ELIZABETH STREB

Throughout my career, my goal has always been to create a motion lexicon that all humans recognize. I call it PopAction and it exists now, not only on stage as a fusion of dance, sports, gymnastics, and the American circus – but also in a place, SLAM, where an exchange of human acts takes place everyday enriching my vocabulary and hopefully expanding the lives of my company’s co-conspirators, the audience. My aim is to create work that speaks of and to intrinsic human potential. Let’s reinvent the radical art of culture, let’s imagine art entwined with the culture of the street, the surprising quotidian event; art that is as accidental an occurrence in people’s everyday urban lives as the parks, the sidewalks, the trees and the corner deli. Each and every time I work at SLAM, I ask, “how can movement elicit sorrow, fright, humor, excitement and the desire to live a better life – all at once.” I want my work to make all of us want to do more, go further. I believe that action – on the stage and in the street – is the most powerful force on earth. I believe it can cure sad hearts and sated minds, and I am trying to prove this point.

Who is Elizabeth Streb?

MacArthur “Genius” Award-winner, Elizabeth Streb has dived through glass, allowed a ton of dirt to fall on her head, walked down (the outside of) London’s City Hall, and set herself on fire, among other feats of extreme action. Her popular book, STREB: How to Become an Extreme Action Hero, was made into a hit documentary, Born to Fly directed by Catherine Gund (Aubin Pictures), which premiered at SXSW and received an extended run at The Film Forum in New York City in 2014. Streb founded the STREB Extreme Action Company in 1979. In 2003, she established SLAM, the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. SLAM’s garage doors are always open: anyone and everyone can come in, watch rehearsals, take classes, and learn to fly.

Elizabeth Streb was invited to present a TED Talk (‘My Quest To Defy Gravity and Fly’) at TED 2018: THE AGE OF AMAZEMENT. She has been a featured speaker presenting her keynote lectures at such places as the Rubin Museum of Art (in conversation with Dr. John W. Krakauer), TEDxMET, the Institute for Technology and Education (ISTE), POPTECH, the Institute of Contemporary Art (in conversation with physicist, Brain Greene), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (in conversation with author A.M. Homes), the National Performing Arts Convention, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), the Penny Stamps Speaker Series at the University of Michigan, Chorus America, the University of Utah, and as a Caroline Werner Gannett Project speaker in Rochester NY, and gave the 2019 Commencement Speech at Otis College for Arts and Design among others.

Streb was profiled by Alec Wilkinson in an extended essay “Rough and Tumble: Elizabeth Streb’s daredevil dances” for the New Yorker magazine in June 2015, was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine (“The New American Circus”), and in 2019 was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Streb received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Award in 1997, a Doris Duke Artist Award in 2013, and a USA Fellowship in 2020. She holds a Master of Arts in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, a Bachelor of Science in Modern Dance from SUNY Brockport, and honorary doctorates from SUNY Brockport, Rhode Island College and Otis College of Art and Design. Streb has received numerous other awards and fellowships including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987; a Brandeis Creative Arts Award in 1991; two New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessie Awards), in 1988 and 1999 for her “sustained investigation of movement;” and over 35 years of on-going support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In 2009, Streb was the Danspace Project Honoree. She served on Mayor Bloomberg’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission and is a member of the board of the Jerome Foundation.

Major commissions for choreography include: Lincoln Center Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, MOCA, LA Temporary Contemporary, the Whitney Museum of Art, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, the Park Avenue Armory, London 2012, the Cultural Olympiad for the Summer Games, CityLab Paris 2018, the opening of Bloomberg’s new headquarters in London, Musée D’Orsay, the re-opening of the Théâtre du Châtelet, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Born to Fly aired on PBS on May 11, 2014 and is currently available on iTunes. OXD, directed by Craig Lowy, which follows STREB at the 2012 London Olympics, premiered at the IFC theater in New York City on February 2, 2016. Streb and her company have also been featured in PopAction by Michael Blackwood, on PBS’s In The Life and Great Performances, The David Letterman Show, BBC World News, CBS Sunday Morning, CBS This Morning, Business Insider, CNN’s Weekend Today, MTV, on the National Public Radio shows Studio 360 and Science Friday, and on Larry King Live.

Elizabeth Streb at TED2018: The Age of Amazement

Elizabeth Streb TED Talk

Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

Watch Elizabeth Streb’s TED Talk

How to Become An Extreme Action Hero, by Elizabeth Streb

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.

“[A] dizzying, inspirational self-help memoir . . . Streb’s riveting prose should provoke and inspire philosophy students, dancers, and athletes of all kinds.” —Publishers Weekly

Foreword by Anna Deavere Smith
Introduction by Peggy Phelan

Available for purchase at SLAM (info@streb.org or 718.384.6491), on Amazon.com and at feministpress.org

"Her new book explores a lifetime of thought and experience with extreme action—real moves—and the conditions that make them possible: body, space, time, motion..."

"Fearlessness and intelligence combined—that is what makes Elizabeth Streb's work so potent and beautiful."

". . . it’s incredibly well written, blazingly articulate, brimming with ideas regarding space, time, movement—as if Martha Graham and Albert Einstein had a love child and named her Streb; like Batman and Robin gave her the secret code to how to explain all that happens behind KAPOW, SPLAT, and ZOWIE."

Interview with Laura Flanders about How to Become an Extreme Action Hero

Press Reviews

Infinite Body review by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Arts journalist since 1976. Scroll down to read the review.

Grantmakers in the Arts review by John E. McGuirk, the director of the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Click here to read the review.

Amazon Book Review from Publishers Weekly including “Streb [as] a glorious acrobatic adventure.” The Guardian. Click here to read the review.

Bomb Magazine article from A.M. Homes with an Interview between A.M. Homes and Elizabeth Streb! Click here to read the review.

Born to Fly: ELIZABETH STREB VS. GRAVITY

Elizabeth Streb and STREB Extreme Action form a motley troupe of flyers and crashers. Propelled by Streb’s edict that “anything too safe is not action,” these daredevils challenge the assumptions of art, aging, injury, gender, and human possibility. BORN TO FLY: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity traces the evolution of Elizabeth Streb’s movement philosophy as she pushes herself and her performers from the ground to the sky. Revealing the passions behind the dancers’ bruises and broken noses, BORN TO FLY offers a breathtaking tale about the necessity of art, inspiring audiences hungry for a more tactile and fierce existence.

Go to the official film site!