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Jennifer Olivas
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When she was 3, Jennifer Olivas’ parents took her to her first dance class, and she was hooked. Growing up in Festus, she danced and tumbled competitively, and won national and regional competitions. After graduating from Webster University, she went on perform with The Slaughter Project, Inside Chicago Dance, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, and was a founding member of LehrerDance, an “organically athletic” modern dance company in Buffalo, N.Y.
A few years ago, she auditioned for Los Angeles–based Diavolo, a company that blends martial arts, modern dance, acrobatics and even circus tricks with huge, oftentimes moving set pieces like aluminum wheels, ladders, or giant peg boards. Olivas, who always preferred more athletic dance, made the company. Late last year, she moved back to the Midwest to teach dance at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, but she still gets called back to perform with Diavolo as an alternate. She will be performing with the troupe on February 28 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center.
We talked to Olivias about her experiences with the company; her first-person account follows.
I grew up taking everything: ballet, jazz, tap, modern... And then I also started doing acrobatics and tumbling when I was around 4.
There weren’t a whole lot of opportunities to dance in Festus. I took dance in St. Louis at Motion Express School of Dance and Acrobatics. Every night I would drive about an hour to get to dance class. My parents would take me until I was old enough to drive. It made it easier to get that first car.
The challenge is to keep myself going to the gym and staying fit, so I can still fly through the air and have the strength to keep up with the choreography that’s going on in Diavolo. There’s a lot of cross-training involved.
Dancing can be hard on your feet. In Diavolo, we wear shoes, which is great. Most of the time, you’re barefoot dancing on stage. The biggest trouble for me is I have bunions. I started developing them probably around high school. They are hereditary. But also dancing en pointe can contribute to that. Some days it’s okay, and some days it’s really painful. Some days I cannot dance at all.
A friend of mine was planning to audition for Diavolo, and I had heard of them through other friends. They told me, “‘Huffy,’ (I go by Huffy) ‘you’d be perfect for this company! It incorporates everything you love and you’re good at.’” I just always told myself the West Coast was too far from where I grew up, and my family
I met my husband in Diavolo, which is the greatest thing ever. The very first piece that I had to learn in Diavolo, I partnered with him and we had to do a 30-second kiss in the middle of the piece. I was so nervous to do that, and I never would have been, but I still tell him there was something about him that made me so nervous to have to kiss him.
In a piece called “Trajectoire,” there’s a move called an eagle fly. We’re rocking back and forth on a 3,000 pound steel boat with wood panels on top of it, and there’s a part at the end of the first section where I get launched off the boat and fly across stage and land in two gentlemen’s arms. When they first sent me the video telling me which part I had to learn, I thought for sure, because I was new, that they wouldn’t make me learn that fly and I showed up to rehearsal and Shauna [Martinez] our rehearsal director said, “So are you ready to fly today?”
Diavolo, $35-$55, February 28 at 8 p.m. and March 1 at 2 & 8 p.m., Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center, 1 University Blvd., 314-516-4949, touhill.org.
Check out images from Trajectoire, and another piece called Transit Space. Photography by Ben Gibbs, Shawn Inglima, Michael Misciagno, and Julie Shelton.
