Rough-and-Tumble - The New Yorker
Lab for Action Mechanics, and she calls her dancers action heroes. She admires various classical and modern dancers and choreographers and works, but her own dancers enact a brash and pitiless system of movement that disdains and subverts politer forms. ” In a Streb dance called “Gauntlet,” commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, two cinder blocks on ropes swing like pendulums. The first time I saw “Slice,” in rehearsal, a friend of Streb’s was visiting, and as the I-beam was being hung she said, “You’re in for a treat,” then she shuddered and said, “I can’t watch this. A union stagehand once told Streb, “The last time I saw people move like that, someone yelled, ‘Grenade. Streb’s dances exemplify her long inquiry into the substance of movement. Certain actions, she believes, are so powerful that they register kinesthetically—in the viewer’s own body, that is. Most people, however, are action-blind. She wonders why, when people see a horse running, for example, they say, “There’s a horse galloping,” not, “There’s a gallop. ” At the heart of Streb’s inquiry is the ambition to enact flight, to overcome what she calls “the hegemony of the ground. ” Ballet dancers and modern dancers fly by leaping, which she discounts as too simplistic to pass for flight. Flight figures in many Streb dances, but “Human Fountain” is her signature flight dance. Source: www.newyorker.com
