Moments of Truth

Choreographer Elizabeth Streb had to invent a term to describe her style of movement:popaction. The word tells it exactly like it is.

“We’re really popping or exploding our muscles to initiate the actions,” Streb said in a recent phone interview from Berkeley, where her company is performing en route to Tuesday’s date at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“I don’t think of myself as anti-dance, as some people view me,” she said. “I attempt to chisel what [interests me] in movement to a finer and finer degree.”

The honing process ultimately comes down, she said, to whether a human body can enact such a stripped-down movement and “survive that experience without being torn apart.”

To explain her basic concept, Streb points to the famous stop-action photos of Eadweard Muybridge. “I noticed that with a stream of maybe 14 images, the one in the middle was really the motion the athlete was going for,” she said. “The rest were preparation and recovery.

“My thought was, let’s try to remove all the transitions and just get to the movement. Just disappear if you want to be gone. Just fall to the ground. Don’t get down. We snap all those moves, almost as if the body is not human.”

The results have been described as a cross between dance and athletics. Streb and her eight dancers use harnesses and trampolines, bungee cords and mechanical devices to fly or walk on walls, even crash against walls or through break-away glass.

They’ve earned the title “The Flying Wallendas of Dance.”

Most of the pieces on the Irvine “Popaction” program describe the action on stage: “Fly,” “Bounce,” “Across” or “Up.” Her signature solo, “Little Ease,” however, requires some explanation. Strep squeezes into a horizontal box just big enough to hold her.

“I believe in attempting to somehow nudge us out of our comfort zones and out also of the physical universe we’re in every day,” she said. “That process usually connotes discomfort, usually danger. To me, that’s a given.”

A recipient last year of a $290,000 MacArthur genius grant, Streb, 47, began conventional dance training at the State University of New York, Brockport, in 1972 and continued to stay in shape by studying modern dance and ballet until about five years ago.

She danced with San Francisco modern dancer Margaret Jenkins in the early ‘70s, began presenting her “Popaction” work in New York in 1979 and formed her company, Streb/Ringside, in 1985.

“It was a long journey,” she said. “I got from there to here by asking fairly elementary questions about movement in general and dance specifically. It was an investigation, which is still going on.”

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In “Up,” Streb explores movement against gravity, using as a starting point a parabolic flight pattern. “It rises from the ground, goes not very far up from the Earth, reaches a high point and then returns to Earth,” Streb noted. “In ‘Up,’ I decided that that direction was underemphasized theatrically. So that became my direction.

“The next thing, obviously, was to go buy a trampoline.”

But to break the simplistic up-and-down rhythm, she suspended pipes above the trampoline around which the dancers must negotiate.

Streb usually begins with a movement idea and “pretty intuitively” works out the beginning, middle and end of her pieces, she said. To focus on the movement entirely, she eschews musical accompaniment. The dancers’ grunts and groans and commands to each other can be heard.

“It’s not dealing with a narrative form,” she said. “It’s all digitalized information, working spatially and dimensionally. Duration doesn’t add to the picture. It detracts because it’s a digitalized storage of information. So from there I try to get to the meat of the matter with a construction of the action in a rhythmic way.”

The rhythms are often fast and risky, but her dancers have learned to handle them through careful rehearsal.

“All of the dances are totally choreographed by the time we get them to the stage,” she said. “The work is too fast and too close and pretty dangerous. You couldn’t improvise those movements, although people do ask us that sometimes. It looks pretty spontaneous.”

Streb has no agenda for how her works should be interpreted. But she does hope that the audience will feel afterward as if “they’ve done the action.”

“Dance-goers have to do a paradigm shift away from the body to understand what I’m doing,” she said. “I can understand [if] someone who is deeply in love with ballet will find my work offensive, if they’re looking at the body and my subject is the action. They think, ‘Gee, no fancy moves.’ My advice is to watch the invisible part of what we’re doing. That’s where what we do lies.”

* Streb/Ringside will perform Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. $24-$28. The program is sold out. (714) 854-4646.