WestBeth Artists
Featured Artist
Elizabeth Streb
Elizabeth Streb in 1997 was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award. She holds a B.S. in Modern Dance from SUNY Brockport from which she has received an honorary doctorate of fine arts as well. Streb holds an honorary doctorate from Rhode Island College and is currently the Dean’s Distinguished Scholar at New York University’s Draper Program, working toward a master of arts in time and space. Elizabeth Streb is the recipient of numerous other awards and fellowships including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987; a Brandeis Creative Arts Award in 1991; two New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessie Awards), in 1988 and 1999 for her “sustained investigation of movement’; and over 20 years of on-going support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Once called the Evel Knievel of dance, Elizabeth Streb’s choreography, which she calls “PopAction,” intertwines the disciplines of dance, athletics, boxing, rodeo, the circus, and Hollywood stunt-work. The result is a bristling, muscle-and-motion vocabulary that combines daring with strict precision in pursuit of the public display of “pure movement.”
Streb believes that true movement invention (the rubric of her investigations) happens accidentally with the milling together of strangers and out of the diverse movement voices that accidentally cross paths.