All in Dance

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Dance

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Other pieces involve epic jungle-gym skills and bouts of improbable swan-diving. There are mats to break the fall, but the mats are miked to enhance the impact, and anyway there’s likely to be another person already on the mat eager to get squashed. The evening climaxes on an eight-foot-diameter hamster wheel that the dancers keep in motion by running on the inside. They slip to the outside rim, dive off the very top, scramble on again.

Streb’s work has always had a circus quality, dangerous but high-spirited. All the equipment is in fact miked to amplify bodies colliding with mats and metal. David Van Tieghem’s minimalist-disco music blasts under the constant noise of dancers yelling instructions to one another and the audience egging them on. It feels like mayhem, but the beautiful thing is, the more catastrophic it looks, the more exquisitely calibrated the performers have to be. What you love about it, besides the pleasurable spikes to your blood pressure, is their precision in gauging where and when to take the biggest chances.