DANCE REVIEW : Diavolo Troupe Satire Takes Aim at Dementia

Characters unhinged by cruelty dominated nearly all the pieces presented by Jacques Heim’s exciting Diavolo Dance Theater, Sunday in the Barnsdall Park Gallery Theater.

L.A.’s newest modern-dance ensemble, Diavolo specializes in neo-Expressionist dementia--especially processes of crazed brutalization targeting women. Remarkably, Heim brings elegance and even humor to this subject, with the gladiatorial woman-to-woman combat by Curtis Hurt and Stacia Voytek in “Crash” becoming a satiric feminist nightmare as shaped by a deliberately obnoxious video monologue written by Trevor Anthony and spoken by Stephanie Niznik.

In “Lapse,” Heim uses competitive swimming as a metaphor for a world in which women are constantly pitted against one another, their own limits and a hostile environment. The referees here wield lengths of stretched cable to limit how and where the women can move, with the manipulations growing ever more arbitrary and dehumanizing.

The sex drive only makes things worse, with faceless bogymen stalking Voytek in the simultaneously witty and scary date-from-hell fantasy, “A.W.O.L.,” in which inventive spatial tricks help define a situation with no escape. Beyond Lorie Kellogg’s nasty parody of Dr. Ruth, the two duets in “Open Match” isolate the desperation and consuming rage involved in seeking and surviving romance. (“Yes, I really love you,” Hurt screams at Heim furiously as they rip off one another’s clothes.)

Incorporating a text by Arthene Hammerman, “Letters From Home” shows three postal delivery workers growing alternately warped and wistful from the hate-filled correspondence they carry. In “Happy Birthday,” Boaz Barkan plays a child who grows up fast in the deadly, barbed-wire landscape of World War II. Insanity hovers in the atmosphere in both works; infection is inevitable.

In some of Heim’s works, movement values assume a subordinate role and others prove more clever in their stagecraft than deeply imaginative. But the program certainly establishes him as a creative force in the community, someone with both a compelling vision and the ability to inspire others to uncompromising performances.

Music by Juliet Prater and Jean-Pierre Bedoyan set the seal on an evening of high ambition and achievement.