Streb’s ‘ActionHeroes’ Proves to Be Right on Both Counts

Beginning her third decade of physical theater, choreographer Elizabeth Streb teeters between past and present in a risky balancing act that makes her newest full-evening creation unexpectedly personal.

At the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Saturday, Streb’s typically exciting “ActionHeroes” announced itself as “the story of transgressive, outlawed and untidy action in America.” But her eight-member troupe of supremely fit, identically dressed gymnasts in no way recalls the eccentric and often ridiculously out-of-shape daredevils that she sees as her antecedents: individuals who took cannonballs in the gut or went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Nor does her company’s intricately coordinated group virtuosity on trampolines, balance beams, aerial harnesses and the like resemble the tasks of contemporary Hollywood stunt professionals who double for actors in car crashes, explosions, fires, floods and various other large-scale cinematic catastrophes.

Using sound effects and video projections, Streb can evoke the great outdoors, and a sequence with a tilting mirror above dancers on mats manages to simulate synchronized swimming--and kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley formations--without a pool.

But as much as she might yearn to be seen as the Evel Knievel of the dance world, Streb belongs to a far different tradition: that of the super-systematized Chinese acrobats who reliably develop ever more improbable but inherently logical ensemble feats, generation after generation. Where they stack 14 people on a bicycle, she crams eight into a tiny box: nothing transgressive, outlawed or untidy about that.

Performed on or below Streb’s portable 20-foot-tall metal box truss, “ActionHeroes” depends most of all upon physical impact--bodies slamming against mats, walls or one another at the end of soaring trajectories, with amplification usually emphasizing each thud/crunch/whomp along the way. At the very beginning of the evening, Terry Dean Bartlett falls face down from nearly the top of the proscenium--and if you thought that landing on a mat is like sinking into a featherbed, you wise up fast.

In Act 1, company members throw themselves against, and hang from, a plank wall; in Act 2, the wall is transparent and we’re looking through it at limbs, torsos, faces mashed against its surface as dancers find footholds where none exist and bound nimbly away.

During their suspension duet “Swing,” Nikita Maxwell and Eli McAfee stage a midair collision to avoid any hint of la-di-da Cirque du Soleil lyricism. But they also shy away from the unpredictable, experiential bungee feats of the rock extravaganza “De La Guarda” in New York and Las Vegas: another example of Streb’s negotiating between extremes.

Classically postmodern in her taste for cool, logical processes, she avoids the swoony balleticization of the former show as resolutely as the transgressive and often metaphorical roughness of the latter. Even at her most interactive--when, for instance, McAfee plunged Saturday through a pane of plate glass, scattering shards into the front rows--Streb gives the audience not only fair warning but access to protective headgear.

Ultimately, the best moments in “ActionHeroes” aren’t those in tribute to (or matching the stunts of) bygone renegades of the circus or carnival, but rather the greatest hits of Streb’s own repertory--in particular the sight of the full company sky-diving off platforms and a trampoline onto mats as if they could fly forever. As a vision of human potential, it’s unbeatable, and who really cares if it’s completely within the law?

Beyond evoking various environments, Nick Fortunato’s video segments provide glimpses of Houdini and other vintage daredevils--though the small and remote screen makes it easy to overlook his cleverness. Miles Green supplies sound washes, rhythmic underscoring and a few excursions into pop literalism--”Baby, It’s Cold Outside” during the swim routine, for example. (Esther Williams introduced the song a half-century ago, though she was dry at the time.)

Besides those previously mentioned, action heroes on Saturday included Sheila Carreras Brandson, Lisa Dalton, Brian Brooks, Chantal Deeble and Brandon O’Dell. Streb appeared at evening’s end to show us how to preserve our sense of balance by hanging onto the floor: valuable advice in these turbulent times.