Choreographer Elizabeth Streb on Why Dance Should Be More Like Football | Big Think

Choreographer Elizabeth Streb on Why Dance Should Be More Like Football

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Choreographer Elizabeth Streb takes us through the theory and practice of PopAction, her particular brand of extreme action dance. Developed by Streb over the last 20 years, PopAction classes help dancers acquire new skills by posing unique challenges: change your base of support in a rapid fire way, physically designate specific locations in vertical and horizontal space, learn to pop the muscles to initiate action (rather than skeletally transferring weight), train for impact, learn to fly with low-to-the-ground maneuvers that increase spatial awareness, and incorporate a timing system that is not musical but physical ("felt timing"). The classes confront issues of falling and fear. STREB operates on a ‘personal best’ principle; the method suits all body types, ages, and skill sets. All adult classes are taught by current company members.

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ELIZABETH STREB:

Once called the Evel Knievel of dance, Elizabeth Streb's choreography, which she calls "PopAction," intertwines the disciplines of dance, athletics, boxing, rodeo, the circus, and Hollywood stunt-work. The result is a bristling, muscle-and-motion vocabulary that combines daring with strict precision in pursuit of public acts of "pure movement."

Streb is a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Award (1997) and a member of the New York City Mayor's Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission. Streb is also a member of the board of the Jerome Foundation and a member of the Atlantic Center for the Arts National Council.

In 2003, Streb established SLAM (Streb Lab for Action Mechanics) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn which created a new outlet for the community where people could come and watch rehearsals and even participate in classes.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Elizabeth Streb: PopAction is a form that I and Streb, you know, the larger Streb which is pretty much hundreds and hundreds of dancers at this point have been developing over the last 30 years. If we were just an urban kind of crazy set of action aficionados it would be similar to parkour but because I was in the dance world and located myself in the early seventies in the downtown experimental postmodern dance world I placed a very formal lens over my investigations. The simple idea about PopAction was I believed that humans could fly and that’s where the genesis of the whole idea began by me awkwardly leaping off ladders and crashing to the floor.

I didn’t realize how complicated it would be and how much hardware I’d need and how impractical it is to fly, you know, on every level. So I started really low to the ground and decided that – it was also a theatrical artistic suspicion that I thought no one lands. Like it’s not just flight, it’s a failure of flight. The dance world doesn’t ever land. They spend a lot of technical time camouflaging gravity. The circus never lands, they just swing. It’s beautiful, aesthetic but there’s no rhythm in swinging. They don’t land either. Gymnastics doesn’t land. Only maybe football and American boxing deals with impact. So I early on started to develop a technique for taking the hit when we landed. And I think that the drama of action theater is really embedded in that moment. But I think flight, flips, things that different acrobats do but weren’t considered elitist moments in time and space and body actually are the most exciting moves a human can do. I noticed that and I wanted to embed it into my action scenario more. So it wasn’t just flight. It was how you fly and that you land.

if you examine normal dance and their base of support is usually the bottoms of their feet we shift our base of support. A couple formal principles here in PopAction are just shifting your base of support from the bottoms of your feet which puts you into normal pedestrian spatial locality and maybe landing on your stomach, landing on your back, landing on your shins, landing on your side, landing on your shoulders so that you really resculpt the occupational space the body is in and therefore provide a different point of view or vantage point to the audience.

And then I also believed after the Muybridge plates on human movement potential and animal movement potential that I wanted to remove all transitions, all predictive acts.....

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