On the Record with Elizabeth Streb
It’s true. Extreme action choreographer Elizabeth Streb finished college at SUNY Brockport in upstate New York in 1972 and roared out of town on a motorcycle with her BS degree in modern dance. She rode 6,000 miles, ending up in San Francisco with only about $70 in her pocket and two basic questions: “Where am I going to stay, and where am I going to study dance?”
She still attributes some of her current success to the strength gained from that intense physical and emotional experience. She’s probably right because, let’s face it, an odyssey of that magnitude takes spunk and grit, two things necessary for a woman who wants to go the distance in modern dance.
“I think the experience of landing in a city with no connections, no nothing, and very little money is a very provocative experience and really pushes the envelope. I have never forgotten,” Streb says in an interview just after she returned from California at the end of May— this time to audition her company STREB for “America’s Got Talent.”
Often called the Evel Knievel of dance, Streb’s choreography, which she calls “PopAction,” intertwines the disciplines of dance, athletics, boxing, rodeo, the circus and Hollywood stunt masters. Indeed, audiences are drawn to the originality, physicality, surprise and risk in her choreography, but the story and philosophy behind her work is just as engaging.
Streb played varsity sports and pursued visual arts in her Catholic girls high school. She didn’t actually take dance classes until she was in college, telling doubters—both friends and Brockport professors who said she just couldn’t go to college and major in dance without any formal training—“But I can.” And she did.
Thirty years later, in 2004, she was back at Brockport on the stage to receive an honorary doctorate with Hillary Clinton calling her Dr. Streb. “It was so funny. It was such a moving thing for me because I was sitting there and thinking they were wrong,” she says.
In fact, Streb’s ability to think out of the box as an artist has been recognized widely for over 20 years. In 1997 she was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, an honor cited by the foundation as an “investment in a person's originality, insight and potential." She studied physics, mathematics and philosophy for a master of arts in time and space from New York University’s Draper Program.
Her company STREB is about action, but the thought behind the action is something this artistic director is also eager to share:
Q: What was dance in New York like when you returned from California in the 1970s?
A: The whole genesis of modern dance was to break away from tradition, about enriching the vocabulary by inventing new structures, developing new words, phrases, syntax and vocabularies. It was just the post-Judson era. There were people working on ideas in movement and changing format, questioning and rejecting the vocabulary.
Q: You have described yourself as an “action architect.” Why boxes or a truss, pendulums, beams, wheels?
A: That started almost at the very beginning. My brain kept saying, “You have to tell me what this means. What does this mean?”
I thought: “It doesn’t mean anything to me. In fact, I feel silly doing it.” And when that formulation started to occur, I thought: “I can do only utilitarian movements that have a cause and effect.” I didn’t just want to use just the stage to structure my work.
Lately I have been thinking action equipment is actually very similar to musical instruments originally created to enhance the sound of the human body. Making flutes, horns and drums is the same as me making a wheel or a flying machine or using a trampoline to get higher. I think actually as time evolves, it will become a much more common practice in the action world of art, the theatrical world of action interpretation.
Q: Once you have the equipment, how do you choreograph movement?
A: The way I choreograph is, I draw. So if, for instance, I have a wheel, I will make a template of a wheel. Then I will draw stick figures and make notations about when things happen. So, it is a storyboard—one image after another.*
On the wheel, the dancers couldn’t do a thing for a month. They just got in there and just walked. I just sit there in the first month or so of rehearsal and watch them walk. But then, I say: “Hey when you are going around like that, can you grab the edge and get on the outside? And then when you get to the top, can you stand up and start running?” This is definitely collaborative activity. I think this is true for every technique in modern dance.
Q: How did that kernel of inspiration for the architecture of the wheel come to you?
A: I have been making drawings of wheels for at least a decade. I eschewed circles. I was very into squares and rectangles and all dimensions of space, but circles really confused me formally because there were no edges on the circle—no beginning, no end. I felt incapable of challenging myself with a circle idea for the first 20 years at least. But then I started to realize movement is a circle. We are on a planet that is circling the sun and rotating on an axis, and nothing is real if it doesn’t turn. Even a cement block is a slice of a circle. I really came upon it in the last three or four years.
Q: Why do you invite people to your space for rehearsals—even to participate at SLAM (STREB Lab for Action Mechanics)?
A: I am concerned that dance has such a difficult economic struggle. And I started to ask questions about public and private when we opened our garage. I started to ask, “What would happen if dance operated in public all the time, was open to the public 24-7? What would happen if all of the activities of a company were public—not just when you happen to be presenting a show? If I am getting money, taxpayers’ money, then don’t I have a civic responsibility on some level to give back to the community that I am in?” Anyone can come in, at any time.
Q: What is your goal for the audience?
A: My goal is to make a show that is so physical that the audience doesn’t feel after they have seen it that they have seen something. They feel that something has happened to them.
Q: You said in 1999, “My next 20 years will be spent trying to develop a movement form that gives people a physical, spiritual and emotional experience." Half of that time has passed. Are you on track with your vision?
A: I really think I am. I am having a fantastic time. Do I feel that I have made myself perfectly clear yet? No. But I feel that I have had this enormous privilege to keep trying new pieces. I think that my biggest thing is, even if some of the pieces that I make are not tremendously successful, I have asked questions that I haven’t asked before, that I am having revelations that haven’t occurred to me before. Recently I thought to myself, “Oh, what if it is not about what you do, but what happens to you when you move? What if it is not what the body is doing, but what if it is really what is happening to the body that ends up being the subject? What would that possibly mean?”
I keep wondering if we could collect our accidents, not our plans. I think the things I accidentally notice, not what I am attempting to do, end up being more fertile territory.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have been working with director Robert Woodruff, very renowned in the theater world. We have been chatting the last three years. I finally said, “Why don’t you just come in and be my adviser?” It has just been amazing. We are building the next show: “Invisible Forces.”
It is a 20-foot circle. In the center of this circle there is an 8-foot plug, a separate circle that turns around it in two different directions. The idea is that they both go so fast that if the dancers stepped on one or the other they would switch directions immediately, but also accelerate immediately—things that you can’t do in real time. You can’t really switch directions without slowing down. This is trying to do simple activity on this multi-turning round with multi speeds and multi directions. It is completely fascinating to figure out how to demonstrate the magic of a circle.
You can learn more about Elizabeth Streb, her vision, PopAction, upcoming opportunities for classes, her dance company and dance space SLAM on the Web at: www.streb.org/
*See sample storyboard drawings here: www.streb.org/V2/vision/index.html