Streb is known for “A preoccupation with movement and itself was symptomatic of a trend that was altering the traditional profile of modern dance.”
She has been creating works from 1975 to the present and is known for her outrageous risk taking and experimental shows she puts on. Streb includes risk into all of her choreography, giving the audience sensations of extreme feelings while watching the performers. She inquired about movement and the suppositions that the dance world created; and integrated actions and principles of the circus, rodeo, and daredevil “stunts.”She is interested in the effects of gravity, math, and physics on her choreography. And has said, “A question like: Can you fall up? This is the bedrock of my process” and that she tries “to notice what questions have not been asked in a particular field that need to be asked and answered.” She grew up participating in extreme sports, therefore she associates a lot of her work with athletics; for example, skiing and motorcycling, and has also expressed her interest in the circus and performance artists such as Chris Burden, Marina Abramović, and admires Trisha Brown.
She wanted to gain a better understanding of the effects of movement on matter so she studied math, physics, and philosophy as Dean’s Special Scholar at New York University. Streb explains that "'Pop-Action' is all about the popping of the muscles, training to utilize them over the movement of the skeleton".[9]Custom-made trapezes, trusses, trampolines, and a flying machine give Streb a way to discover new ways for the body to move in space while being subjected to gravity. Moves consist of diving off 16-foot-high (4.9 m), metal scaffolding, also known as a “truss”, landing level on a mat. The performers also can be found launching through the air in “Quick succession with timing so precise that they just miss occupying the same space at the same time.”
Streb’s work is extremely demanding and necessitates endurance, dexterity, great physical strength and the ability to be daring. Streb focuses progressively more on single actions, particularly falls and collisions. By 2010 Streb stopped performing these extreme actions herself, explaining that, “I stopped because that started to become the subject of my activity. I started to hear, Wow, you can still do that and you’re 48? It was a practical decision—three hours a day to keep in that shape?...I had been training for 30 years. It’s very boring to exercise. I stopped. I let it go, which was a good thing.” But says, “I still let extreme things happen to me.”
In her recent years, productions have become less harsh and she has begun incorporating texts, videos, and projections of slides. Within her video collaborations, she incorporates camera angles that appear to evade gravity and making the dancers bound off and crash into the edges of the monitors. They also are often swung from cables and are seen leaping off platforms or hurling against padded walls or mattresses. The dancers who are trained under Elizabeth Streb are taught to follow movement’s natural force to the edge of real danger. Collaborators on the videos include Mary Lucier, Nick Fortunato, and Michael Macilli
Communication between dancers includes verbal cues and in place of music the dancers’ grunts and gasps were electronically recorded and amplified as well as the thuds of their landings and the clank and clatter of the stage equipment. With her newer choreography, Streb incorporates music as a part of the show being experienced by the audience. However, she has always upheld that "movement has its own timing, unrelated to music.” Streb has always tried to contact more than just usual dance audiences.
She is also known for generally seeking out performance spaces that are out of the norm for most dance performances. Her works are showcased at high art venues such as the Lincoln Center, the Spoleto Festival, or the French Festival Paris quartier d'été but also Grand Central Station, the boardwalk at Coney Island in New York, and in a mall in front of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
Streb has expressed her philosophy thus: “Go to the edge and peer over it. Be willing to get hurt, but not so hurt that you can’t come back again.” She has also said that, “Movement is causal; it’s a physical happening. You can stick a high C next to a low F-flat, whereas you couldn’t connect a move where you’re 30 feet in the air and falling, then skip a spot in space, land on the ground, and walk away. So I thought the arbiters of dance training and presentation were lying at the first basic step. Dance does not address its compositional methodology. It’s not true to the form. This form is movement.”
personal ideas: I think the rhythm, symbol, gestures combine together could make a successful dance, but it is more about these, it is also about new ideas and new experiences a dance could provide to the audience.
I think the topic of putting body and the nature movement and imagination and the culture, everything together to create a dance is amazing. We all live in the nature, and dance in a nature way put movement art element into a scene.
There is lots of different symbolic staff in Art , especially in dancing. A gesture or a posture in dance is meaningful and is telling the audience some information. I found lots of interest in Streb's dance, and her ideas of using edges is very special to me.
