Following Friday night’s performance by STREB, I walked to the edge of the stage where the eight dancers were perched and one by one squeezed their calves and biceps. With one fellow, I took a hold of his instep to admire his beautifully curved arch. In very real terms, I was trying to see what STREB is made of.
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STREB dancers fly among cinderblocks in “Gauntlet,” one of the many thrills staged at STREB: RAW last Friday. |
Invasive? No doubt, were it any other dance company. But from the start of the show, STREB made it clear they’re different, capital D. VJ/DJ Zaire Baptiste walked out and instructed the audience to “MAKE SOME NOISE!” To which he then added that STREB believes in “audience sovereignty.”
“Take out your cell phone, take pictures, take video, go on Facebook, go on Twitter,” he said. Do what you need to do.
After a couple hours of STREB’s mesmerizing physical action that sent me through a spectrum of visceral responses—from can’t-bear-to-watch tension and uncontrolled giggling to yelling out “Oh no!” and then to a soaring sense of daring—I needed to squeeze a few sweaty muscles.
Artistic director and choreographer Elizabeth Streb calls her work “PopAction.” Mix equal parts wrestling, trapeze work, combat arts, modern dance and construction materials (think cement blocks and steel beams) and you start to get at the unique movement and apparatus circus that is STREB. If Johnny Knoxville had ballet training, he might come up with something like this. But where “Jackass” pursues the gross-out end of physical danger, Elizabeth Streb seems to go for thrilling liberation.
The title well describes “Wall Run Turn,” the evening’s opener. A revolving transparent wall occupies center stage, with dancers on either side. They launch themselves onto the wall to mirror one other. They bounce, they hang, they shimmy. The wall keeps moving.
A daring spectacle, it was a mere appetizer for what followed. “Polar Wander,” the third number, features the aforementioned steel beam that spins in the center of the stage, ascending and descending on cue as dancers limbo under it, dive and bob, or peek their heads up just as the death rod skims past them. By the time the piece concluded, expletives of fear and dismay and excitement were popping out all over the audience. We were sovereign all right.
Naturally, works that are so apparatus-heavy (a circus wheel of death, two pendulous concrete blocks, and a gigantic teeter-totter propelled by a dancer’s iron thighs are but a few examples of what occupied the Paramount stage) invite the question, “Is it dance?”
To which I have to answer, does it matter? Rarely do performances of any genre leave one as viscerally spent as STREB’s. Movement is supposed to thrill, but so often the audience experiences that pleasure visually only. With STREB’s brave-crazy antics and nonstop energy, the show has full-body impact for everyone.
The closer, “Fly” completed the catharsis. Strapped into an anti-gravity harness, one dancer (the one who’d rocked “Tip” with her marble quads) soars above the company, upside down for long intervals, extending and flexing her legs, free, joyful, young, happy, lovely. The dance could have been called “Free” or “Glee,” but “Fly” sums it up nicely on many levels. It was a stylish and uplifting ending to an inspiring show.
After I checked out everybody’s muscles, my pals and I sauntered out of the theater, looking for a streetlight or something to swing around. It was such an energizing, mind-blowing evening, we were ready to fly ourselves. When’s the last time you said that about a dance show?
