Evel Knievel of Dance Blends Physics into Performance Art

By James Devitt

She has a self-described obsession with “high-impact, high-velocity” sports. She has debated former Congressman Dick Armey on Larry King Live over the merits of public funding for the arts. And she has a fascination with how to best analyze right triangles.

      It’s not easy to pin down Elizabeth Streb—at least not since the early 1970s, when she headed off to San Francisco from upstate New York, bachelor’s degree in hand, in “an Easy Rider kind of way” on her Honda 350 to pursue art and choreography.

      Streb, who came back to New York in 1974, graduates today with a degree from the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought, which is part of the Graduate School of Arts and Science.

      With her own performance company, Streb Extreme Action, part of the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as well as a list of honors that includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, it would be fair to ask how a graduate degree could enhance Streb’s profile. Her response is simple—and complex.

      “I wanted to study time and space and to develop a measuring system for my work,” says Streb, who’s been described as the Evel Knievel of dance by one critic. “I wanted to introduce new methods of rigor into my choreographic questioning process garnered from these various fields.”

      Streb’s objectives of better understanding physical processes required bolstering her mathematics background. She did a three year independent study with NYU physics professor Allen Mincer. But a big portion of her education came during her re-immersion into the classroom.

      “The most valuable exercise was to be in class with [graduate students] and to be in my 50s and to not ‘know,’” she explains. “It was like when I was a young artist, and I was nobody. I had to come up with an idea and prove myself again.”

      Streb says she’s now equipped for her next artistic epiphany.

      “Chance favors a prepared mind,” says Streb. “Reading something will just badger your brain in a way you least expect it to. With the influx of information and knowledge gained during my time here, I’m better positioned for future ‘Aha!’ moments.”

 

Elizabeth Streb: “Chance favors a prepared mind.”