The folks at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles agree. They invited the group–Elizabeth Streb/Ringside – to inaugurate this month’s reopening of MOCA’s second building, the Temporary Contemporary, which has been closed for three years. The TC, as everyone calls it, is a former warehouse rehabbed in 1983 by architect Frank Gehry. With soaring ceilings and 45,000 square feet of exhibition space, the TC is perfect for Streb and the eight human projectiles she calls her dancers. Her performance space is the huge main gallery, and arrayed throughout are the sets for the various pieces on the program, including the wall and scaffolding (“Lookup!”), a large floor pad with loaded springs (“Bounce”), an Olympic-size trampoline (“UP”) and a 22-foot pole rigged with ropes and pulleys (“Rise”). The audience walks from one illuminated set to the next, following the action.
Which is exactly what Streb calls her work: not dance or performance art but “pop action.” “My obsession early on was with high-impact, high-velocity sports–downhill skiing, motorcycle riding, everything,” she says. (If this set her apart from the other girls at Our Lady of Mercy High School in Rochester, N.Y., she doesn’t say.) She studied dance at the State University of New York, Brockport, then joined the dance world, but she found most of the work a bore. “When I did this . . .”–she carefully extends a leg–“I felt foolish. I wanted to make movement I thought was real–action at the high end of physicality but where you wouldn’t die.”
Streb organized a company in 1985 and six years later made “Wall,” a breakthrough work still in the repertoire. The piece features an eight-foot wall: the dancers race to it, hoist themselves up and slither over, “walk” down on their hands, then fly back up. This was the first dance in which Streb reinvented the floor, and she’s been reinventing it ever since. “If your feet are on the ground, you’re in a cliche-ridden universe,” she says. In “Rise,” commissioned by MOCA for the TC performances, two dancers hang in harnesses from the top of a pole and use it as if it were a high wire and a maypole both. “Your floor ends up being six inches wide and curved, and your stability is the point of a dot,” says Streb.
Broken noses: One of the few choreographers Streb admires is Merce Cunningham, and watching her performers at work is surprisingly like watching his. Dispassionate and focused, her dancers are calmly engaged in astonishing acts, with no other purpose than to complete them. Of course, the injury rate is a bit different. Streb’s company members, who come from dance and gymnastic backgrounds, spend most of their time diving headlong into space, slamming their bodies flat-out onto the ground, somersaulting down inclined planes or pitching themselves through (fake) plate glass. “We’ve all gotten fractured wrists and broken noses,” says Streb. “Things that happen in football all the time.” At 45, she still performs in several pieces.
At the TC Streb will premiere a piece that the company has been working on for “the scariest six months we ever spent.” It’s called “UP,” and it’s made for six dancers and a trampoline, with parallel bars high overhead. “Once you’re up in the air, if something goes wrong there’s nothing you can do until it’s over,” says Streb. Working in precisely calibrated ensemble, the dancers flip backward onto the trampoline, switch directions, sail up to the parallel bars and bounce fiat onto a foam mat–nonstop, so that dancers are coming and going in all directions at once. It’s an exhilarating vision of the art of rebound.
Audiences tend to love Streb’s work, but some critics have doubts. “Is this dance?” asked Clive Barnes in the New York Post last year. “No. It is moderately imaginative circus-style athletics.” Fair enough as an opinion–but then what do you call it when someone spins 32 times on pointe at top speed, kicking out the other leg with each turn? In ballet, these are fouettes, and they were contrived for the same reason Streb hangs people upside down-to make the audience gasp and cheer.
