Diavolo founder Jacques Heim brings a daredevil performance to town

Jacques Heim is a charismatic talker who uses your name for emphasis and delights in outrageous comments.

He’s a natural showman, boyish for his 62 years, with the self-possession of a practised rule breaker.

“Nick, I have to tell you, I was never a dancer, I was never a gymnast. I was never an acrobat,” he says in French-accented English.

“I was a rebel, I was a punk, I got kicked out of six different schools in Paris. I was a little wild and so they had to put me in jail for a while, and then they let me go.

“So my family told me: ‘Jacques, you need to leave, you need to go to the land of opportunity, America.’ So I said ‘great’.”

Heim is the founder and creative director of Diavolo: Architecture in Motion, a Los Angeles-based company bringing its daredevil style of performance to Australia for the Brisbane Festival.

The company’s spectacular dance pieces involve huge geometric props that roll, pivot and swing while the performers climb, balance, hang, fall and jump.

“This is something I will remember, it was incredible, congratulations,” Simon Cowell told the company after its debut on America’s Got Talent in 2017. (Diavolo would go on to be finalists.)

Surprise and delight are arguably in Heim’s blood: his grandfather and namesake was an influential couturier who shocked the postwar fashion world with his two-piece swimsuit the Atome – the forerunner of the bikini – and pioneered prêt-a-porter (ready to wear) clothing.

“I guess some of my artistic juice came from him,” Heim says. “I’m really interested about what is innovation, how do you know if an idea is a good idea, how does it affect people?”

As the headline act for Brisbane Festival the company is presenting Escape, a show with 22 performers that “follows a group of humans as they … escape from their ordinary lives into a surreal landscape of infinite possibilities”.

“The seed of the show started as revolting against the state of the world that we live in,” Heim says.

“You know what’s going on in the States. It’s a little crazy, especially with the government, who completely cancel every aspect of the arts.” (The Trump administration cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts in 2025.)

“The reason it’s called Escape is very simply because we wanted to escape this crazy world that we live in, in the United States.”

Heim does not need much encouragement to say what life is like in the country that has been his home for more than three decades.

“When we were creating and rehearsing Escape, we had the ICE agents actually moving around our studio…

“I love America. I don’t want to be a hypocrite because it has given me so much opportunity, but I do have to say in a very genuine way: it’s not the same country.”

Back in his punk days, in 1983, Heim attended liberal arts college Middlebury in Vermont, and started getting interested in acting. But his garbled English was holding him back, so when friends suggested he try dance instead something clicked.

Architecture was another love, and he began to see parallels, formulating a style of prop-based movement that was not quite dance, not quite circus, and not quite acrobatics.

Heim created Diavolo on graduating in dance from CalArts, and its first full-length show debuted in 1999.

By 2005, Heim was high profile enough to be invited to direct Cirque du Soleil’s show Kà, which is still running at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

“That was my PhD, because I learned a lot. I nearly got fired at least 34 times,” he quips.

He is adamant that Diavolo is “not a circus company”. The distinction is a philosophical one: circus acts can involve danger, whereas danger, for Diavolo, is a “theme”.

“I need to put my performers in a danger zone on purpose. Because when you put a group of people into a state of survival, they come closer together and help one another, they don’t think about themselves, but they think about others and how to create safety around each other.

“So we have major safety protocols, and we have many steps that we implement.”

Pushing performers beyond their physical and emotional limits has been a feature of Heim’s performance workshops with military veterans, a program Diavolo launched in 2016 as a way of treating PTSD.

“I operate as a drill sergeant. Even if some of the veterans are in a wheelchair, I ask them, can you get out of your wheelchair? Can you crawl? I make them crawl and move with all the dancers that elevate them.”

Veterans have reported that taking part helped them avert self-harm. Heim received a Meritorious Civilian Service Medal for the program.

He says his company is looking forward to performing in Brisbane for the first time, having previously appeared at the Arts Centre Melbourne in 2014.

“I hope my dancers will not defect and stay, because I have to tell you, Australia is a great country, has a lot of great arts. I won’t be surprised if some of my dancers decide to defect.

“Who knows, Nick, maybe I will move the company to Australia, and I will never leave Brisbane?”

I mention that the far right is on the rise in Australia too, and may have something to say about that.

“Is it? It’s weird, because it’s happening in one country after the other … No one is really safe today in 2026.

“So how do we find equilibrium? How do we find a sense of hope? It’s about being together, it’s about creating a community. That was the core of Escape that we created among our 22 performers: a sense of community.

“At the end of the day, Nick, we’re from the same family called humans, and how can we support and help one another?”

Escape runs at the Playhouse, QPAC, September 23-27.