Streb. - Joyce Theater, New York, New York - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, April, 1998 by Alice Naude

JOYCE THEATER DECEMBER 16, 1997-JANUARY 4, 1998 REVIEWED BY ALICE MAUDE

Elizabeth Streb's creative trajectory soars; to its most poetic in Fly, a work in the tradition of Icarus and the Wright Brothers that premiered in December at the Joyce. For years, Streb has sent her dancers hurtling through space and ricocheting off trampolines in an effort to battle gravity and break with the confines of modem dance. But in 1997--the year in which she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship--gravity became an equal partner.

Fly harnesses Hope Clark to one end of a giant counterbalanced lever. She is held by a swivel harness that allows her to turn, twist, and run almost weightlessly. Propelling the lever around in a circle, she builds up momentum and then dives into the air. The rest of the company ducks, falls, and hits the floor with reverberating thuds that ore miked and fed back by Matthew Ostrowski, whose gritty sound core is one of the performance's great achievements.

On all fronts, Streb's show has been raised to a new level of technical virtuosity. Designers Bill Ballou and Michael Casselli have created a box truss, much like the sets used for rock concerts, that opens and closes mechanically, allowing the equipment used in various pieces to be set up and taken down quickly. When it works--there were mechanical failures one night that delayed the performance almost an hour--it echoes the stark, Brave New World quality of the movement.

In Streb's All/Wall, dancers hurl themselves at a red wall. In Bounce they leap through the air and land hard on a gymnastic mat. Look Up belays them to a giant vertical surface from which they dive toward the audience. These older works ore striking not only for their brutality but also for their moments of sheer beauty when a dancer's body is caught in flight. Yet, next to Fly, they look like exercises: ones that test but never break Newton's laws. Fly is the evening's real payoff, the one that says the most about the body's potential. Streb's dancers deserve high praise for sheer guts and the trust they place in each other's skill and timing. Among them, Clark stands out for grace and a poise that reminds us--in this show full of technical wizardry--that the most startling innovations here are human.