The dancers in rehearsal for Elizabeth Streb’s “Ascenscion.” Photo by Tom Caravaglia
Forget that notorious comic-book Broadway musical; if you want to see truly amazing and daring—not to mention outrageously creative—performers defy gravity and travel at speeds you may not want to contemplate, make your way to the Park Avenue Armory. For the second of that adventurous institution’s December dance presentations, Elizabeth Streb is transforming the Armory’s vast drill hall into a high-tech industrial playground for her 16 dancers.
It seems like a perfect match: Streb’s no-holds-barred imaginative world of seemingly impossible large-scale feats finds a home in the huge, flexible space that is increasingly inviting performing artists to explore its possibilities to suit their visions. Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president and executive director, had long hoped to turn Streb loose in the space. Kiss the Air, her collection of six new large-scale works, is making that a reality.
Along the length of the space, with the audience seated on both sides, will be an array of the elaborate constructions from which Streb’s daredevil dancers propel themselves into, through and across space. At one end is the four-level structure for Human Fountain, from which bodies launch themselves through the air to create an effect inspired by Las Vegas’ Bellagio Fountain. At another is Ascension, a 21-foot turning ladder on which the dancers have to maintain their balance. An original score by David van Tieghem accompanies the action, and projections (some of them live-action) by Erik Pearson will appear on six large screens.
Last Friday, on one side of a drill hall that resembled a vast, noisy construction site, Streb sat at a work table covered in detailed diagrams amid dozens of workers and explained what was going on. She spoke knowledgeably about trusses, scaffolds, bungees, zip lines and 10,000-foot cement “mafia blocks” that anchor the cables holding up the various structures. Wearing a black suit and boots, she seemed unfazed by the scale of the project, the pressure of getting such elaborate equipment loaded in and ready so the dancers could begin to acclimate themselves to the largest indoor space in which she has ever presented her adventurous pieces.
Some of the works have been tried out at SLAM, her Brooklyn studio, but for Kiss the Air, “we’re going to scale up everything, starting tonight”—when the dancers begin rehearsing in the drill hall. She has put years of thought into this project, contemplating possible seating arrangements and figuring out how to create a continuous show so her dancers can proceed from one form of explosive “extreme action” to the next.
“We spent a long time trying to figure out the right vector structure to slice this enormous space in an effective way—how do you go from one to the other, where will the audience be, where will the projection screens go? This space eliminates the need for set changes,” she explained, holding up a meticulous diagram of the hall divided into areas for each event.
“See that enormously high tower?” she asked, pointing across the hall as the noise level rose. Streb explained that it was the launching point for a piece in which “the dancers will get going around 50 miles per hour, going right over the heads of the audience. Eighty engineers are promising everything will be fine.”
Walking through the enormous space, we pass tractor-like vehicles parked at the sides and a central square pool of water that is featured in one of the works, with dancers on bungee cords flying high and out over the audience. For another, Streb is making use of air ramps—pneumatic devices the movie industry uses to hurl bodies sideways. “That’s two and a half minutes; maybe the most expensive dance I’ve ever made,” she observed.
Who are the brave performers who submit to Streb’s wild schemes and take to the air so readily? Streb says her work does require “a systemically impervious body.”
Those bodies will be “scaling up” the action even further next summer when Streb, who was invited to be part of the Cultural Olympiad, plans a series of spectacular outdoor events in London. As she describes the project, titled One Extraordinary Day, “It’s along certain iconic buildings on the Thames—all outdoors—on bridges, the London Eye. Human Fountain will go right into Trafalgar Square between two actual fountains, and they’re going to let me raise and lower those fountains choreographically. We’ll jump off the Tower Bridge with high-speed winches.” One can only imagine the diagrams she has created for all that
For the moment, Streb’s attention is focused indoors, as an idea she and Robertson first discussed over a decade ago comes to fruition. “Rebecca has been dreaming about this as a performance space for years. She’s done all this infrastructure work—she’s been a spectacular cultural leader, a maverick,” Streb said admiringly.
Kiss the Air
Dec. 14–22, Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave. (at 67th St.), www.armoryonpark.org; $25 & $35.
