Music And Dance Reviews : Diavolo Troupe Descends With Style at Highways

If you’ve ever dreamed about running for a train as your suitcase falls open and your life spills out, and then a woman near you crawls into a bag while reading a newspaper and is carted off by a stranger, you know something about “Tete en L’air,” the latest work made by Jacques Heim and the performers of Diavolo Dance Theater. But maybe your sleepscapes are not as elegantly theatrical as this one, nor as cleverly whimsical and athletic.

Premiering on a program of older works at Highways Thursday, “Tete en L’air” is a kind of dream travelogue in which dancers stream down--and take off from--a giant set of wooden stairs. They start out in gray suits with briefcases, walking down the staircase with too many bags and furrowed brows. But they soon turn into hyper-dance Fred Astaires, zigzagging toward us or rolling, tumbling and slithering to buzzy electronic beats controlled by onstage musician-composer Jean-Pierre Bedoyan.

Softer taped music (by Juliet Prater, Lionel Cole and Greg Ellis) drifts around a slow-motion section, in which couples embrace, fight and become tangled sculptures. Stripped down to black boots and stylized long underwear, dancers climb in and out of trapdoors in the staircase, then begin a series of stairway-from-heaven descents, skiing and bicycling the steps, bumping down in soft suitcases like sacks of potatoes and surfing down on boogie boards. The last images are of single dancers falling and diving off the steps into the arms of others.

Something about negotiating life’s downhill turf with invention and style emerges. And because Diavolo uses athleticism, drama and design to spark ideas, the message is loud and clear.

* Diavolo Dance Theater, Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, tonight and Sunday at 7:30, $12. (213) 660-8587.