WHEN: 8 p.m. today and Saturday.
WHERE: UNC's Memorial Hall.
TICKETS: Call 919-843-3333 or visit www.carolinaperformingarts.org
By SUSAN BROILI
Special to The Herald-Sun
Recent books provide some ideas of what to eat, what to buy and where to travel around the globe before one's time on earth ends. Elizabeth Streb doesn't need such suggestions.
"I'm just trying to make the most astounding action show before I die," the action architect/choreographer said in a recent telephone interview from New York.
Make that extreme action on such apparatus as the Whizzing Gizmo, a giant, revolving metal wheel in her new show, "STREB: BRAVE," that stops at UNC's Memorial Hall today and Saturday.
Streb doesn't call company members dancers.
"They're a different tribe," she said. "They're gladiators."
They must have courage. In auditions, she looks for signs.
"If they seem tentative in their movements when I ask them to run as hard as they can and slam into a Plexiglass wall, that's a red flag," she said.
She's looking for "action engineers" who can produce pure movement. "How can it be extreme enough so the audience will notice it as action and not focus on the body itself?"
She calls her choreography PopAction and draws from athletics, boxing, rodeo, the circus and Hollywood stunt work in addition to dance. She's written a book, "How to Become an Extreme Action Hero."
Streb has always been active herself. Growing up in Rochester, N.Y., she did motorcycle racing and downhill skiing, she said. Elements used in her choreography sometimes have personal meaning. "The cinder block is a homage to my dad, who was a mason," she said. Make that several swinging cinder blocks on bungee cords that performers have to dodge in the "Gauntlet" number in the new show.
In her exploration for pure movement, she's come a long way since the 1990s. When her company performed at the American Dance Festival in 1994, performers exhibited derring-do that included launching themselves from two towers -- the only music the physical sounds of their efforts. Today, she collaborates with composer David Van Tiegham. And, she uses more spectacular and challenging apparatus devised through other collaborations such as the MIT Media Lab and trapeze artists Noe and Ivan Espana, who designed the Whizzing Gizmo, modeled on their "Wheel of Death." In the new show, everything revolves -- even the floor.
Two Streb "gladiators," Sarah Donnelly and Fabio Tavares Da Silva, who perform on the Whizzing Gizmo, spoke recently in phone interviews, about what it's like. She's on the inside of the wheel while he's on the outside. He runs, hops on one foot and even walks over another performer lying down on the edge of the wheel that's constantly spinning. "At times, it's really fast and it feels like I can barely make it," Da Silva said.
The eight performers must counter-balance each other and communicate by verbal cues.
"I tell them, 'Slow down,'" Da Silva said.
He hasn't fallen so far but at the end he "flies" Superman-style off the top of the 25-foot high wheel.
Learning to fall tops the list of techniques both had to learn when they joined Streb in 2005.
"The first time, I was totally scared," Donnelly said. To land so that the impact is distributed mainly on the muscular parts of their bodies, they hold themselves in a straight line, arms above their heads, and land face first. They also learn to fall on their backs.
That's a far cry from Donnelly's previous training in ballet. She gained firsthand knowledge of Streb's technique when, as an intern for The Village Voice, she was given an assignment to take a class at the Brooklyn-based Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM) and write about it. "I just totally fell in love with it. You're dancing on all surfaces of the body. You pop from movement to movement," Donnelly said.
Da Siva had worked as a circus acrobat since age 15 in Brazil and thought he'd learned everything until, at age 27, he joined Streb. "In a circus, you have your specialty. That's all you do. In Streb, you do everything," he said. "It's more demanding. But at the end of the show, it's much more rewarding -- the kind of high that comes with the joy of knowing I got through a show."
Donnelly added, "It's about taking calculated risk. To be an artist is one of those risks. You start to apply this to the rest of your life."
For more news and reviews visit Susan Broili's Time to Dance blog at www.heraldsun.com.
