Photo by Angela Weiss

Last night’s program, closing out the classical season at the Hollywood Bowl, was an engaging combination of meat and potatoes repertoire (Weber’s "Invitation to the Dance" and Stravinsky’s "Firebird Suite," both emotionally rendered) and remarkably authentic cross-disciplinary production as LA’s Diavolo Dance Theatre performed a newly commissioned work set to LA Phil Artistic Director John Adams’ "Fearful Symmetries."  

Coming back from intermission for the dance and music program, a monolithic cube, almost but not quite obscuring the orchestra, sits center, riddled with rectangular holes, opaquely begging to be touched and examined. The music and the dancers arrive together. Their costumes are shirt sleeves and work pants that neutralize the dancers into everyman workers straight out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The music is chugging and industrious in such a cinematically familiar way that someone on YouTube has used it to score “Master Hands”, a 1936 factory film showing the manufacture of Chevy’s.

The company does what artistic factotum do – they approach the structure with curiosity, industriously exploring its mystery, climbing, hanging or leaping from its surfaces with the stunning acrobatics that mark Diavolo’s work. When one part of the cube suddenly protrudes out, the heft of Jacques Heim’s choreography is revealed. Each shift or bellow of the cube creates a ledge to be grappled at the same time it creates a hole to be sounded. The worker-dancers disassemble the cube into infinite shapes for the rest of the piece; the structure is much a dance partner as an environment to be manipulated.

If all of this sounds abstract, Diavolo’s sheer derring-do keeps any stunt-spectacular trained audience enrapt and along for the ride. The dancers leap great gaps to land on columns that become cityscape rooftops, or rock climb sheer walls even as they shift to become precipices escaped by Olympic dives and dramatic basket catches. Folks, these people get some serious air.

A few remarkable sequences draw upon no contemporary reference as much as video games, as dancers Frogger their way through narrowing passages just in the nick of time, or dodge rotating blocks through sheer skill and rhythm.

Just at the moment that it seems the cube will be inevitably reassembled, the company replaces their preoccupation with the thing in their midst with the individuals they have been tossed in beside, and the night and season close with a satisfyingly earned Hollywood ending.

Reach reporter Rebecca Kinskey here.

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