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 1985. 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. Streb has been a featured speaker presenting her keynote lectures at such places as 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, among others. "Rough and Tumble" Alec Wilkinson's profile of Elizabeth Streb, appeared in the The New Yorker magazine in June, 2015. Streb received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Award in 1997. 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 two honorary doctorates. 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;” a Doris Duke Artist Award in 2013; and over 30 years of on-going support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). She served on Mayor Bloomberg’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission and is a member of the board of the Jerome and Camargo Foundations. 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, and London 2012, the Cultural Olympiad for the Summer Games. "Born to Fly" aired on PBS on May 11, 2014 and is currently available on Netflix and 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. She lives in Manhattan with her long-time partner, the broadcaster and investigative journalist, Laura Flanders.

Action, danger, risk, accidents, and machines.

Light travels 18,000,000 times faster than rain. If you could fold a piece of paper 51 times, it's thickness would exceed the distance from here to the sun. The common shrew protects itself from predators by dying of fright. "You cannot change what you are unaware of... how do you notice these points of strategic inflection? A small shift that would make everything new again." If you dug a hole through the center of the earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side. How fast is that?

Devising Action Gizmos, Extreme Action Invention

Throughout my career, my goal has always been to create a motion lexicon that all humans recognize. I call it POP ACTION 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 entwines 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.

Nothing really separate from what I spend my time doing every day. This involves the job of asking unanswerable questions about time, space, and forces (i.e. what is the iambic pentameter of action).