Documentary reveals how Elizabeth Streb and her Extreme Action Company (including Jackie Carlson, seen here) take dance to a whole new level
BORN TO FLY: ELIZABETH STREB vs. GRAVITY (Catherine Gund, 2014)
Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Sunday, December 21 & 28 and January 4, $14, 4:30
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.borntoflymovie.com
Over the last several years, New Yorkers have gotten the chance to see Elizabeth Streb’s Extreme Action Company perform such dazzling works as Ascension at Gansevoort Plaza, Kiss the Air! at the Park Avenue Armory, and Human Fountain at World Financial Center Plaza as her team of gymnast-dancer-acrobats risk their physical well-being in daring feats of strength, stamina, durability, and grace. In addition, Streb herself walked down the outside wall of the Whitney as part of a tribute to one of her mentors, Trisha Brown. Now Catherine Gund takes viewers behind the scenes in the exhilarating documentary Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity, going deep into the mind of the endlessly inventive and adventurous extreme action architect and the courage and fearlessness of her company. Gund follows Streb as she discusses her childhood, her dance studies, the formation of STREB in 1985, and her carefully thought out views on space, line, and movement as her work stretches the limits of what the human body can do. “I think my original belief and desire is to see a human being fly,” Streb says near the beginning of the film, which includes archival footage of early performances, family photos, and a warm scene in which the Rochester-born Streb and her partner, Laura Flanders, host a dinner party in their apartment, cooking for Bill T. Jones, Bjorn Amelan, Anne Bogart, Catharine Stimpson, and A. M. Homes.
Elizabeth Streb and her partner, Laura Flanders, prepare for a dinner party in new documentary
Gund also speaks with current and past members of the talented, ever-enthusiastic company — associate artistic director Fabio Tavares, Sarah Callan, Jackie Carlson, Leonardo Giron, Felix Hess, Samantha Jakus, Cassandre Joseph, John Kasten, and Daniel Rysak — who talk about their dedication to Streb’s vision while using such words as “challenge,” “velocity,” “endurance,” “magic,” “invincibility,” and “risk” to describe what they do and how they feel about it. Gund focuses on the latter, as virtually every one of Streb’s pieces is fraught with the possibility of serious injury, as evidenced by their titles alone: Fly, Impact, Rebound, Breakthru, and Ricochet, not to mention the use of such materials as spinning I-beams, plastic barricades, dangling harnesses, and a rotating metal ladder. “I have to be able to ask someone to do that and be okay about it. Those aren’t easy requests,” Streb explains. “Knowing where you are is how you survive the work,” adds former STREB dancer Hope Clark. Gund goes with Streb to her doctor, where the choreographer describes what happened to her gnarled feet, and also meets with former dancer DeeAnn Nelson Burton, who had to retire after breaking her back. The film concludes with an inside look at STREB’s spectacular “One Extraordinary Day,” a series of hair-raising site-specific events staged for the 2012 London Olympics at such locations as the Millennium Bridge, the London Eye, and the sphere-shaped city hall, photographed by documentary legend Albert Maysles. In her Kickstarter campaign, Gund (Motherland Afghanistan, A Touch of Greatness) said, “Action architect Elizabeth Streb has reinvented the language of movement. [Born to Fly] will rewrite the language of documentary.” That’s a bold declaration, but the film does have a lot of the same spirit that Streb displays in her awe-inspiring work. Born to Fly is screening December 21 & 28 and January 4 at 4:30 as part of Symphony Space’s ongoing Thalia Docs series.
Oscar-winning director John Huston pokes fun at some of his previous films in the sly, dry crime noir parody Beat the Devil. Written by Huston and Truman Capote, who furiously typed out pages every day on set, the 1953 black-and-white film teams Huston with Humphrey Bogart for the sixth and final time, following such successes as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, elements from all of which can be found in this jumbled tale of a gang of crooked men looking to score big in the uranium mines of Kenya. Bogart stars as Billy Dannreuther, a cool customer married to Italian firebomb Maria (Gina Lollobrigida). They are stranded in an Italian port town while waiting for a ship to take them and his associates — Peterson (Robert Morley), O’Hara (Peter Lorre), Ravello (Marco Tulli), and Major Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard) — across the Mediterranean to Africa. Also along for the ride is the prim and proper Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) and his hotsy-totsy wife, Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones), who quickly falls for the smooth, confident Billy. Throw in a murder, a drunk captain (Saro Urzi), and some neat twists and turns and you have yourself an amusing little exercise, even if it does have its share of plot holes, story jumps, and inconsistencies.
Peter Jackson’s sixteen-year adventure through J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth comes to its inevitable conclusion with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third film in the prequel trilogy that began with An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug. The story picks up as the enormous fire-breathing flying dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) is laying waste to the island of Lake-town as the thirteen Dwarves of Erebor watch from the Lonely Mountain. But soon after the brave Bard (Luke Evans) dispatches the evil beast in spectacular fashion, the Men of the Lake, the Orcs, the Elves, and the Goblins all descend on Erebor seeking either refuge, revenge, or the massive amount of gold that fills the abandoned castle. However, Dwarves king Thorin Oakenshield II (Richard Armitage) has been overcome with dragon-sickness, an unbounded greed that has him protecting every single piece of the vast treasure, refusing to share it with anyone but his thirteen cohorts as he searches for the powerful Arkenstone that Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is hiding. Meanwhile, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), Elrond (Hugo Weaving), and Saruman (Christopher Lee) take on Sauron the Necromancer (voiced by Cumberbatch); the Elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and the Dwarf Kíli (Aidan Turner) explore their forbidden love; and a stream of frightening creatures join the fray. Also along for this final ride is Legolas (Orlando Bloom), his father, Thranduil (Lee Pace), Thorin’s cousin Dáin (Billy Connolly), the brutal, scimitar-armed Azog the Defiler (Manu Bennett) and his brutal son, Bolg (John Tui), and the pompous, greedy Master of Lake-town (Stephen Fry).
