pedantic nuthatch

STREB, Wild Blue Yonder and other pieces, George Mason University Center for the Arts Concert Hall, Fairfax, Virginia

Elizabeth Streb is a woman of many ambitions. She seeks with her work to break down the barriers between artist and audience, to which ends she closes her company's performances with a two-minute audience participation segment followed by a meet-and-greet at the edge of the stage. She seeks to deconstruct notions about dance like

the nature of grace; the camouflage of gravity; the presence or absence of transitions; gender distinctions; the investigation of spatial and temporal dimensions; the incorporation of action-sound and specially structured equipment into theatrical presentations.

The choreographer/action architect meets some of these goals more fully than others. For all the words, the effective Tied (a duet for a man and woman tethered together at the waist) reads like an exploration of a conventionally dysfunctional relationship. (Was that Samuel Barber providing the score?) The crowd-pleasing Ricochet calls for the dancers to impel themselves against a heavy sheet of plexiglas set along the proscenium line; unfortunately, the apparatus takes too long to set up and strike, which means a too-present transition at the piece's end.

The most interesting, successful works in the program are the dances where the equipment both provides assistance to the performers and presents an obstacle (isn't this true of any structure in art?). For instance, consider Fly, which suspends a performer by gimbals at one end of a center-pivoting beam, counterweighted with a menacing pile of bricks. Or Bilevel, perhaps the most fully-developed dance in three dimensions: this piece uses a catwalk that can be raised and lowered on cue. A row of dancers rides the catwalk while a second row works directly below them on the stage deck. As the catwalk is lowered, the stage-bound dancers have to flex or just simply get out of the way.

The equipment can be more subtle, less technically elaborate, as in the solo piece Little Ease, which takes place in a horizontal plexiglas box not much bigger than a footlocker. The box is something to push against, a support, as well as it is a confinement. Or the gear can be simpler still: much of Streb's work relies on nothing more than a human body in freefall, motivated by gravity.

There's not a lot of room for playfulness in Streb's aesthetic, although Slapstick's finale involves bathtub toys; and in many of the pieces, we can hear the dancers calling their own cues to one another (I suspect that counting music beats is an unappreciated skill here); sometimes we'll hear a maneuver cued as something like "spiderman" or "superfriends." Personal expression is also downplayed, even though deeAnn Nelson lets us know in her work that she's having a great time.