Streb: How to Become an Extreme Action Hero
Starred Review. In this dizzying, inspirational self-help memoir, choreographer and performer Streb details her life-long exploration of movement, the body, and time while providing brief lessons in math and practical philosophy: "Impact is a primal and primitive practice we at my dance company STREB accept: the full, weighted human body, with its issues of vectors and forces and angles of incidence and choices that are incurred in the flash of an instant, yet determine everything." Based out of "an anti-white cube, anti-glass bubble, anti-ivory tower arena" in New York, STREB creates performances such as Artificial Gravity, which "explores whether there is a perfect radius that would be essential for the human form on a horizontal surface," and "Wild Blue Yonder," commemorating the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' flight ("STREB began with a dream of flight, rugged and rough... dealing with true space, the sky, an area above the ground"). In her explanations and experiments, including an unprotected and unrehearsed dive through glass, Streb gives readers news ways to consider the body and its movement, from "the mechanical measurement of the legs, arms, torso, neck, hips, feet, shoulders, ankles, and knees" to "the alchemetic processes of the neurological systems." Accompanied by full-color and black-and-white photographs, Streb's riveting prose should provoke and inspire philosophy students, dancers, and athletes of all kinds.