Bravely, Streb’s troupe goes to another extreme
Elizabeth Streb’s dancers have to be adrenaline junkies. How else could they catapult through space, carom into walls, vault on and off one another, and repeatedly crash to the floor with such sheer physical abandon? It’s like bumper car gymnastics with split-second timing and a kind of mosh pit knockabout fervor.
For more than two decades, the choreographer has been charging her dancers to defy gravity with breathtaking imagination. She calls her distinctive form of movement investigation “extreme action’’ and her spectacularly athletic dancers “actioneers.’’ But the name of the work the Institute of Contemporary Art is presenting this weekend is even more telling - “STREB: BRAVE.” It’s brave, and then some.
At its core, “STREB: BRAVE” is an exploration of circular, perpetual motion. It’s less about defying gravity than toying with it. And unlike previous pieces, this one lacks a little air and a sense of poetry. It’s rambunctious rather than breathtaking. But what gives Streb’s work its humanity is that the visceral thrill is tempered with a constant sense of vulnerability. Danger it has in spades.
Streb’s eight virtuosic dancers weave and tumble amidst suspended cinderblocks that swing back and forth like giant pendulums, narrowly missing heads and limbs. They soar and swan dive from the rafters onto cushy red mats, each impact landing with a palpable thud. A heavy beam suspended from scaffolding spins like a helicopter blade, moving up and down, causing the dancers to duck and dive.
“STREB: BRAVE” evolves as a series of intricate games infused with eye-popping daredevil play and the electric charge of unpredictability. Dancers call instructions, from simple shouts of “in’’ and “out’’ to more fanciful code phrases, such as “vanilla shake’’ and “tuna melt.’’ Sometimes it looks like so much fun that you forget what strength, balance, and flexibility Streb’s acrobats have to possess, not to mention bodies that can take a brutal jarring night after night.
The most effective pieces go beyond slam-bang and create intriguing patterning atop a rotating stage, which continually changes audience perspective. Video projected onto a backdrop behind the dancers shows how their movements look from above.
In “Artificial Gravity,’’ the dancers work with two circles: the large, nearly full-stage one and an inner circle spinning in the opposite direction. They become a dizzying blur of flying bodies as they vault on and off the inner circle, letting centrifugal motion work its magic. (One dancer looked dizzy by work’s end.)
The finale, “Super Position’’ hauled out circus artists Noe and Ivan Espana’s Whizzing Gizmo design, which looks like a nightmare amusement park ride to anyone with motion sensitivity. The dancers romp inside, on top of, and under a wheel roughly 7 feet in diameter that revolves around a tall frame. It’s balanced on the other end by a towerlike structure. As the whole shebang spins around, the dancers weave around and through, up and over, until it seems to spit them out, flying through the air.
