Leaving the hospital, startled workers puzzle over a handful of people climbing around like youngsters at a playground ? only they are on the exterior of the new parking structure. One passerby stops to ask the slight blond woman at the staircase base what is going on. Choreographer Heidi Duckler explains that these are dancers exploring the possibilities of the parking structure for a new site specific work being premiered in August.?

Duckler's gracious response reflects having fielded such queries over three decades as she, her dancers and their collaborators invade, create and perform in unconventional locations. While her venue specific skills have gained her an international reputation, Duckler's deepest art may be her ability to draw audiences into L.A.'s cultural archeology, revealing often overlooked history in sites scattered throughout L.A.'s many communities and then linking the past with often cautionary, sometimes anthem-worthy insights that resonate.?

From her early explorations of movement possibilities in a laundromat and along the concrete banks of the L.A. River (with performers that included a motorcycle gang), what began as Collage Dance Theater morphed into the eponymous Heidi Duckler Dance. In recent years, HDD could be found on a multi-masted schooner in San Pedro and in a historic abandoned jail in Lincoln Heights. HDD's traveling?telenovela?moved to a different L.A. locale for each chapter and at the San Gabriel mission where the book?Ramona?was set, Duckler provided a contemporary reconsideration of that early California romance.?

Duckler draws audiences out of familiar L.A. and into historic sites that still have tales to tell, sometimes for the last time. An excursion under a downtown high-rise into the deep bowels of what was once L.A.'s Red Car streetcar garage and a walkabout through Chinatown's oldest movie theater proved to be their last gasp before redevelopment.

HDD also has created a traveling site, an enormous skeletal fish sculpture that travels with Duckler and other invited choreographers who create works exploring environmental issues and larger climate change concerns under the banner?Ebb and Flow. Many choreographers intermittently offer site specific work in L.A., but when it comes to Heidi Duckler Dance, nobody does it better.

Heidi Duckler Dance, Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Drive, downtown; 90015.

Stay Awake at Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Campus, Front Lawn, Wilmington Ave. & 120th St.; Sat., Aug. 24, 7:30 p.m., picnicking at 6 p.m., free w/ reservation. Free parking in Structure A;?heididuckler.org.