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Sitting next to Elizabeth Streb as she conducts rehearsal is part thrill-ride, part strategy huddle, and proves to be a juggling act between talking physics and trying to ignore bodies as they whiz by. The zeal with which Streb operates, electrifies her Williamsburg space, the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (S.L.A.M), where the company and their fearless leader prepare for their biggest show yet, Kiss The Air at the Park Avenue Armory.

The STREB dancers in rehearsal, Photo Alvaro Gonzalez for The Dance Enthusiast

Streb, a MacArthur Fellow, and a self-described “action architect” is a kid in her own candy store of machines and contraptions that are all designed with one primary goal: “to expand the capacity of action to tell its own story.” Streb goes on to explain, “If I’m going to make a 40 minute dance to a Beethoven's such-and-such, that’s really not what movement does best. You’re tampering with its nature by putting it to music at all. Music is the true enemy of dance as we know: it artificializes movement. Movement is causal, so (the two) really don't go together like that.”

Even though she doesn’t use music, Streb compares her machinery to an orchestra needing different keys and pitches to examine the capacities of sound, musing, “It’s a whole episodic symphony of one move after another." The particular “instrument” the performers are working with when I arrive at rehearsal is the circling ladder,which Streb describes as “a pure diameter.” She continues, “circles are really pure action, otherwise you have to stop and start constantly. That’s not real. It’s tampered with.To turn is everything. That’s where the forces get generated…depending on where the body is, it (the forces) comes as a surprise to us."

Referencing her magnificent steel invention (between issuing words of warning and encouragement to the dancers) Streb reminds us, "We spent a lot of human hours trying to figure out how to hang on to this thing…we even have a t-shirt that says ‘never let go’.”

A purist if ever there was one, Streb intends to keep challenging herself, her performers, and her audiences to bring themselves ever closer to a real-time present moment. That pure second of delicious reality that you experience in her work is born of at least a year of designing, researching, building, and physical investigation by her company. She rigorously questions the laws of physics and semiotics to retrieve the tiniest pearls of authentic movement. Streb explains, “The audience rules in terms of language transmission.Let’s just say searching for the content of action, is, for me, more fundamental than meaning. Meaning is assigned by the audience and the outside eye. I can’t assign meaning, I haven’t got control over it, but I can try to excise content out of our language. I’m trying to get to the part where there are no more parts. They used to think the atom was the final thing, but guess what, it’s not. And maybe by smashing protons together they’re going to find more fundamental particles.”

A Day in Rehearsal with STREB: The Slideshow

Whether she’s smashing protons or using the pneumatic ejection systems, scaffold towers, bungees, air rams, and zip lines to study the impact of bodies (up to 50 mph), I am definitely having a real moment as I watch the company run through Ascension, the ladder piece. This work is impossible to “mark”–it’s all real, all the time.The margins for error are almost nonexistent.

In parting, Streb leaves us with this: “I want people to watch us move and think, ‘that doesn’t follow the rules I’ve been taught operate on earth…”

Mission accomplished.

Comments

Woke up to controversy this a.m.....I didn\'t realize Mr.Terry Dean Bartlett\'s history...so for anyone who is unclear...here are 2 NYTimes links to enlighten you...I don\'t wish to be an apologist for Ms. Elizabeth Streb or to attack her. She and her work stand on their own- very well. I am very interested to know what the current company feels about the risks involved in their work. They are not forced to be there. They choose to be \"extreme\" and participate in this \"extreme vision\". What kind of artist goes for that experience---and with that level of fervor and devotion? Personally I am not an \"action hero\" and would never seek out dancing along side swinging cement blocks or performing some of the other dare-devildry that I witnessed last evening...BUT I did get revved up and oooh and ahhh and was amazed as I watched. I rooted for them. It was spectacular stuff. I didn\'t feel as if I was a participant in \" cruelty in action\", though I did think \"better them than me up there.\" Is it art? That\'s up to you to decide. There were moments that transported me. I am all up to get more comments. I cannot and will not be part of an attack campaign, however. \n\nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/arts/dance/23stre.html\n http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/arts/dance/02stre.html?pagewanted=all
Dec 17, 2011 7:52am

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-new-yorkers-on-the-10th-anniversary-of-911 \"Earlier this summer I went to see a three-act circus performance at the plaza of the World Financial Center. The third act was a troupe of gymnasts who jumped and tumbled in various ways off three-story scaffolding down onto a foam crash pad. The piece was titled “The Human Fountain.” Classical music played and was interrupted by heavy explosions of bass every time a body crashed. Swan dives and smiles, twirls and flips, bodies crossing and nearly colliding. It was basically synchronized falling. And it was fun, for about two minutes. The show went on for ten.\n\nAfter awhile I looked away at the sun lowering over the Hudson, then back past the Winter Garden of the WFC to the hole in the sky where you can see the replacement towers being built. It hit me. How dare they? How dare these gymnasts perform an act of bodies falling, smiling as they plummet to the ground with explosions of bass right across the street from where victims of a terrorist attack jumped and fell a hundred stories to their deaths? How dare these clowns try to pass it off as some cool, hip, exciting art piece that everyone should love?\n\nI looked around to see if anyone else was offended. I felt confused, and then sick, and then confused again, because I knew I had no real connection to 9/11. To be honest, I had never even seen the footage of the people falling from the towers. What right did I have to get upset? The director, dressed in all black with black sunglasses and a black faux-hawk, grabbed a microphone after the show, asked if there were any questions but did not wait for them. She proceeded to talk ad nauseam about the piece, how to move bodies and “form movements with flesh that creates content, not meaning, but content [sic].” I wanted to punch her in the face. She wasn’t responsible. She had no idea what she was doing. I felt even sicker.\n\nMaybe it’s fine to have a bunch of people falling right across the street from the WTC and call it art. Maybe people affected by 9/11 have moved on and found a way to heal. I have not healed. I never had a chance to be injured let alone to heal from any pain. But I know what those gymnasts did was wrong and disrespectful. I didn’t lash out then, because I didn’t want to offend all those who responded differently to the performance—who have healed. I didn’t want people to yell at me for opening up old wounds that I had no business touching. I was just some ignorant Californian who had just moved to New York—not even New York, but Brooklyn. So, I just left.\n\nSince then I’ve watched countless hours of 9/11 coverage on the Internet. I try to find the best, the clearest, the most horrifying videos. I have seen so many people fall from the towers. I have felt things, I think, but still have no answers. I don’t know if I should be upset, traumatized, or indifferent like I once was. I want to accost every New Yorker and ask him or her if it is OK to be pissed at a troupe of gymnasts for making me feel this sick and confused, to be irate at a bunch of clowns whose brashness still haunts me today. I want to find those still grieving and put my arm around them and say, “I’m with you. I’m with you. I’m with you.”.\n\nReeling,\nBrian Calavan\"
Dec 17, 2011 12:45am

\"Shameful. Ms Streb\'s painfully incoherent description of her own creative \"genius\" might qualify her to be the George W. Bush of the NYC art scene. Never have so many contradictions and hollow phrases been strung together to mean so little. And while it would appear that someone in her circle has advised her to take the tiniest modicum of responsibility for her impact on the lives and well-being of her dancers (\"But it’s my fault. Anything that happens in that room, I’m responsible for\"), she is obviously incapable of feigning genuine concern for more than one or two soundbites - evidenced by the rest of her response (\"There are certain human animals that know how to avoid a speeding bullet and others who don’t\"). It must comfort Ms Streb to equate her dancers with animals in order to risk their health and safety on a regular basis. The scariest line of the interview: now that she no longer performs her own work \"I\'m not quite as sympathetic\". No truer words have been spoken.\"
Dec 17, 2011 12:44am

Betty\'s got a show at the armory this week. The dancer who broke her back won\'t be there, nor will the dancer who got 2nd degree burns when she got set on fire, nor will the one who called you out on safety issues so you fired her... nor will the dancer who got a ruptured spleen, nor will the dancer who had their chin split open by another dancer\'s teeth. the dancer who got their head split open by a cinder block, in rehearsal, won\'t be there, nor will the one who got hit in performance. The dancer who broke their wrist won\'t be there, the one that broke their foot, also, no. The dancer with a ruptured spinal disc and sciatica, they won\'t be there. The dancer with the black eye, the dancer with the chipped teeth, the dancer with the broken wrist, the dancer with the torn shoulder, the blown out knee. None of us will be there.\nThe dancer who got a ruptured appendix and the one who got drop foot will be there... still dancing with the company.\nhttp://www.facebook.com/deeannn1
Dec 17, 2011 12:41am

\"... watching the latest Streb Extreme Action spectacle. “Kiss the Air!” is big and loud and visually impressive, full of flashing lights and intimidating metal scaffolding and aggressive performers. And it doesn’t say anything nearly so interesting...It doesn’t say much of anything at all.\n\nA lot of these activities are dangerous. (A massive spinning metal ladder looks, in particular, as if it were built to do damage to the people clambering all around it.) But they aren’t exciting. Or enlightening. Once you acclimate to the initial sight of the giant adrenaline-addict playground that confronts you when you enter the drill hall, there’s not much to see, and even less to think about.\" - NY times Review.
Dec 17, 2011 12:39am

Cory, what an insightful interview! Streb is such a unique and controversial voice in the Dance world we definitely need to hear more about her. Thank you. I\'m inspired!
Dec 13, 2011 8:50am

Great piece by The Dance Enthusiast\'s , Cory Nakasue. Now, I am more excited than ever to bring my High 5 Tickets to the Arts group to the show on Friday! Don\'t miss this New York....
Dec 12, 2011 1:18pm