ gifts.