Relationship Gymnastics

With its emphasis on sex, technology and athleticism plus its breezy, almost self-mocking style of physical risk, Jacques Heim’s Diavolo Dance Theatre may be the ultimate Los Angeles company. Certainly, its seven-year rise from cramped alternative spaces to major international festivals is unprecedented for a Southland contemporary ensemble. And its ability to fill Royce Hall on Thursday for the premiere of the full-evening “Catapult: La Comedie Humaine” decisively set the seal on its first phase of development.

Starting with its two-part title, this plotless exploration of relationships reflects the unresolved tension in Heim’s body of work between showing and telling: state-of-the-art gymnastic display versus trenchant commentary on modern life. Heim wants to be a showman and a satirist, a pop culture icon and a serious choreographer at the same time--and sometimes he succeeds, though never, alas, for very long. Not yet anyway. The lure of the catapult always ends up eclipsing the human comedy.

In the opening scene, for example, Darren Press descends from above the stage, hanging by his ankles, to lift Meegan Godfrey up among the stars for a rapturous love duet that manages to sustain the fantasy of weightless, airborne romance through constant, inventive changes of position.

Soon, however, it’s clear that the acrobatic challenges interest Heim far more than the metaphor he’s created, with the performers required to clamber over each other in ever more unlikely and ungraceful maneuvers. As the sequence becomes increasingly focused on difficult handholds and mountain-climbing strategies, the illusion of lyric lovemaking will crash to Earth even if Press and Godfrey don’t.

The Heim dichotomy finds its complement in the production design by Jeremy Railton: half-modern quasi-Pilobolus functionalism (the clunky furniture units that support freewheeling gymnastic extravaganzas) and half-backdated neo-Folies Bergeres glamour (Godfrey dangling from a glittering crescent moon in the finale).

Unified by a cool silver-unto-pewter color scheme, the production features a large silvery sculpture of a reclining woman facing upward, raising herself off the floor on extended arms and legs. This sculpture becomes a platform for dancing and its pose also turns up as a choreographic motif--a symbol of the conflict between traditional and contemporary concepts of womanhood that provides much of the comedy in the work.

When, for instance, Robert Lou and Zoltan fight like cavemen over Godfrey--only to find her easily trouncing both of them--we’re in the same universe of potent, self-aware females and bemused, unequal males that Pilobolus physicalized so memorably nearly a quarter-century ago in “Untitled.”

Diavolo not only finds these gender roles still good for a laugh but uses them as the animating principle of an elaborately choreographed sequence on a giant ottoman, with the women seductively emerging at the top and later sending the men crashing down below. Soon after, the ottoman gets upended and stripped to its skeleton: voila a wheel of life initially manipulated by Nick Erickson, but eventually enlisting the full company in the most spectacular hanging/vaulting/balancing feats of a very virtuosic spectacle.

In the last few moments, the wheel comes apart and forms rocking chairs for the four men to sink into while ogling Godfrey on that glittering crescent moon: her prowess and their passivity forming a rueful valedictory image for Heim’s uneven but exciting and surpassingly humane comedie.

In addition to the company members already mentioned, Diavolo enlisted Monica Campbell and Allen Moon (deft in the first sex-war skirmish), Lara Hudson and Laura Everling (terrific in an Act 1 duet involving a couch unit) and Sita Acevedo (superbly pliant in an Act 2 duet with Lou). A lush score by film composer Michel Colombier added distinction to the occasion, though Heim often violated its flowing lyricism with punchy, high-speed feats. A fault to correct in Diavolo’s next seven years.