Streb: How to Become an Extreme Action Hero

Elizabeth Streb has been testing the potential of the human body since childhood. Can she fly? Can she run up walls? Can she break through glass? How fast can she go? With clarity and humor—and with a world-class dance troupe called STREB—she continues to investigate what real movement is and has come to these conclusions: It's off the ground! It creates impact! It hurts trying to stop it! In this pathbreaking book, Streb combines memoir and analysis to convey how she became an extreme action dancer/choreographer, developing a form of movement that's more NASCAR than modern dance; more boxing than ballet.

Once called the Evel Knievel of dance, Elizabeth Streb intertwines the disciplines of dance, athletics, rodeo, the circus, and Hollywood stunt-work. She founded STREB in 1985, which performs internationally in theaters, museums, and town squares. She established S.L.A.M. (STREB Lab for Action Mechanics) in 2003, a factory space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which produces a cottage industry of extreme action performances and invites everyday people to wonder about movement, gravity, and flight.

Actor, playwright, and author Anna Deavere Smith is performing her latest play Let Me Down Easy off-Broadway, and she appears on Showtime's Nurse Jackie.

The Evel Knievel of dance creates a new way of seeing the body in action.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

In this dizzying, inspirational self-help memoir, choreographer and performer Streb details her life-long exploration of movement, the body, and time while providing brief lessons in math and practical philosophy: "Impact is a primal and primitive practice we at my dance company STREB accept: the full, weighted human body, with its issues of vectors and forces and angles of incidence and choices that are incurred in the flash of an instant, yet determine everything." Based out of "an anti-white cube, anti-glass bubble, anti-ivory tower arena" in New York, STREB creates performances such as Artificial Gravity, which "explores whether there is a perfect radius that would be essential for the human form on a horizontal surface," and "Wild Blue Yonder," commemorating the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' flight ("STREB began with a dream of flight, rugged and rough... dealing with true space, the sky, an area above the ground"). In her explanations and experiments, including an unprotected and unrehearsed dive through glass, Streb gives readers news ways to consider the body and its movement, from "the mechanical measurement of the legs, arms, torso, neck, hips, feet, shoulders, ankles, and knees" to "the alchemetic processes of the neurological systems." Accompanied by full-color and black-and-white photographs, Streb's riveting prose should provoke and inspire philosophy students, dancers, and athletes of all kinds.
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In 2003, Streb established S.L.A.M. (Stereo Lab for Action Mechanics) in Brooklyn, NY. The company performs in theaters around the country as well as in its own massive performance space in Williamsburg. Streb has received numerous fellowships and awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and on-going support from the National Endowment for the Arts. An actress, playwright, and professor, Anna Deavere Smith is the recipient of two Obies, two Tony nominations, and a Macarthur fellowship. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her play Fires in the Mirror. Appearing in several films including Philadelphia, Rachael Getting Married, and The American President, Smith has a recurring role on Nurse Jackie. Peggy Phelan, author of Mourning Sex: performing public memories, is the chair of the drama department at Stanford University.