Elizabeth Streb — Lady of Action - Elizabeth Streb, and her dancers, display an ongoing passion for passion of action and daring - Brief Article

Elizabeth Streb's choreography is off the wall. Literally. She combines the spirit of Merce Cunningham and the dating of Evel Knievel in her unyielding passion for action, speed, and force. Body slams, near-hit-and-miss collisions, rebounding off immobile surfaces, and the defiance of gravity are all Streb signature moves. Audiences are intrigued by her vigorous investigation of impact, velocity, and the proposition that humans really can fly. "People say that I do things with the body that are shocking," says Streb. "What I want is for the audience to have an action experience by the time they leave the theater. I'd like to engage and involve them. My next twenty years will be spent trying to develop a movement form that gives people a physical, spiritual, and emotional experience."

She has always been fascinated by the human body's power and potential. While in high school in Rochester, New York, she was an obsessive downhill skier and motorcyclist. At seventeen, she chose a modern dance major at State University of New York at Brockport. The dance training Streb received combined the philosophies and styles of Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Jose Limon. Although she also experienced lyrical movements when studying ballet, she found that traditional dance forms did not sustain her interest. "I almost immediately began isolating time and space and human movement potential and investigating those," she says. "I came up with what I do now, which I realize is wild and insane."

The dance community's inability to place her amuses Streb. She doesn't think it her place to define dance; her preoccupation with movement begins and ends with the interaction of space, time, and energy. She believes that story or concept is not something that can be honestly conveyed through movement: "If people from Mars landed on Earth and went to a concert of Sleeping Beauty, they'd have no idea what it's about. It's only for the people who are privy to what's going on. Only they understand. If you want to tell a story, write a book."

For Streb, action is the message. She does not use music in her work, because it could change the intent of a piece. She is more concerned with setting up a condition of turbulence. "I question the rate of speed, distance, and all the invisible forces that cause movement to happen. I develop techniques around velocity, momentum, the rebound, and impact. If you are true to the form, pure in your representation of action, then the message lies within and is more easily discernable.

"I have to produce a frame of reference that is extreme and shows radical change within a moment-to-moment progression. If I don't, there is no information, and then I don't have the attention of my audience. There are questions that haven't been asked because people believed that certain issues were unquestionable. The most difficult thing is to unravel one's attention toward that which hasn't been attended to."

For example, she will ask, "What constitutes information in movement? How much are you able to glean from a movement moment? Why should gravity be camouflaged?

"The sound of bodies on impact helps bridge the distance from the proscenium stage to the audience seated in their chairs. They come along with us on the ride and interpret what they see for themselves. My intention is to involve them and move them."

Her eight dancers follow her approach willingly and with discipline, and bring to the stage a great deal of technical training. They fall and collide with objects or surfaces without sustaining injury. Streb says they are actually honing their survival skills. There is no real way to simulate risks. In Fly, for example, commissioned in 1997, a woman, counterbalanced by 400 pounds of counterweight, soars through space while fellow dancers thrust themselves out at full force about her in a series of near misses. Streb prefers dancers who have been trained in ballet or martial arts to perform her work because those forms stress discipline and exactness. "It has taken me twenty-five years to investigate and create this vocabulary and its ideas," she says. "I work very much like a scientist. I might spend two years on an idea and possibly find out that I went down the wrong track. I'll have to go all the way back to the fork in the road and go another way. It's a very zigzag path."

Streb recalls that she was desperate to be accepted into the art world at the start of her career, but she now believes that art is for all the people, not only for the elite in ivory towers. That's why she has taken her company and three tons of equipment to venues in Australia, France, and England and all across the United States. Recently they performed in front of the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island and at the World Financial Center in New York City. One day she plans to take the company to Las Vegas.

She doubts that the proscenium stage will continue to house her work because it limits audience participation. After spending twenty years alone in the studio, she has retired from performing to better gauge her progress by audience response: "They say in the theater that if you really want to hear what people think, you should eavesdrop in the ladies' room. I'm trying to bring art into the real world and see if I can feel what the audience experiences. I want to find out if I'm close to my target and see if I can make people feel like they've done the moves by the time they leave the theater or park.