Streb & The Art of Extreme Action Movement

[Music] ELIZABETH STREB: I think that risk and danger as essences residing in an action room are necessary um, territories. And I think that the notion that a dancer, or a gymnast, or a circus person, would not agree to get hurt when they walked into an invention room that is attempting to make a move that no one's ever seen before is absurd to me. So we agree to get hurt. But we can't get so hurt that we can't get up the next day and do it. And so we definitely do have a line there, but I'm requesting my dancers to be okay with having to make a saving, a physical saving situation occur. [Music] ELIZABETH STREB: I think that the issue of fear is a very interesting idea. I don't think anyone's not scared. I was terrified. I think I want terrified people in the room, or they'll do careless things. The issue of fear is something that we encounter all the time, you know, and everybody's fear skips around itself. We unravel that fear, and we, um, we try and examine it and, uh, make it a common physical choice, not a, not an abnormal physical choice. We are contending with something that's really almost neurological. But I insist psychologically, emotionally, spiritually we, we go in and we contend with these, these zones of fear. I think that ones you do, and you accomplish it, massive growth spurts happen. Not just, "Hey, I can do a move I couldn't do before." That would be pretty banal. But with your spirit. [Music] ELIZABETH STREB: I think if I was gonna zero in on one seminal discovery that I've made over the last 30 years, it would be that it's hard to hurt the body. [Music] I think that the excitement and the beauty of flight is not sufficient. There has to be the culmination of the failure of flight. The landing. The impact. The non-camouflage, the choice to not camouflage gravity is where the real drama and content of action resides. [Music] I can see that mostly in that zone, when somebody, a full fleshed-and-*** human body lands, when people haven't seen STREB and they come in for the first time and that happens right next to them, or on the stage, they're very upset. Because that sound is always the sound of someone being damaged in a not-okay way. Being really hurt, or dying. And for me I'm trying to decline that sentence, that half-second, and make it a much more profound moment - much more nuanced moment - than just we're slamming ourselves around. No, I'm really not just camouflaging gravity. [Music] My job, as a, as a choreographer for, of extreme action, is to attempt to viscerate action in all the right ways to ask, What can action do that no other discipline can do, and what does it do best? And this requires us to, um, not just find out what the grammar is, but name the grammar, and understand the temporal system. What's the iambic pentameter of action, for instance? Like, poetry knows, music knows, on some level certainly, language knows, Shakespeare knew. I don't have an idea of what I'm doing to the audience because I don't know them, and there's hundreds of them out there. I'd love them to go away with a phenomenal, logical, experiential, um, feeling from the show. Not what it was about. I want them to be grabbing their arms of their chairs, or the person's thigh next to them that they may not even know, and just pay attention. You know, the way you pay attention to a great novel. I want it to be a page-turner. I want them to wonder, Well, what could we possibly do now? What are they gonna do now? What are they gonna do now? What are they gonna do now? I really think action falls into that realm much more. And I'm trying to make the event of STREB, as a performative idea, um, be an experience for the audience. ELIZABETH STREB: I'm Elizabeth Streb, and you're watching me on Epiphany. And you will have an Epiphany. [Music]