CALGARY -- Diavolo is a community of movement.
The unique interdisciplanary performance company, which blends dance, architecture, theatre, design and music, opens Thursday at the Jubilee Auditorium, where it will present its one-of-a-kind performance to a lot of very cold Calgarians braving windchill readings of -40 to see them.
Think, for a moment, how it felt to be Jacques Heim, the man behind Diavolo, and his Los Angeles-based company of dancers and designers, who arrived earlier this week in a city that by Wednesday, was Siberia.
"It is actually the coldest place I've (ever) been," Heim said Thursday, in a press conference at the Jubilee.
"My skin is peeling off, it Is fantastic. I am pouring lotion onto my face — but the people are fabulous. They are fantastic. We are excited to be here."
Heim grew up in Paris, got kicked out of six schools, fled to the U.S., dreamt of becoming an actor and studied at a college in Vermont, but ran into a pretty significant obstacle quite early in his acting career.
"My English was so bad," he said.
"I had friends in the dance department who said, 'Jacques, why don't you dance? At least you don't have to speak.' I said, that's fantastic."
He loved the one true superpower that dance possesses: a universal language that Heim honed as a choreographer of Cirque du Soleil's Ka.
It brought his company to NBC's America's Got Talent in 2017, where they landed in the top 10, along the way presenting five new pieces, including a pair — Trajectoire and Voyage — that are part of the Jubilee show.
Diavolo is being presented in Alberta by the Alberta Ballet, which has become the resident company of reinventing classical dance over the past decade under the tutelage of Jean Grand-Maitre, in pop ballets such as Balletlujah and The Fiddle and the Drum, and more recently, in Frankenstein.
"We are thrilled to have them on our stage," said Grand-Maitre. "And we hope you will be mesmerized by their fearless athletic prowess and artistic daring.
"Having found their own unique methods for exploring human experience, they have created a powerfully engaging aesthetic which is absolutely their own. They're a riveting ensemble of artists who are successfully developing exciting new vocabularies of movement and theatrical expression."
And as far as facing extreme cold temperatures, Heim said that dovetails quite nicely into the philosophy under which his company operates.
"There's a metaphor about the weather and what we do onstage," Heim said. "My dancers, they're like gladiators. They're fighters.
"If something is wrong onstage, they're gonna have to deal with it, like in life. We don't believe in obstacles, we believe in how do you deal with obstacles? Together. As a group. As a unit."
That came in handy walking out of the airport into a brisk –30 C day.
"They have that kind of mentality," he said, "So we open the door, we feel the cold, and we attack it. We embrace it."
