Last Sunday, t&M, along with a fellow circus friend & collaborator, went to see STREB’s latest SLAM show, CATAPULT:
We work our way through the increasingly trendifying Williamsburg neighborhood of murals, bookshops, and cafes, down industrial-looking side streets, and finally stopped outside the large metal door of a semi-abandoned looking building from which we could hear music and cheers leaking. We walk in, get our hands stamped club-style, and scramble onto an enormous red mat as big as my living room.
We locate the performance, happening among the packed crowd, where dancers are flipping along a row of mats, landing in full body slams onto the ground and each other, then sliding along a parallel strip of slippery flooring, shouting the name of each move before they perform it. The crowd cheers at the highest flips and giggles when the dancers playfully bump into each other, gasping when they narrowly miss each other’s flying bodies. I stand up for a better view and wobble on the cushy mat. It feels like I’ve walked into a party, not a performance.
STREB is a dance company in Brooklyn, NY specializing in an energetic, dynamic, extremely physical form of experimental dance called popaction. They also use custom-made apparatus like trusses, frames, low- friction floors and spinning wheels to play with the bounds of physicality. SLAM, which stands for the ‘Streb Lab for Action Mechanics,’ is their HQ and primary performance venue, a converted warehouse garage by the banks of the East River. It’s stocked with mats, mechanical russes, and a flying trapeze rig (in fact, STREB is where I first trained as a flying trapeze instructor my last year of high school, as it was for a while the only indoor rig in NYC).
CATAPULT! was similar to other STREB shows I’ve seen, broken into a cabaret-like string of act/pieces, interspersing longer, demanding dances with video projections, mini-dances, and even a short demo of a multi-jointed dancing robot toy. The pieces are wildly inventive, playful, full of risk and excitement. In one piece, a heavy slab of I-frame metal hangs suspended from a single cable as the dancers shove, swing, spin, and push it around, running around, hanging from, and ducking under it. In another, three dancers abseil up and down a wall, leaping and turning as a vertiginous video projection behind them creates the illusion that they are astronauts, jumping tens of feets with each leap as the planet recedes and returns behind them. There’s even a group of young trapeze artists (full disclosure: that’s one of the other reasons I went to see the show – I’m friend of the catcher’s) who do a short piece during intermission. The finale centers around a rotating catapult, a sort of counterweighted hamster wheel, that the dancers ride in and on, climb up and down, and are flung from. It reminds me of the Wheel of Death act recently being displayed by bigger circuses like Cirque du Soleil in Kooza, only more intimate.
The space is so small you can feel the vibrations of the dancer’s thundering bodies as they perform, see the rest of the audience’s faces mirroring your own reactions. There’s a feeling of community, of solidarity, energy drummed up by the dancers and tossed back by the audience. At one point, 3-, 4-, and 5- year-olds are invited up on ’stage’ to do a short dance led by one of the company who teaches the youngest kids’ dance class. As they copy her simple movements, jumps, turns, and rolls, it becomes obvious that as adventurous and childlike the company’s pieces seem, it’s the high level of professional skill and roots in mature movement theory that make STREB’s work so engaging and interesting to watch.
