Dance Innovator Elizabeth Streb Owes It All To The Circus. By Margaret Regan WHEN SHE WAS a child in Rochester, New York, Elizabeth Streb's parents used to take her to the circus. No surprises there. What is surprising, given that nowadays Streb is a nationally known innovator in modern dance, is that the circus was "the only cultural event I went to." But her beloved circus may have served her in better stead than regular outings to, say, the ballet. Streb's daring moves on the stage in her grown-up life can be traced directly back to those daring young men and women she saw on circus trapezes. Streb's nine-member troupe, Streb/Ringside, which gives one Tucson performance next Wednesday, March 26, at Centennial Hall, performs on a collection of surfaces unusual enough to do any big-top acrobat proud. To wit: a vertical (yes, vertical) floor, a big blue square set atop 150 bouncy springs, a 20-foot pole and a trampoline. Then there are the swan dives from the scaffolding above the stage, the dances with plywood 4 by 8's ("They're very heavy! They're not foamcore.") and Streb's solo inside a box. "I'm from a working-class background," Streb explains by telephone from her hotel room in St. Louis. She's up early after a late-night performance, all part of a tour that's keeping the company out of New York from January through April. The daughter of a Rochester mason, Streb says she's always had a "desire for a utilitarian aesthetic, for movement to be about something, not just about manipulating the body. "I came to dance thinking it was the art of motion, the art of action. It may be erroneous, but I started with the premise: Why spend all your time on the bottom of your feet? There are many parts of the body." Indeed. Which is why Streb has her dancers flying every which way through the air above that blue square in "Bounce," a piece scheduled for Wednesday's Popaction concert. "Bounce," she says, is about "cheating space and time." In "Wall/Line," the one where the dancers ignore gravity to cavort sideways on the vertical floor, Streb says, "We harness the invisible forces of action: If you throw something against the wall, it stays up there a few seconds. I'm playing with time frames. Two seconds up there seems like a lot longer." "Rise," performed on the 20-foot pole, is "my pas de deux," Streb says proudly. "Two dancers in harness are walking up and down the pole. It's a little like trying to ride a bucking bronco. It's all choreographed, but how successful they are is not." Streb uses no music in her concerts. Instead, she has a composer mike the various pieces of equipment. Amplified, the syncopated sounds of bodies slapping against poles and trampolines "become the pulse of the piece...It's like tap dancing for the body." Her all-out rebellion against dance convention notwithstanding, Streb came to modern dance via the usual route. She majored in dance at the State University of New York in Brockport. After graduation in the early '70s, she headed first to San Francisco, then New York City. She had no money, of course, but in the Big Apple she was careful first to sign up for the dance classes she wanted (one modern, one ballet, every day) before she signed on for the standard restaurant jobs. Her two lives took a parallel upward course: While she was working her way up from dishwasher to chef, she was making her way from neophyte dancer to presenter of her own choreography at small concerts in assorted rented lofts. The circus-rodeo dance aesthetic evolved gradually. "It was such a slow process. Really, close to 20 years. When I first started showing work in New York...what I wanted to see happening in dance wasn't happening...I had a lot of trouble making sense of classic movement." First she started experimenting with changing the angle of the floor. Next came a vertical pole, then a "hill dance" performed on a platform at a 40-degree angle. From there it was a short conceptual leap not only to the upright floor she uses in "Wall/Line" ("I re-invented the floor! I scooped it up and put it vertical,") but to a commitment to make only dances that were about "getting bodies to a new place in space." In 1985, Streb formed her own company, which has since performed all around the U.S. and in Europe. Most of the performers are trained dancers, but not all. One, she says, is a "totally phenomenal" ex-basketball player from D.C. Several have gymnastics training. But Streb is less concerned with her dancers' histories than with their desire to defy the laws of physics. "Even more important is the mind and spirit and heart behind this. You have to want to do this and not something else." Streb/Ringside performs Popaction at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 26, at Centennial Hall on the UA campus. The concert is part of UApresents Street Noise series. Dance professor Amy Ernst leads a free discussion at 6:45 p.m. in Room 101 of the Douglass Building, just east of Centennial Hall. Concert tickets are $9, $17 and $23, with discounts available for students, children and UA faculty/staff. Tickets are available at the box office or by phone at 621-3341.

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