PIFA 2018: STREB's 'Singular Extreme Actions'

Kimmel Center artistic director Jay Wahl encouraged the audience to snap photos and record videos of SEA and to share them on social media with a #PIFA2018 hashtag. Before passing the microphone to Zaire Baptiste, STREB’s music producer and DJ, Wahl shared that he wants to be Elizabeth Streb when he grows up.

It is easy to see why she generates such admiration: STREB’s approach to movement is like method acting for dancers. SEA fulfills her artistic vision of challenging performers to peer over the edge of possibility without fear, including fear of getting hurt. Fittingly, the company calls its members action heroes rather than dancers or performers. Baptiste took the mic like a WWE ring announcer, shouting and pacing as he urged the audience to cheer on the performers.

Get ready to rumble

Throughout SEA, action heroes in blue unitards achieved nearly impossible physical feats, from balancing atop a furiously rocking half-moon structure to piling six bodies into a small glass-walled case, then somehow adding a seventh.

The action heroes clearly hurt themselves; at one point, they body-slammed one another and bounced off a trampoline into a belly flop. The audience groaned and shuddered in sympathy, but like true action heroes, the performers quickly jumped to their feet, seemingly unhurt, and took on their next challenge.

What transforms STREB’s acrobatics into art is its movement philosophy, which asks what it looks, sounds, and feels like to be an action hero. Most would expect this feat to be difficult and painful, and only available to certain types of people or bodies. STREB questions those assumptions with a team of varying ages, genders, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, sizes, and shapes, though all those shapes were muscular.

No performers wore capes, yet they appeared unafraid when moving dangerously close to a spinning metal beam. They seemed unhurt after crashing into a chalkboard; they created sculpture out of the collision by effortlessly forming a human pyramid, which then slowly collapsed and rolled downstage. A single female performer rocked the half-moon structure, yet it took three stagehands to move it afterward.

These features made SEA interesting and effective. Not only were the individual performers uniformly fearless, flexible, and unthinkably strong, they formed a unit bolstered by trust and connection. Individual action heroes became a kind of Justice League that made impossible situations possible: bodies bouncing on a trampoline without crashing, balancing in mind-boggling shapes and hanging from a ladder whirling on an axis.

Attention must be paid

Funky tunes playing before the show set the mood, and Baptiste, serving as emcee, kept it going by cueing Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory” as performers leaped from the trampoline. He played cartoony thudding sounds as their bodies hit the mats.

During a set change, Justin Ross joined Baptiste to fire a T-shirt cannon into the audience. I would have preferred to skip this diversion, but the crowd clamored for those shirts.

Clad in a fringed jacket, the mustachioed Ross bore a passing resemblance to the late Queen singer Freddie Mercury. Another action hero, Jackie Carlson, brought to mind another musician, Pink, also known for performing aerial acrobatics. Like Pink, Carlson radiated energy and enthusiasm. But Cassandre Joseph shone brightest of all: she surfed the half-moon, swung her body through the ladder, and jumped from the greatest heights. As associate artistic director of STREB, she also seemed to be the group’s leader.

STREB adds a unique dimension to this year’s PIFA lineup with SEA’s physical feats and a democratic ethos that involves audience members. But I wonder if the Kimmel Center’s ultra-laissez-faire attitude toward late seating caters to the audience a bit too much.

I was dismayed by people arriving nearly half an hour late, only to be shocked again 20 minutes later by a group who forced half a row of ticketholders to stand up so they could get to their seats, all in the middle of the performance. STREB’s talented action heroes and the Kimmel's audience members deserve better.