Elisabeth Streb works on her newest performance in her Williamsburg studio.
Radical Bodies in Motion: Elizabeth Streb
MacArthur “genius”-grant recipient Elizabeth Streb has created a body of work that expands the traditional boundaries of the art form called dance.
By Brian McCormick
Spectacular, pulse-pounding excitement! An edge-of-your-seat non-stop thrill ride! Words typically reserved for big-budget action flicks are easily applied to the work of Elizabeth Streb and her company of athletic daredevils.
Streb’s choreography stretches the definitions, the contexts, the very charter of dance. Her language of pure movement is instinctual, animal, pre-rational; it glides over the rough terrain of post-modern dance, focusing on action rather than abstraction. Her inspirations come not only from Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, and Trisha Brown, but also from boxing, the circus, rodeo, and extreme random action that happens everywhere. Recently her movement studies have focused on Parkour, the sport invented in the Paris suburbs that involves scaling walls, roof running, and leaping from building to building.
Not surprisingly, the artist is very much like her work – intense, provocative, and typically poised with potential energy at the edge of her seat. Small and trim but no slave to fashion, she is nevertheless singular and commanding in presence, with a shock of maroon hair and punk framed glasses. Her garb is black jacket, cropped black pants, and Rockabilly shoes. This one of a kind, originally from the Rochester, New York, area, graduated from SUNY Brockport in 1972 with a degree in modern dance. She then went out to San Francisco, where she danced with Margaret Jenkins for two years before coming back east to New York City, where her movement experiments began in earnest.
Streb discovered early on that traditional dance was married to music and tended to borrow from compositional music forms instead of exploring its own palate. “If dance is an art of movement, then it’s not okay just to be on your feet, on a horizontal surface, transferring weight,” she says. “That’s like ignoring space.”
Her approach typically starts with a series of fundamental questions about issues pertaining to force. For example: Should I camouflage gravity for this piece, or not?
“I always found it disturbing that in a physical system like dance people would pretend there wasn’t anything physical happening to the body. Why do traditional dancers always pretend there is no effort, and why do they sort of erase all complicated forces like impact, rebound, and centrifugal force? For me,” she says, “dance is the art of action; it’s about waiting for a major physical sensation to occur. I’m interested in muscular possibility above all, not in what the soles of the feet can sustain. In my approach, the muscles ‘pop,’ and this muscular action combines with aspects of time, space, and precision. That’s one reason I call my work ‘popaction’ instead of dance.”
Her company, STREB, performs in or around structures designed by her to be confining and liberating simultaneously. The work pushes the limits of physical expression while eschewing any formal notion of technique. In performance, video cameras project and magnify moments of the action, thereby amplifying the exhilaration of spine-chilling antics and inviting audience members to linger over such experiences as physically felt sound created by the dense compression of air.
In “All/Wall,” a montage of several classic Streb works, company members throw themselves against a wall and each other. They dance at a 90-degree angle using a thin horizontal bar to support their weight, and move right side up and upside down along the top and middle of the wall. In “Bounce,” bodies fall, jump, smack, slap, flip, and roll – one, two, three at a time – onto an amplified reverberating mat. Similarly, in “Up” (a.k.a. “the trampoline piece”) company members fall, step, dive off, and spring back onto scaffoldings from a springy base. They exploit each other’s counter-force on the unstable webbing, add to their hang time by grabbing bars that stretch across the fly space, and often end by slamming onto floor mats.
“Lookup!” features dancers in harnesses flying out over the audience and pushing off the wall with arms and legs. They bounce, spin, twist, flip, and call out instructions to one another. In a signature piece called “Little Ease” Streb bangs against the walls of an open coffin-sized box, tumbling aggressively from side to side, refusing to accept the undeniable restrictions of the space. “Drop” uses bungee cords to turn two dancers into human slingshots. And in “Breakthru,” a dancer dives horizontally through a pane of glass.
Streb, who has taught for more than a decade in the Harvard Summer Dance Program, has conducted workshops in cities and universities all over the world. Developing a technique grounded in the science of physics, she has no interest in quitting while she’s ahead. Currently a Dean’s Special Scholar in New York University’s Draper Program, Streb is working toward an MA in Time and Space that requires her to study physics, philosophy, and architecture. The focus is on trajectories, falling, flying, colliding, velocity, and impact.
Streb does not believe in make-believe, stories, or music. Her work doesn’t lend itself to metaphor, character, or emotional association. Choreography for Streb involves actions that are more commonly associated with extreme sports or acrobatics than with ballet or modern dance. “I’m interested in what makes movement imperative,” she says. “To me, every action is acceptable. Action as subject, not body as object. Aesthetics of grace, the use or camouflage of gravity, the presence or absence of transitions, treatment of gender, the nature of spatial and temporal dimensions, and the use of sound in theatrical presentations have all been primary areas of exploration.” As with extreme sports (if without the competitiveness) Streb’s “popaction” technique is dangerous. Yet performers rarely get hurt.
“Fly” is Streb’s duel/duet with centrifugal force. The protagonist, harnessed into one end of a giant counterweighted beam that looks like a trap from a James Bond movie, flies around the stage in circles, interacting with the other dancers who help generate and react to the mechanical movement. They leap into the air as their Icarus passes, trying to mimic the flight but instead crashing flat-bodied onto mats that cover the stage. They fall backward just moments before the human flier hits them, flip the flier forward and back, and add their mass to the counterweight so the harnessed figure can literally dance on the ceiling. It leaves you gasping, laughing. Dancers fall into each other like dominoes, or turn themselves into another surface that the half-caged, half-bird human can walk on – as if walking on air was not good enough.
Elizabeth Streb and company have performed all over the world. Because she enjoys exploring the relationship between art and life, public performances of her works have been mounted not only in traditional venues but in unconventional settings that include Grand Central Terminal, the Houston Astrodome, the Minneapolis Metrodome before the opening of a Twins vs. Yankees game, in front of the Cyclone at Coney Island, and hanging in the dark vaults of the now off-limits Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage – where Streb suspended her dancers from 30-foot ceilings in harnesses so they could spin in the air as they bounced off a wooden wall.
These days, Streb can most often be found in her massive Williamsburg, Brooklyn, space called S.L.A.M. (Streb Laboratory for Action Mechanics). There she makes and presents work, and conducts classes for the local community. A converted mustard factory 100 feet deep, 30 feet high, and 50 feet wide, encompassing a 200-seat theater, is where the action’s been since 2003.
Among the highlights of Streb’s 25-plus-year career was her 1991 appearance on CNN with Republican Congressman Dick Armey of Texas, who in 1989 spearheaded a successful campaign against the scheduled exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. As recalled by Streb: “Jane Alexander, then head of the NEA, had been scheduled to appear on the Larry King show to discuss the censorship wars. She was in an awkward position, and didn’t want to engage. So I ended up alone. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. I said to Laura, my partner [author and Air America journalist Laura Flanders], it should be someone like Laurie Anderson. ‘But it’s you, Elizabeth’ – and she told me to think of the three things I wanted to say and nothing else.
“I had been briefed by the NCFE [National Campaign for Freedom of Expression]. I had received hundreds of faxes and pieces of advice. We were long past the Corcoran/Mapplethorpe controversy. I was staying in a hotel run by Republicans and I tried out my arguments on them. On the show, I performed ‘Little Ease.’ Dennis Miller was sitting in for Larry King. I came off breathing heavily and sweating. They really insulted me, saying thing like: ‘My 3-year-old could do that.’ But I didn’t respond. I was talking to American people: For the body, mind, and soul, arts and culture are as critical as housing. Artists aren’t crazy. They are creating a record for the future … I held my own, big time.”
Some critics have complained (as Dennis Miller did) that Streb’s work isn’t dance. Neither Streb nor the audiences care about classification, but the grant givers’ belief is obvious: Elizabeth Streb has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fund, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a major grant from the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund to support consecutive national tours from 1996-1999. She received a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for sustained investigation of movement. And in 1997 she received a John D. and Catharine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (“genius award”) for Choreography and Dance.
“The MacArthur grant is the Nobel Peace Prize for artists,” says Streb. “I have no idea how I got it. Everyone [in the field of choreography] who had gotten it had been at BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music]. I thought I’d never get it. But you never know. My heart stopped dead when I found out. It’s life-changing. In war, you get badges and stripes. I think I’m very weird; this put me inside normal. It’s such a commendable award from a group of really ethical people. I felt I could relax a little about my crazy ideas. I’m less outside. I’m not in the clique, I’m still transgressive, and I don’t like fancy parties. But it’s a fantastic placeholder for me and I continue to receive enormous pleasure from it. Of course the money was amazing. I could go to the ATM without anxiety, and basically had a five-year respite. I’m a child of the ’70s, still paying my college loans. Before the MacArthur grant I was living hand to mouth.”
Streb admits that she feels extremely privileged. “It’s a dream for this to be my life... The dance world is where I was rooted. I remember being in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, watching tennis players stretching. I wanted to make that my life, without being in someone else’s company. At 55 I’m here in the studio, building my action shows, entertaining action-obsessed people.”
She teaches and rehearses at her lab on North First Street in Brooklyn, with the door always open to the community. Open rehearsals, performances, STREB popaction classes for all age groups, the Espana Streb Trapeze Academy and other explorations of action mechanics happen there daily. S.L.A.M. is open to the public any time the staff is present.
“Hundreds of kids and parents come every week to the school. It’s rife with exchanges. In cottage industry, we don’t have a distribution method. We go to product, not to market. It allows us to be more caring about audience, to offer more sovereignty to them.”
One can almost imagine a future company of biotechnology-enhanced Streb-o-nauts, reared on an obsession with extreme action in real time, flying harness-free over the Williamsburg skyline.
“The lease is good until 2013,” says Streb. “After that, who knows? It’s dangerous to believe we’ll stay anywhere. I’d love to build a building, to buy this space. If I don’t get to do that we’ll be here max till the early part of 2015. But it’s impossible to say where my movement will be, who I’ll be then. There’s the likelihood of a LasVegas Streb show, which feels like destiny. There are people interested in producing it, but is the market ready? Maintaining the company is arduous. It’s hard to say whether I’ll be doing this when I’m 60 or 70.”
S.L.A.M. is at 51 North First Street in Brooklyn, and on the Web at strebusa.org.
