BORN TO FLY

Catherine Gund’s documentary of Elizabeth Streb’s Extreme Action Company is part biopic, part adventure film, and part travelogue, taking viewers from the company’s early years to Streb’s more recent one-day occupation of London, where she staged her own super high risk version of the Olympics. Before the film opened in New York, the choreographer met with the Rail’s Nancy Dalva.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): What we see up there. Is that you?

Elizabeth Streb: Yeah, it’s me. Does it look like me? Does it remind you of me?

Elizabeth Streb after cutting herself while cooking. photo: Born to Fly

Rail: It’s a movie about you, but you exhibit a curious absence of what usually passes for ego. Or perhaps it’s just a larger scale ego that dispenses with the trivial.

Streb: I like that. That would be the good news, right? It’s really more about the essence of my movements than it is about me or my persona. I’m unaware of my persona. I am not performing at any time. I am trying to be. At that point when the movie ends—I didn’t even sleep that night. It was me in my most essential second-to-second existence.

Rail: Were you aware of the cameras?

Streb: No.

Rail: Did you edit yourself as you went, somehow?

Streb: No.

Rail: Did you have any involvement in the post-production, or have any approval of the final cut?

Streb: No. I gave Catherine and her team carte blanche. It was about getting outside the context of those who know me or my work. To get outside the context of me or knowing the work is really what this is all about. People stood in lines to see this film at film festivals. To be first in the season at Film Forum feels again like an absolutely thrilling chance to tell a wider audience about these ideas and the people willing to accomplish these ideas. Some of the people in this movie are the people the movement happened to. We had this experience of extreme movement.

Rail: That moment when you are about to walk down the curved facade of London’s City Hall—from so high up—were you scared?

Streb walking down London's City Hall: Born to Fly.

Streb: Yeah, I was really scared. More of failure or that my rope was going to break. Even with Trisha’s walk down the Whitney [Trisha Brown’s “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building,” which Streb performed in New York City, at the Whitney Museum] I knew that if the guys let go of the rope—

Rail: Is it about trust?

Streb: You abandon trust. It’s just a detail. But I did think, “This is going too far.”

Rail: Do you feel that way now?

Streb: It’s over; it’s immaterial.

Rail: Would you do it again?

Streb: I would do it again, yes. I pray for the next opportunity to be that extreme or that crazy. If you believe in the present tense as being the subject of any presentation of extreme movement, there is, for sure, no time for reflection, or to even notice that I am rather than I do. There’s the next step and the next step. It was the most outrageous experience—all I did to prepare for that walk was to get hung up on a wall. Why does movement have to be on a stage or in a place you go to see it? Movement! A flash in the sky as you walk down the street. A body where you don’t expect it.

Rail: In the beginning, your work was you. Does it feel separate from you now?

Streb: I guess the answer would have to be yes because I am trying to discover something in the world that is true, not something I suspect beforehand. I am not very sentimental or very hopeful, so I don’t care. It can exist without me, but it’s nothing without the dancers who have helped build it.

STREB EXTREME ACTION COMPANY in London: Born to Fly.

Rail: Isn’t your work answering a series of questions you give yourself? What are you asking now?

Streb: How do we make movement relevant? What movement is relevant? I no longer believe you can connect moves, I believe they start and stop. Ballet and modern dance go up, but they don’t land. And this thing about dancing to the music is utterly idiotic to me—that just isn’t a good enough reason unless somebody loves music. When I poke at questions I don’t ever really feel I answer them—if the questions are deep enough. That’s my goal: to figure out what question.

Rail: Is the movie one of the propellers?

Streb: Again, the movie is not my work. It’s a really great introduction for the majority of the humans in the world who don’t know Streb. I am honored that Catherine decided to make it. She’s been graceful, and remains curious, and we’ve had a great time. I am curious about the audience, so I sit there and try to get a sense of what they respond to. I sat through every screening at every film festival. It’s been very informative. It’s really exciting—you can feel it in the audience. The movie encapsulates action.

from

ELIZABETH STREB: An Introduction

“RHYTHM IS A DOMINANT ISSUE IN THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ACTION.”

Clang! Bound! Rebound! The wall is the floor! Slam! Gravity is negotiable by force! Elizabeth Streb was fierce before it was a fashionable adjective, and she revealed all of the exactions dance art used to strive to conceal (and often still does) before Post-Post-Modernism arrived with its underpants as outerwear. She was efficient, she was direct, and however unadorned, her work was somehow—then and still now, though it was more so with her in it—not inimical to metaphorical implication.

“I COULD SUM UP STREB METHODOLOGY AS INQUIRY INTO THAT WHICH IS UNQUESTIONABLY TRUE...”

STREB at City Hall in London in July 2012. Photo: Julian Andrews

I first saw her work after asking Merce Cunningham, “Whose work should I be seeing besides yours?” He replied at once, “John Cage and I are very interested in the work of a young woman named Elizabeth Streb.” (This was some time ago.) So off I went to an all white room downtown, where a lithe woman of my exact age climbed up walls and slammed off metal tables in vivid action that left contrails of concentrated energy—like Merce’s singular phosphorescence combined with some kind of rocket fuel.

Fast forward five or six years, to a panel at the Dance Critics Association Conference. There she was, talking about her work and taking questions. One of the things Streb proposed was an interest in only “real moves.” I raised my hand and asked, “What’s an unreal move?” It was, in effect, a challenge—but it turns out it was to me.

Because, today, I know the answers to that question. (It took me a long time, but I got there.) As I kept watching, she got more populist, with a generous acknowledgement that her early devotees might feel sorrowful as she ramped up the sound, the machinery, the applied narrative. Her enterprise got noisier. Gone were certain aspects of suggestion, and much of Streb’s personal and ineradicable grace. The calibrations were trickier, the projects got larger. Streb became a show called STREB.

“THE CAPACITY FOR CHANGE REQUIRES MOVEMENT.”

All the while, this perception held: to this day her work is seen as sui generis, outside the dance canon. But it is not. Elizabeth Streb’s work is not outside dance history, or the world of dance as we now live in it. She is a part of this tradition. Her philosophy of dance as physics is exactly what Merce Cunningham proposed when he said “Dance is movement through space and time.” This is formalism. Her statement that “You need to eliminate all preparations and all recoveries” describes exactly what George Balanchine did to make ballet modern. No more prepare, pose, pause. This is Modernism.

Although her programs now have themes—more about keeping an audience engaged, I think, than anything intrinsic to her own vectors of investigation—Streb is not about subject matter, or meaning. Streb is about form—the actual content of the choreography in terms of action.

And yet there is something large in the implications of the work—not in terms of imagery, but in terms of us: about possibility, about teamwork, about throwing yourself at invisible barriers. We all learned to stay upright by falling and getting up again. We all go around throwing ourselves at invisible walls—some we know are there, and some we don’t see until we crumple up against them. Or crash right through.

Elizabeth Streb. Photo: Mary Ellen Mark

Streb grew up in upstate New York, rescued from an orphanage at the age of two by a loving mother who sent her to a convent school. Nuns were her role models. Think of this not in terms of subjugation within the structure and strictures of the Church, but in terms of self-discipline, devotion, and working with others in an ordered way. And think about the imagery. What interests Streb and always has is the intersection of the horizontal with the vertical, and various feats involving the transcendence of fear and of gravity. (In other words, Stations of the Cross.) In one of her early pieces, she was a one-woman version of El Penitente, throwing herself again and again at an “X” of light on the ground beneath her.

“WE AT STREB ARE NOT PRETENDING…IT IS THE TIMING OF ACTION AND THE METHOD OF EXECUTION THAT HOLDS THE KEY TO REAL MOVMENT…”

Yes, Elizabeth Streb climbs down tall buildings (in calibrated bounds). Maybe what you do the day she does that is manage to get up and go outside and watch her do it. And yet, some day or other, you figure out that that’s a kind of action, that bravery is relative, and that the crazy things Streb proposes and makes happen aren’t alien even to the timid. You contextualize. See Streb’s work, and you realize at some point or other that psychic and physics are almost the same word. The moves are real. And so are the metaphors.

The Streb quotations used are from her book called How To Become An Extreme Action Hero. ©Elizabeth Streb
©Nancy Dalva 2012