“When it happened in March, I went into seclusion,” said Jacques Heim, director and founder of Diavolo, of the Covid-19 pandemic. “I went into a little hole and I said ‘Holy s***, what the f*** am I going to do now? It took me a month to realize and to figure out. I was talking to myself and said, ‘let me see what you are made of.’ Slowly I got out of my little emotional and mental hole to look at how can I now create.”
One result of his soul-searching was the creation of a brand new work called This Is Me: Letters from the Front Lines. Heim’s work will have its world premiere on July 31st on The Soraya website at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT. It will also be available on the Diavolo website shortly thereafter.
This Is Me was created specifically to be filmed at the suggestion of Thor Steingraber, Executive Director of The Soraya.
“When Thor asked if we could do something, I said yes. We created this little film. Is this film good or not? I don’t know, but I do know it helped us physically, mentally and emotionally. It gave us new blood and new directions.”
Diavolo has long been active in partnering with veterans organizations. It was through conversations with both veterans and first responders that he found the qualities they shared and also the foundation of This Is Me.
“What kind of human beings are they? They are these amazing warriors,” Heim says by phone on the way to finish editing his project. “They fight wars with guns, missiles, tanks and now we fight an invisible enemy with medical personnel and medicine. There’s an interesting parallel. When you ask if they consider themselves heroes, they all say ‘absolutely not.’ If you ask if they are warriors, they say ‘yes.”
That distinction serves as the foundation for This Is Me.
“In the film I reverse the perspective. I put the warriors in pedestrian clothes and I put our dancers in kind of army clothes because it is really now the citizens who are the warriors. All of the dancers were wearing masks, but my warriors and first responders did not wear masks. I wanted to be able to see their faces. The mask, covering our faces, became the theme.”
Veterans and first responders appear as themselves in the film. Since they were not wearing masks during filming and the dancers were, Heim, his film crew and the Diavolo company were carefully monitored.
“We spent more time cleaning the structures, disinfecting, taking temperatures than shooting the film. We put the dancers in full quarantine living with one another. That’s the only way we could do the film. Every 18 minutes we had to stop for the dancers to go outside, take the mask off and breathe.”
Part of Heim’s standard description of Diavolo is “movement with architectural bonds.” Filming during the pandemic meant the relationship between these architectural structures and his dancers necessarily changed.
“When I was driving from my house for the first day of the shoot, I was thinking of Covid-19 as an obstacle – the same kind of physical obstacle we deal with when we work with physical structures. I ask my dancers when you see an obstacle in front of you do you get scared or do you find a way to understand the obstacle? Covid-19 is the most dangerous obstacle I’ve had to face. It’s around you but you don’t know where it is. We’re going to work with it. We work as a team and that’s how you do it in the trenches.”
French artist Edgar Degas, who is primarily known for his images of dancers, said that “Art is not what you see, but what you make other see.” Heim agrees and creating This Is Me not only allows him to express his gratitude to members of the military and first responders, but also to send a message to viewers about how we can each navigate our way through this crisis.
“Human beings are powerful and beautiful. Sometimes in tragic moments it is easy to criticize and put each other down, but at the end of the day we need each other and we have to have one another. If we do that we will not be defeated. We cannot use violence. We cannot use racism. We’re all from the same family called humans. Look at those beautiful vets and first responders who sacrifice for us. If they can do that, we can also do it.”
Four months after finding himself adrift, Heim’s film is done and ready to be seen. In other words, he found out that he, too, could do it.
“As artists we want to work with humans. We want to create. We want to help people. I want to do work with social impact. It’s when you are in this kind of situation that interesting art gets created. I know we are in the middle of a complete disaster, but behind disaster eventually we will see the light. But we have a long way ahead of us. I have no money or power. The only thing I have is my art form, so I have to do my own part and create work like This Is Me. The next project will have some kind of impact, too. That’s my part.”
Photo: France Nguyen-Vincent and Dancers (Photo by George Simian/Courtesy of Diavolo)