Jacques is worried his troupe will defect while performing in Brisbane. He’s only half joking

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.”