Last Updated
May 14, 2020
Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Elizabeth Streb. [Live show recorded: May 12, 2020.]
Guest: Elizabeth Streb
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
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 1979. 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.
Elizabeth Streb was invited to present a TED Talk (‘My Quest To Defy Gravity and Fly’) at TED 2018: THE AGE OF AMAZEMENT. She has been a featured speaker presenting her keynote lectures at such places as the Rubin Museum of Art (in conversation with Dr. John W. Krakauer), 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 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 honorary doctorates from SUNY Brockport, Rhode Island College and Otis College of Art and Design. 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). In 2009, Streb was the Danspace Project Honoree. She served on Mayor Bloomberg’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission and is a member of the board of the Jerome Foundation.
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, London 2012, the Cultural Olympiad for the Summer Games, CityLab Paris 2018, the opening of Bloomberg’s new headquarters in London, Musée D’Orsay, the re-opening of the Théâtre du Châtelet, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Born to Fly aired on PBS on May 11, 2014 and is currently available on 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.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to the season one finale of Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live! The Morning(ish) Show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by the super amazing human, Elizabeth Streb. It's impossible for me to distill Elizabeth's bio into just a few sentences, but I'll try. She's a MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient. She dove 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; although we learned that setting herself on fire was actually an accident. And these are just a few of the things among Elizabeth's long list of feats of extreme action.
Tim Cynova:
The 2014 documentary, Born to Fly is a must see. It chronicles her company of extreme action mechanics as they prepare for and perform literally breathtaking moments as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad of the Olympic Summer Games in London. We are so happy she's able to join us for the season finale. Without further ado, Elizabeth, welcome to the show.
Lauren Ruffin:
So really excited to have this conversation with you, Elizabeth. Our first question, for all of our guests and in particular, knowing that it's the night after your first virtual gala, how are you doing personally and how is your community doing during the pandemic?
Elizabeth Streb:
Well, I think that the community at large, my small community, which is Drive Extreme Action, our dance company, and also our SLAM lab STREB LAB for ACTION MECHANICS, where everything happens, including, 600 kids a week in an afterschool program, ordinarily, normally, rehearsals, flying trapeze, STREB rehearsals, shows. That's closed. We closed it middle, early March, like everyone else, trying to figure out how do we keep operating? We did get a PPP, so we're continuing to pay the dancers. I think I and my executive director, Christine Chen, we're dedicated to keeping our promise to the dancers and our employees, even though the income from the SLAM shows and one of the trans-migrations of our operation lie with the brilliant leadership of Christine Chen, our executive director, was to put all of the training online.
Elizabeth Streb:
So we had a whole semester, for instance, of KIDS ACTION and we'd already gotten the tuition. The dancers band together with the leadership of Christine and starting to send classes to the KIDS at home. Even the parents, because they were stuck at home too, would take these classes for KIDS ACTION and the kids were known to run off to the screen, kiss their teachers, and apparently the parents did that too.
Elizabeth Streb:
Things that they could do. We had very few people ask for the tuition back. We are trying to like grab the income we can. We knew that the shows weren't going to go on. All of the work that we were doing with the Kennedy Center, like River Run that they were doing with all around surrounding Tomanek and their opening of the new building and Brookfield Properties and the tape bridge. We went online, did all these other things online that had been posted on Instagram. And it's just an unknown. I'm not worrying about money. I think Christine, we always worry about money, but what can we do?
Elizabeth Streb:
You know, I think my attitude is we're doing the best we can. We're going to pay everybody for as long as the money holds up. So mostly we've gone up virtually as uniquely as good can do, being that I am a physical company. I made a piece for Zoom for the gala last night. They just really don't like Zoom. I don't see how they can't get timing right. And I thought work, how would you do it? But nothing was edited because I refused to do that. But the [inaudible 00:03:50], like I wanted them flying all around the nine boxes that was not going to happen.
Elizabeth Streb:
I'm adjusting, trying not to have an attitude about...My obsession is...our content is in the rhythm of action. Not words. We're not music and it's gone, gone, gone, gone. You know, so get humble. I guess those are the details. I think everybody's trying to make adjustments and dance companies are particularly hard because you're paying humans to do physical things outside or inside, and that's gone, but I can keep the paying humans for as long as we can.
Lauren Ruffin:
That made me think of the conversation we had on Friday with Lisa Yancey and Bamuthi Joseph where he talked about being a dancer and his work being his body. I'm wondering if you're rethinking or reframing your work during this time?
Elizabeth Streb:
In terms of the work, being their bodies?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Streb:
As humbly as possible. You know, I think that the dancers... We've had four-hour Zoom rehearsals to make this piece, horizon line. They're in their little rooms or rooms somewhere around Manhattan, the Bronx, and it's physically difficult, mentally difficult, spiritually difficult. Would we do it anyway? I don't get into regret or cope. You know, I expunged them from my vocabulary many decades ago. It's a present tense idea and philosophically, it's also a present tense idea. So there are things, a little detritus on the ground that we have that we can harness. And that's what we're trying to do. And the cheery attitude, no swearing at SLAM, because we mic our staff and the kids will hear you. And also you can increase your vocabulary if you promise not to swear. Anytime someone swears at SLAM, you have to give me a quarter.
Tim Cynova:
Just a bunch of people carrying quarters around in their pockets, just on the off chance that that might happen.
Lauren Ruffin:
I'd have to pay up front. Put me on layaway.
Elizabeth Streb:
Wow. I'm telling you about I've started swearing again, which my partner, Laura Flanders, is like, I can't believe you're like a sailor, a drunken sailor. What's happened? To not do that. And I think it really increases your vocabulary if you don't swear, but I'm hopefully not on the air.
Tim Cynova:
Research shows that people who curse are more likely telling you the truth, so whenever I actually say something, I usually follow up with a research, but...
Elizabeth Streb:
I never heard that. I think you're making an excuse.
Tim Cynova:
That's true. Yeah. I've never seen the research. I've just read the article that references it. Yeah.
Elizabeth Streb:
We're just gaining rumors.
Tim Cynova:
It's true, Elizabeth, that's exactly what's happening. When you talk about regret and hope. And we were in a meeting a couple of weeks ago and one of our coworkers remarked that this is the first time in their life when their faced, or we're faced with the uncertainty of a global pandemic, when they've sat to contemplate, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself. It took on new meaning for them. You are someone who I know does things that I could never do. Walk down outside of a building, jump through plates of glass, set yourself on fire. I imagine you have a relationship with fear that you've given a far more thought, or not, to what fear is. During this pandemic, I'm wondering what comes to mind as you think about that.
Elizabeth Streb:
Lighting myself on fire was for my girlfriend, my partner now. We recently got married after 29 years or something, but that was, I don't know; lesbians don't get married for God's sake or death to all. But for her 40th birthday, and that was probably almost 18 years ago, I set a fire. My dancers set a fire and I was supposed to land on it and put it out. It was called blaze away, trying to demonstrate to Melissa Etheridge. I'm the only one to walk across the earth. When I stood up, I'd been using sternal. I was on fire. So it wasn't like I'm going to set myself on fire. My character got set on fire. I think that here is a class thing, in my opinion, because then I got brought up in a very working class family. Then I went, I sort of snuck into the higher art world by default, by stubbornness.
Elizabeth Streb:
And I can see those girls, women, that were in rehearsal and go out to dinner and I would go to restaurants and cook. I was a chef. Then I even researched the famous choreographers in New York, their parents. One's a judge, one's a lawyer. My father laid bricks. I think that fear...what we consider fear in the dance world, especially because it's what you do to train your body to do things that are supposed to be new vocabularies, to you increase the profundity and the vocabulary and the language, the grammar of action; not just to perform the techniques you learn in ballet class, which is what they do. Why would I want to see around the job? What the hell is that? The idea that action has [inaudible 00:09:15] rather than experience has to be in terms of transference. So I always disagreed with everything the dance world promulgated.
Elizabeth Streb:
Fear for me was I noticed that people of higher class, higher fences, larger yards, they keep harm away way away from them. And I'm thinking, well, how bad could it be? And you just started moving closer and closer to the incident of disaster and you know about millisecond timing. And you know, you can get out of there, but if you don't go there or you're so worried about your own precious little speck in the universe that you just don't do things if we're going to arrest the attention of the viewers.
Elizabeth Streb:
I feel that fear is just a detail. It's something we learn and little girls do. Be careful, be careful, don't get hurt. I'll carry that heavy thing for you. I'm probably one of the few teenagers... I looked very, very straight as a young woman all the way to when I hit 40 and then the guys stopped bugging me, thank God. That's probably because they figured out I couldn't have their baby or something like that. But I mean, I have this really crazy attitude. I think that my fear thing is that in that zone, which is certainly not a zone you're ever going to meet catastrophe if you're paying utter and rabbit attention, you figure out techniques to move in a millisecond manner. You make a decision when everything goes to heck and a hand basket. You make a decision to save yourself. That's where the stuff of the action erupts from, not exercising your training and such.
Tim Cynova:
Thank you for that.
Lauren Ruffin:
It strikes me in this whole thing about fear. One of the most interesting things about the pandemic, for me, is how few people I know think about sort of the reality of death and people are really panicking about that. I feel like I've made my peace with the idea of my demise, which is inevitable in a way that a lot of my colleagues have it as the pandemic made you reframe your thoughts on your own mortality or do you feel like you've always had a pretty good sense of that and a pretty good understanding of that?
Elizabeth Streb:
I'm not so worried about myself, I guess.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Yeah.
Elizabeth Streb:
I did get COVID. We just got tested and I had COVID. We have a little cabin up in Smallwood, New York by where the real Woodstock happened. I was careless when we left New York- went to a restaurant, went go party, went to the movies, and I got slapped with it. I actually had that thought, Hmm, I'm 70. Uh-oh, I'm going to go out with a stupid thing. I'd rather be falling off a tall building or something. Not to get me with this damn [inaudible 00:12:02], or whatever the heck it is.
Elizabeth Streb:
I guess I understand people being afraid, but I think the whole other thing, Laura, is this thing about what it's bringing out about race. Like what the heck. Or class and poverty. And for me, if there's anything that's going to switch the lens on fairness in this world, and certainly in this country, maybe it's this. Maybe the good thing out of this is just to figure out how to have empathy for everybody. I'm working on trying to have my attitude about wealthy people, have a way a little. I think they're stingy, but what else can I say?
Tim Cynova:
Well, before we get to a comment from Andrew Taylor who was just live chatting, in this moment, it feels like we have an opportunity to do things that we might not have been able to do in our lives. The globe essentially shut-down, and to get to a future where everyone can thrive, what do you think it will take that we need to do now before maybe it just falls right back into what it's been for generations?
Elizabeth Streb:
That's a very complicated question, because mostly, I don't know. I don't think it will go back. I just don't see how it can go back. We live in New York city. You guys probably do too. We have a loft in SoHo that I had in the seventies. It's devastated, and it's as high of real estate monitoring and you know, people just hanging on to things and seeing how much they can get. It just was destroying businesses here and certainly all over New York for quite a while before COVID hit.
Elizabeth Streb:
Laurie Garrett, who I was mentioning, is an amazing health political activist doctor said, it'll be 36 months. It'll be three years before they get a vaccine. That's what she thinks. She was very involved in the AIDS crisis, also; although it wasn't a pandemic. I just don't see. Then, because this keeps mutating, this virus with the children's story the other day, that 73 children, who knows. It could be like the dinosaurs and the asteroid and no more anything. It could be that. I don't know. Also, climate change and nobody was paying any attention to that. So do people learn their lessons? I don't think it'll ever go back to normal, though. I don't think people change past the age of 20. Not really.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. Well, we have a question from someone who's watching, Andrew Taylor. Andrew was a guest on our show last Friday. Yeah. Two weeks ago. I think he's all running together, but he says your work refuses the premise of human constraint, of gravity, of the horizontal, of the human body. How are you considering and questioning our current constraints of home space and the Zoom screen?
Elizabeth Streb:
Well, Andrew, we did, we put this out. I've got to get you on my mailing list. Again, you are, we've had great exchanges over the years, Andrew and I have you know, about education and about the arts and about life. What I think that the screen... I'm not comfortable with it, as you could see how long it took me, but Andrew, I am.
Elizabeth Streb:
I found myself getting fascinated by it. When I was making the horizon line dance for our gala, our Action Maverick's gala, it's missing everything I care about- physicality, danger, time. I sort of blame it on the physicists, because they've still never defined time. Not even defined it. It's based on the same thing. I asked Lisa Randall once, she's a physicist at Harvard, and I said, well, what's your definition of time? Well, no, one's been able to really define it because well there's a problem with a minus sign. I go, really? ...Where you can go backwards in time, it's a theoretical particle, but I guess Andrew, I'm just a curmudgeon and I'm going to do it. I'm going to get into Zoom or Chrome. One of the things that is nine squares and we were not editing and it was two minutes long. And all I could do is positional things and images. We go faster than what images would provoke. They lasted about a half a millisecond. So it's everything I don't like. You know, someone's handed me this pale and I'm going to have to just get into it.
Tim Cynova:
Elizabeth it's going to be exciting to see what you come up with, because if anybody can make this work, I'm excited to see what comes out of that. I have recommended that I've lost track at how many people need to watch Born to Fly, the documentary I was fortunate to see it in New York when you were there about the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Lauren and I have talked about her love of the Olympics and how typically she would shut down every summer and winter for years. What's your relationship with the Olympics, Elizabeth? Do you usually watch it? Do you not? Do you have favorite sports? Where you're like, I'm going to just slide people down the spokes of the London Eye and that's going to be far, far more interesting than anything else?
Elizabeth Streb:
Well, I was really pretty cool. You've got to admit. I have a rigger named Robin Alliance with unusual rigors in London, and he created these gizmos that snapped onto the spokes, all 32 of them. I choreograph this whole dance on the spokes. Profundity is it kept changing...the slope changed its relationship to gravity and every little movement on that thing. They could fly; go 200 feet down the radius. It's 600 feet in the air. Once you're off the ground, 65 feet. It was a new vocabulary. His relationship with gravity was different than I was in trans. We walked down city hall, but we were tied somewhere up in the roof.
Elizabeth Streb:
I remember it stopped and Leonardo had to go over and unwrap a cable and there was like this thing, right? And I was at the top of the roof of the city hall in London, getting ready to go. And there was this, a rigger was up there, Robin was. I went, I think there's a problem there. It's all this tangle. I think it's not correct. No, no don't worry. You know how, how hard we're [inaudible 00:18:21]. Fair enough. We get a third of the way down and there's a round well.
Elizabeth Streb:
But Olympiad was a once in a lifetime bungee jumping off the millennium bridge. Anyway, in reference to the Olympics. I watch every Olympics. My favorite sport is downhill skiing with the women. And you know, this is like in the wind. This is the other thing. Talk about time. You win by a quarter, right? It's a hundred thousandth of a second. And all you can do to be that good is have guts and just be skiing your home like Lindsey Vaughn. I mean, it was just like cracking all of her falls. I don't like it that people fall and get hurt, but I love watching how they survive those falls going at that speed, 70 miles an hour. Is that right, Lauren? Something like 70 miles an hour?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Streb:
What other sport do you like, Lauren?
Lauren Ruffin:
So I always forget the name of the sport. I didn't know it existed until a couple of years ago.
Tim Cynova:
Biathlon, right?
Lauren Ruffin:
Biathlon. When these, I mean, white people invent the most amazing sports. You're skiing, long distance, and then you have to lay down in the snow and shoot at targets. It is amazing! And if I had known that sport existed, when I was a kid, I would have like thrown my basketball into the wind and become a bi-athlete.
Elizabeth Streb:
See, that's like, we're fast Twitch people like anerobic. I don't like it. I want it to be over in two minutes and then suffer all the way. But not an hour or whatever the heck goes.
Lauren Ruffin:
As I've gotten older, I've become a more patient athlete.
Elizabeth Streb:
You have?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I was always a sprinter and a basketball player, and now I can do things for 45 minutes an hour that are not me chasing a ball, which is very strange.
Elizabeth Streb:
That's amazing. I'm very impressed by that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Streb:
I love surfing, but it's not an Olympic. Where's my book. Oh, I have this great book called Sharks. That's perfect. Very hard book to find. Yeah. It's not Natalie Jackson, but it's my Bible. I can't even held it up as a gala last night. I go get this book. But I think physical ideas like that, like surfing. I also love sports that go on for generations, but they get no notice whatsoever. And like when people surf the mavericks, those are the waves that are like 60 feet high, 40 feet high. And you fall off of that and you just die. So I like things that have death as the other edge of them, I guess.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I do want to get it. Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Meanwhile, I went cross country skiing for the first time on a totally flat land or broke my ankle. So, you know. [crosstalk 00:21:11].
Elizabeth Streb:
You're not even attached to the ski, and you're not going to cry real cute for that.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. Clearly I'm not pushing the envelope hard enough.
Elizabeth Streb:
Well you just decided to bail out and didn't want to do it anymore.
Tim Cynova:
I have an aversion to what I would call low friction, sports, ice skating skiing. I am more of a cyclist and runner where there's some traction there, but I don't know. I was in Canada a couple months ago. Everyone was so encouraging about how easy cross country skiing is. I thought might as well try it. And then first time out ever in my life, a mile, broke my leg.
Elizabeth Streb:
That's terrible.
Tim Cynova:
Good story. That's the only time I'm going to go skiing. And we're coming up on time though. I think it's time for the suitcase question, Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
Elizabeth, I'm going to miss talking to you. It's good that someone else can give Tim a hard time besides me.
Elizabeth Streb:
It's my job, Tim. And I love [inaudible 00:22:11]
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, thank you. So throughout your life, you've been carrying a figurative suitcase with you. Habits and beliefs and things you love that have been in the suitcase for a long time. Now we're in a pandemic. So what's one thing that's been in your suitcase for a long time that you're tossing out, never to go back in again. What's one new habit or belief or love that you were going to put into the suitcase forever.
Elizabeth Streb:
This is really a quintessential impossible to answer question. I won't take any of the books out. That's why my suitcases are so... I know on my iPad, but not, not reading on a virtual machine. Now we're saying this right as I've got this huge suitcase. We're in New York, and we're going back tonight or tomorrow. I have packed a million other things in there. So I know it's a mess. Or maybe I take body lotion out, which is bad for a seven year old to do, but it's wrinkling. Anyway, what can I do then? I think that exercise equipment I take out. I've got to get back to exercising, but I'm not in the mood. So that goes out. I think that what I would leave in or put in?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, something new that you're going to put in.
Elizabeth Streb:
Well, what I've been putting in is certain types of books. I almost got the Rome prize, but then I was rejected. I was going to take a year off and go and just be. The thing that I'm putting in is time that I wanted to go back to when I was just, nobody, sitting on a curb on Canal street. Reading, studying. That kind of time you need to read a book that's philosophical. So it would be philosophy, mathematics, and science. I have time to like read a page and then run. Like I've noticed also a lot of the quotes I used to just say this, this, this and Feinstein said, this guy said John Page, and woman said. Now I want to go back there and it's giving me time.
Elizabeth Streb:
So I'm putting time for study back in my suitcase. And the COVID is really the only implementer. I think that could have forced that on me. And even though in my mind, I wanted to go back to be able to see, could I come up with a new idea or am I done inventing? Does the world need another modern dance or perfection dance? Does it need it? Or are the 99 or a hundred I've made enough? What would be the next version of me giving back before I... The idea is that I would just burst into dust. That's my idea to die. I'm not going to take a lot of time dying. I just want to explode. I've used every single part of my microbes. I think that those are the things that I would do.
Lauren Ruffin:
Amazing.
Tim Cynova:
That is amazing. Elizabeth, you are a wonderful person and it's an honor to get to know you; to have known you for these years and to close our season one with this conversation. I can't imagine two other people that would rather have making fun of me for my inability cross country skiing than the two of you lovingly doing that. I assume it's lovingly. I'm going to take that as lovingly. Thank you so much for being on the show with us today.
Elizabeth Streb:
A real pleasure.
Tim Cynova:
And with that, we sadly and excitedly end with an immense amount of gratitude to all of our guests and viewers. We have reached the end of an amazing Season One of the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live morning show. Never fear, we have more audio only podcast episodes in the queue while we plan our next live season. You can also download all of the previous Work. Shouldn't. Suck. Live episodes from your favorite podcasting platform of choice and re-watch Work. Shouldn't. Suck. live episodes over on www.workshouldntsuck.co.
Tim Cynova:
If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun, too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or photo friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it, who you don't like as much. Until next time. Thanks for listening.
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