Extreme Action Dance

[Music] ELIZABETH STREB: I think my obsession - really I would call it more an obsession, it goes beyond interest - with movement and action happened extremely early. I once saw a whole cigar box of nuts and bolts fall off my parents' shelf, and I went to catch it. And I did, without anything falling out of it. I think that was really the first memory I have of, "That was really cool." Ever since then, gadgets, objects, equipment, and action together, I always saw them as being, um, one and the same. I think kids do this all the time - usually lightning bugs, a more glamorous form of insect - they go around trying to capture them in jars. It's, it's the opposite of capturing lightning in a bottle I think. Because a fly - it's ugly, dirty, grubby - and I think that the way the fly moved as I screwed the cap on was an impossible set of circumstances. Newton would say that if you want to change directions, you have to decelerate, stop, readjust your angle, and accelerate and reach speed once again. This fly was not doing that. It just was going [buzzing] all over the jar, without, without banging against the edges of the jar. And I realized that was, that was almost a particle physics set of activities. You wouldn't be able to have mass and move like that, and in recognizing this I promised myself that I would somehow figure out how a human could fly in that way. Not, not a beautiful, soaring flight that never landed, but a flight that would be able to capture the force, or, or mimic the force, or even erase the force that was necessary to do the things that um, beings much lighter than humans are capable of doing. [Music] I think machinery or action gizmos are critical to the examination and exploration of extreme movement. And my, my whole raison d'etre is to see if a human can perform an extreme move and survive. The, the question is not 100% answered, and without a machine, um, then it would be impossible to add force in the manner in which force needs to be added to get the body, the biomechanical system of the human, to do anything that might be noticeable. [Music] ELIZABETH STREB: The most intense thing I've ever done is the thing I did in London. I and two of my comrades, *** and ***, walked down City Hall. I'm 62, and I, I was like, "It's a glass building, am I gonna slip?" But I didn't know, and I was so terrified, and I, I just said, "Can I go up there, can I go up there?" And then finally, I got to climb the ladder and walk up to the top of the building and just start. And, um, that was one of the most exultational moments in my life, when I was walking down that building. But every second, I'm walking down - 'cause it's a curve - I'm, I'm having to register 90 degrees to the building. 90 degrees. Don't put your feet too far forward; don't go back, you'll fall. And, and the whole world is watching, you know. So I was just calculating my 90 degree angle to the building. It was just, uh, it was an indescribable thrill, to be able to do that. [Music] ELIZABETH STREB: We did a, a dance for the London Olympics - the Cultural Olympiad - and I'd been working on it for two years. One of the ideas we did was to have the dancers, 32 dancers, occupy the spokes of the London Eye while it's turning, and they're traveling the 200 feet of the radius as it's turning, and they're doing moves on that spoke. We had to get a facsimile by Hudson Scenic that was 24 feet in diameter, not 400, so I could put it in my studio and try to understand what happens to the spokes, and the occupation of the spokes as they change their place in space, and as gravity's effect alters their capacity to do this move or that. And when, a couple things that happened - for instance, I thought that - let's say that you're looking at the profile of the wheel, right? I've got the wheel here and it's this way. I thought, Oh, I'll have them go out like this, perpendicularly when they feel like it. And so that's why I had the axel eight times as long as it needed to be. And then I realized, no, no. They're gonna go towards gravity. They're gonna be on the under side of the wheel in the Eastern Hemisphere, and on the other side, absolute opposite, 180 of the spoke - not the wheel, but the spoke - when they're on the Western Hemisphere. I only found that out when we got that facsimile wheel into S.L.A.M. And I, I was so baffled. After 30 years of investigating motion and understanding that gravity is down, I realized I know nothing about movement. It really is about figuring out that if I can create a condition, or a set of circumstances where I can start asking questions about something I think I know about, but I really don't know anything about it. And that to me made up the whole, the whole notion of our project, where if you don't go into territory that is unhabitual and unfamiliar, you're not going to discover anything. ELIZABETH STREB: I'm Elizabeth Streb. Make sure to subscribe to THNKR. You won't be sorry.