Ringside Dancers Dive and Fly With the Greatest of Ease

Elizabeth Streb graduated from SUNY Brockport and began her dance career in 1972, the year after two guys from Dartmouth founded Pilobolus. Like that groundbreaking company and its offshoots, she has always challenged conventional definitions of dance by adopting unorthodox movement vocabularies--especially hard-core gymnastics. But where Pilobolus and many of Streb’s own followers emphasize metaphor and what one can call a dance sensibility, she remains defiantly non-artsy and intently focused on technology: the mechanisms that make it possible to explore spaces and contexts new to movement-theater.

In a sold-out performance at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Tuesday, Streb’s hardware proved nearly as dazzling as her nine-member company, Ringside. Created and engineered by Bill Ballou and Michael Casselli, elaborate skeletal scaffolding gave birth to towers and trampolines; massive 20-foot walls divided to become floors and ceilings; padded mats and platforms appeared out of nowhere to cushion falling bodies even as hidden microphones all over the stage heightened the sounds of impact.

Indeed, the 10-part program added up to something like an apotheosis of the belly-flop, with performers continually diving high into the air and landing with a resonant, amplified, full-torso whomp. Many of the pieces had no real endings--just a cue for one of lighting designer Heather Carson’s glare-curtains. And it took longer to set up the “Breakthru” solo (Hope Clark diving through plate glass) than to actually perform it. But by the sheer scale of attack, and in the illusion of wild, reckless improvisation, Streb kept you wide-eyed more often than not.

Her most intriguing pieces contrasted the weightless freedom of technologically assisted performers with the heaviness and physical limits of normal human motion: the crux of her whole career. In “Fly,” Clark dangled from the end of a giant fork-like lever high above the stage, with counterweights and up to six other performers taking time out from their own activities to help her circle the space in any number of positions, walk on the ceiling and soar up, up and away like Superwoman. These mere mortals also imitated her actions with unstinting energy and skill but inevitably succumbed to the laws of gravity. No aerial fork for them and none ever, alas, for any of us.

Similarly, “Up” found seven performers leaping from platforms onto an enormous trampoline and then rebounding high over the stage, sometimes gracefully swan-diving back to the trampoline but just as often swan-diving down, down, down onto mats at the front and back of the stage. How wondrous they looked when falling into the accommodating elastic web; how vulnerable when headed straight for the unyielding floor. Think of watching Olympic divers deliberately miss the pool and you can understand the mix of admiration and alarm this piece generated.

In “Look Up,” a threesome in rope harnesses maneuvered down a wall like mountain climbers caught up in some militaristic mind-set, testing themselves by executing formal commands (“Wheel!”) during their descent. In “All/Wall,” another vertical surface became a dance floor as five company members hurled themselves against it, found ways to cling to it--and to one another in increasingly elaborate cooperative gambits.

Like a Peking Opera battle scene, “Bounce” exploited the fireworks of the company’s high velocity vaulting and rolling onto/across an 8-foot platform, with individuals barely missing one another. The two parts of “Across” placed the coordinated gymnastics on a much smaller moving platform. And the familiar solo “Little Ease,” the oldest work on the program, found Streb herself trapped inside a box just high enough to sit in, just long enough to lie in and just wide enough to permit plenty of virtuoso flailing.

Finally, Streb presided over “Q/Action,” fielding the audience’s questions and comments but also getting everyone up for instructions on assuming the ideal posture for what she called “inscribing the perfect action tracks in space.” No further appearances by her company are scheduled in the Southland this season.