Elizabeth Streb’s dance with danger returns to the stage

By Jessica Robinson

Elizabeth Streb, the Brooklyn-based, pop-action choreographer known for setting herself on fire, crashing through glass, and walking down the outside of London’s very tall city hall building, will return to Jacob’s Pillow starting August 18 for the first time in 20 years with her STREB Extreme Action Company.

A MacArthur “Genius” Award-winner, and TED Talk presenter, Streb has been called a thrill-seeker, a Superwoman, a circus performer, even a Houdini (she’s been known to leave a room through the walls). Whether you call her an action hero, or an “action-artist,” one thing is constant, Streb flirts with death. She has vaulted and slammed her way into the daredevil hall of fame.

“I want my work to make all of us want to do more, go further,” Streb tells Brooklyn Magazine. “I believe that action—on the stage and in the street—is the most powerful force on earth.” (You can see it for yourself, even if you don’t make it to Jacob’s Pillow next month: The Emmy-nominated feature documentary on her, “Born to Fly: STREB vs Gravity,” was directed by Catherine Gund and is currently streaming on Netflix for those who are curious.)

Many writers and critics call Streb a dancer. Indeed, once upon a time, in the 1970s, she was a member of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. But categorizing her as a dancer is lazy. Too conventional, too tied to visual illusion, storytelling, and music. “Music is the true enemy of dance,” says Streb, meaning music bullies a dance into conforming to its rhythm. “The timing for sound is antithetical to how you would choreograph or assemble one move after another.” For her, movement has its own timing, unrelated to music. Ultimately, her work challenges the very definition of “dance.”

Where dancers leap across the stage, Streb’s leaps and jumps are death-defying. Her “dances” expand the boundaries of what can be done with the body, with physics, with gravity. More like an acrobat or stunt performer, she courts danger by taking body-breaking risks with seemingly impossible feats. Her ambition is to defy gravity … to fly,  to overcome what she calls “the hegemony of the ground.” She has built her repertory and her reputation doing just that. “Give her and her company, Streb Extreme Action, a platform 30 feet in the air to leap off, a sheet of plexiglass to crash into, or a mat to land on, face forward, with a splat, and they’re right at home,” writes Gia Kourlis in the New York Times.

Many of Streb’s dances include machines, designed with the help of an engineer. One, called Gizmo, is an enormous yellow wheel with a pronged counterweight large enough for dancers to stand in and make the wheel turn, faster and faster, by running, leaping, doing back flips, all the while spinning and spinning inside this whizzing machine. In one Streb dance called “Gauntlet,” commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, two cinder blocks on ropes swing like pendulums. The dancers swoop between and around the heavy bricks. The escapes are narrow and horrifying.

A Streb machine

“Pushing the limitations of the human body is what action has to be about,” she says. “You’re doing this artificial thing to a bunch of rich people, you have to scare them a little.” Or a lot.  “Risk has to be part of the drama. If death is going through a glass window, how close to that window of no return can I get?”

Pretty close, it turns out. In 1997, performing a piece called “Breakthru” in New York’s Joyce Theater, she dove through a sheet of plexiglass. “I let out a blood-curdling scream,” Streb tells it. “I launched my body and my mind at that glass, punching so hard the glass shattered into the laps of the first three rows of the audience.” The audience in the front rows were protected with helmets and goggles, as if at some post-apocalyptic Gallagher show.

Streb performing ‘Breakthru’

That was 24 years ago. Streb is 71 now and retired from dancing, but her STREB Extreme Action Company continues performing her signature, high-octane, choreographed feats.  Under Streb’s tutelage, combining muscle, virtuosity, acrobatics and technical skills, her dancers—or athletic warriors—have embraced Streb’s credo: “anything too safe is not action.”

From August 18 to 22,  the STREB Extreme Action Company will perform at Jacob’s Pillow Henry J. Leir Outdoor Stage in Becket, Massachusetts. While the glass-exploding piece, “Breakthru,” will not be part of the program, audiences will watch a troupe of eight acrobatic, aerial dancers perform gravity-defying – even hair-raising – physical feats including classic solos from the ‘70s – ‘80s, early equipment experimentations from the 90s, and jaw-dropping extreme action opuses with the large scale ‘action machines’ the company has since become known for.

The program will also be available on-demand from September 2 to 16. For those who prefer being in the action rather than in the audience, there is the STREB POP ACTION SCHOOL, headquartered in the heart of Williamsburg, (at 51 North 1st Street).  It’s a cavernous ground-floor space and is open to kids of all ages, from 5 to 95. Each week, more than 400 kids take classes at this Brooklyn hub, usually from an instructor wearing a T-shirt that asks: WHY WALK WHEN YOU CAN FLY?

STREB POP ACTION SCHOOL