We saw Elizabeth Streb’s Slam Show XI last night at the Streb Laboratory for Action Mechanics - it’s each year’s repertory (repertoire?) improves on the last - old pieces get better, and one fantastic, “TRAP,” choreogaphed by Kevin Lindsay, and several new pieces, including “AIR,” - each one beter than the last. We particularly liked Kevin Lindsay’s piece “TRAP,” which will appeal to engineers as much as to dance fans, “WILD BLUE YONDER,” a classic Streb piece which gets better every year, and in which Lindsay and Fabio Tavares - company members, we think, longest with the company and this piece, stood out. Tavares can evoke Buster Keaton and Popeye with deadpan, under-the-breath, and generally self-mocking comments, very funny and usually offered in the midst of something dangerous and visually arresting.
We brought a friend visiting from out of town, and she was amazed and inspired. You will be too. We bring at least one person every season, and they’re always happy, no matter how fussy they are.
Tickets are available online at the Streb website or by calling (718) 384-6491.
Video gallery - with previews of some of the current pieces - here.
[Ethics disclosure: we’ve made the odd contribution, volunteered as ushers, given the odd piece of professional advice - but stand by our assessment of last night’s performance, for which we were happy to purchase tickets. But proudly encumbered by association and bias, which we here disclose].
An excerpt from Marcelle Manhattan’s lovely piece this week, There’s No Place Like Home:
I move at least once a year.
Since 2003, I’ve subjected myself to six rounds of searches on Craig’s List, six tedious packing rituals, and six tales of mishap with sundry scurrilous moving companies.
You might think me a carefree, irreverent type who treads with a conscience-light, exploratory flounce and lays my whistling head wherever it suits me. But actually, the opposite is true. I’m unsettled seeing my life in boxes. I don’t like spending first nights alone in new bedrooms. In general, I’m risibly bad at goodbyes.
That’s why the most soul-gutting feeling in the world is after the movers have finished, and you’re left standing small and swallowed in an empty apartment, where only months ago you ate and cried and fucked and perhaps fell in love and had your heart broken. But it’s over. So you learn to move on.
In fact, I wonder if I’ve learned too well. Each time I go through a move, I throw away a portion of what I had before-losing some detritus of my life’s misguided homing instincts, like Hansel and Gretel laying crumbs behind them on the way to the Gingerbread Witch. Each time, I shed a piece of my past I no longer care to carry; I’ve gotten the resettling down to a routine, hanging pictures in the same, rehearsed places and hooking up the wires to my electronics like a pro. Which is saying something, since I’m a moron when it comes to technology (don’t ask me why I started a blog).
There’s No Place Like Home, from Marcelle Manhattan.
All the air knocked out of air
Rinsing Feeling — not so bad
what you knew would happen
has only happened later
than you expected
the delay: a blip.
By Todd Colby - at Todd Colby’s GleeFarm.
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