ELIZABETH STREB
PopAction: the Anthropology of the Stunt and the Maniacs who perform them
Date: Friday 9. 18
Start Time: 7:00pm
Location: Einstein auditorium, Rm. 105, Barney building
STREB’s PowerPoint presentation will depict the particular concerns that STREB EXTREME ACTION has brought to the presentation and invention of Action over the last 20 years. These concerns begin with questioning issues of actual ’staged presentation’ of action including how humans perceive action when they themselves are not moving, what affect ‘angle of viewing’ has on the experience of action, how is ‘frame of reference’ tampered with in presenting movement, how we comprehend size, distance, rate, and physical rhythm’s. We also are investigating, ‘What is movements’ “vanishing point”.
STREB EXTREME ACTION and PopAction (the technique Streb invented) attempts to exhibit movement in an extreme manner under dangerous conditions. This is done for the purpose of creating a certain alarm in spectators similar to those who covet the experience of NASCAR and World Wrestling, boxing, those that cause rubbernecking on superhighways, The Circus, bull riding, and other extreme physical spectacles. The other agenda STREB has thru the utilization of ‘danger’ is to construct ‘non-predictive physical moments. Humans want to be near an event that may result in disaster. This is common and we accept this as part of the content of our work. The Anthropology of the lineage and origin of meaning in Movement is examined. Beauty is most often eschewed, or at the very least it is not a goal but an emergent quality, a mere detail.
Within STREB’s PowerPoint presentation, she acknowledges these issues and deconstructs and examines some ideas behind the general human attraction to physical risk.
Anthropologically speaking, ‘movement-as-subject’ has little history in academia. STREB as a practitioner (not a scholar) works at framing the potential ‘archetypal’ languages that combine to inscribe the ‘American’ liturgy of named actions. The potential for Action to have deep content is here, within the un-named rhythms, and the origins of all the movements done to date in the United States. STREB is continually engaged in the naming and collecting of influences from stunt work, slapstick, vaudeville, circus, acrobatics, kids, animals, things, labor and dance, as well as the physical material that erupts from other daredevil maniacs.
Elizabeth Streb in 1997 was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award. In 2008, Streb was appointed to the Mayor’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, a commission mandated by the City Charter to advise the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. She holds a Master of Arts in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, a B.S. in Modern Dance from SUNY Brockport from which she has received an honorary doctorate of fine arts as well. Streb also holds an honorary doctorate from Rhode Island College. Elizabeth Streb is the recipient of numerous other awards and fellowships including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987; a Brandeis Creative Arts Award in 1991; two New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessie Awards), in 1988 and 1999 for her “sustained investigation of movement’; and over 20 years of on-going support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
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 the public display of “pure movement.”
In 2003 Streb established S.L.A.M. (STREB Lab for Action Mechanics) in Brooklyn, NY. S.L.A.M.’s door is literally open for the community to come in and watch rehearsals, take classes and learn to fly. The central idea at SLAM (besides always being public) is to mix three extreme action forms: PopAction, KidAction and Circus Arts.
Streb believes that true movement invention (the rubric of her investigations) happens accidentally with the milling together of strangers and out of the diverse movement voices that accidentally cross paths. SLAM is the Petrie dish that feeds the possibility for these new forms to emerge.
