Elizabeth Streb
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ POBOX 444, PRINCE ST NEW YORK, NY 10012-0008, rkostelanetz@bigfoot.com Proposal for an illustrated book about the choreographer ELIZABETH STREB Elizabeth Streb is the most original and important new choreographer of the 1990s. The MacArthur fellowship that she received in 1997 is one sign of this recognition; another is her international touring throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Though she has recently presented her pieces at the Joyce Theater in New York, she has also explored such alternative venues as a platform beside the boardwalk at Coney Island and the beach in Miami.. Choreographing since 1979, she founded in 1985 her company, called simply Streb.. In her current brochures, she prints five epithets that define her art: "Ricochet, Crash, BreakThru, Catapult, Air Hurdle." The first radical idea was the use of props not as extensions, as Alwin Nikolais had done, but as resistances. So her dancers crashed into walls and wooden planks and dove fist-firstthrough a pane of glass. More recently acquiring two world-class trampolines, she is exploring possible movements for dancers suspended in mid-air. My sense is that out of post-Merce Cunningham avant-garde dance come two directions--one emphasizing alternative movements within a dance tradition, the other incorporating nondance activities for dancers. If Mark Morris for one represents he former, Streb epitomizes the latter. Early in her career she received from Cunninghamıs lifetime collaborator John Cage this mash note: "When I first saw Elizabeth Strebıs wori, I was exhilarated. Her energy, inventiveness, uninterrupted attentionaire are great. Every time I hear that she is dancing, I arrange to see her work." What I would like to do is the first book that would tell of her life, his esthetic, and the development of her art, with photographs and other documentation. It can be done to any length and size the publisher thinks appropriate. Enclosed is a revision of an article done for Brooklyn Bridge magazine.