Lightness in Action: Elizabeth Streb + Gravity

In the months before his death, Italo Calvino, the Italian writer and explorer of the imaginary, was working on a series of essays, which he called Lezioni americane: American lessons (translations mine). The English title was Six Memos for the New Millennium, and in fact both are fitting: Calvino was investigating fast, shiny, forward-looking ideas like "Exactitude" and "Quickness." The first and most intriguing essay in the book is called "Lightness." At the center of the "Lightness" essay is a story about the poet Guido Cavalcanti, taken from Boccaccio's Decameron. One afternoon, Boccaccio writes, the mercurial and enigmatic poet Cavalcanti is confronted by a roving band of Florentine youths, who taunt him for not joining in their revels. They surround him in a graveyard, their horses edging closer and pawing nastily, and then, quite suddenly, answering them with the quickest of wit and the lightest of leaps, Cavalcanti lays one hand on a nearby marble arch in the wall, vaults nimbly over it, and is gone.

Calvino sees this leap, this poetic unexpectedness of movement, as the emblem of lightness itself; he says it shows how Cavalcanti manages to embody a contradiction in which his own "gravity contains the secret of lightness." Calvino classifies a kinetic airborne body of this kind as having three essential elements: first of all, it is, like Cavalcanti's leap, leggerissimo—very, very light. Secondly and crucially, it is in motion; and finally, Calvino states, "it is a vector of information."

This conjunction of terms—extreme lightness, meaningful movement, and the idea of bodies acting as vectors of information—has a corollary in the "action art" of Elizabeth Streb, whose Brooklyn workspace is home to relentless physical experiments in velocity, impact, force, and timing that send her dancers cannon-balling through the air at terrific speeds. Recently, Streb premiered a site-specific piece called Ascension (2011), commissioned by the Whitney Museum, which engaged the dynamics of elevation and apparent impossibility in the service of aesthetic exploration. Ascension is typical of Streb's work in that it combines the lofty aspirations that ascent invokes with unexpected, impractical movement. Instead of portraying a graceful, inspiring elevation, the dance is very much about descent, gravity, and weight. The set is a rotating ladder, whose revolutions confuse any sense of upward or downward, and the STREB dancers throw their bodies on and off of it, impelling it to accelerate, reverse directions, or swing like a pendulum. As they find themselves upside down, they can crawl through the rungs of the ladder to the other side: a sideways movement that changes the parameters and perspective of the action, just like Cavalcanti's leap. Ascension is an example of vectors of human movements being forcibly bisected by vectors of mechanical movement, and the result is an equation of bodies distributed across space in new ways—a physics lecture in neon spandex.

In addition to her performances in public spaces, Elizabeth Streb often throws open the doors at SLAM, the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics, in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), New York, for hours and hours of company rehearsals. Members of the public are encouraged to wander in wearing their street shoes, eat their lunches, and use the free WiFi. Here, too, there is a lightness about the creative process: instead of the mystique of the delicate choreographer, locked in her studio perfecting her creation, we are all invited to watch the choreographer try things out, make mistakes, encounter the resistance and failures of her dancers—and use the cotton candy machine. The emphasis on accessibility, open spaces, and low-key, process-based interactions between audience, dancers, and choreographer is also a sideways leap over the wall that dance-makers usually erect around their studios.

On several levels, then, Elizabeth Streb employs the dynamics that Calvino sees in Cavalcanti's movement. She explores the way that bodies strain to ascend to new heights and traverse physical boundaries, how gestures can embody kinetic wit, and how dancers' bodies can trace vectors that are designed to convey specific information, even information that belongs to other disciplines. Using "extreme action," Streb has...