Elizabeth Streb’s ‘Forces’ a roller-coaster ride of physics and flight

“If you really want to live, you have to mount a machine and learn its tricks.”

This quote, based on the Wright Brothers' advice, launches the finale of "Forces," an evening of adrenaline-pumping PopAction, choreographer Elizabeth Streb's genre-defying mix of dance, sports, gymnastics and circus arts that's driven by an unrelenting inquiry into the visceral impact of falling and the exhilaration of flight.

"Forces" will be performed Oct. 8 and 9 at the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech, part of a two-weekend series of unconventional but accessible dance works exploring how humans relate to technology. "Huang Yi and KUKA," Oct. 1-2, depicts a poignant relationship between a young man and an industrial robot. "Forces," performed by Streb Extreme Action Company, explores human flight by harnessing gravity using hardware and machines.

Streb, a MacArthur award recipient and Guggenheim fellow, has used equipment to extend the human movement vocabulary for 35 years, starting in a Canal Street loft and now at the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics in New York City’s Brooklyn borough.

Catherine Gund’s film about Streb, “Born to Fly,” documents a day of site-specific performances at the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in London that included “Human Fountain,” a rhapsody of free-falling dancers set in Trafalgar Square. “Sky Walk,” a death-defying trek down the domed facade of London’s City Hall, paid tribute to choreographer Trisha Brown, whose influential 1970 “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building” used mountain climbing gear to alter the performer’s relationship to gravity and space.

Streb believes that repeated attempts to fly — and failures to do so — create a kind of rhythm that’s a metaphor for the human condition. It’s as if the “arc between two deaths” — an old-school principle of modern dance — was lifted, spun and thrust through the air, only to crash against a wall.

In “Forces,” dancers dive off 10-, 20- and 30-foot high platforms, move across a giant motorized turntable and speed through the air while spinning on the end of a giant revolving lever.

The finale features the Gizmo, an 8-foot-wide wheel that rotates on an off-center axis. As the eccentric wheel turns, an attached counterweight drops, creating an anti-gravity moment during which dancers turn flips inside the wheel and fly off its perimeter.

Peril is intrinsic to Streb’s work, but there are questions as to whether or not it’s worth risking life and limb. Streb insists that there’s nothing new to be discovered by playing it safe; she takes full responsibility when a dancer gets hurt. “I’m carrying around every injury that’s ever happened in there, including my own,” she said.

“I have not been able to find a way to get around the danger — injury, disaster, fear zone,” Streb said. “If I could do both, I would. I’d rather not see blood on the wall. It doesn’t make me happy. But I accept that that’s a fact of this particular project.”

Streb and Madison Cario, director of Georgia Tech’s Office of the Arts, are talking about challenging university students to design a new machine for the company — a complex proposition. Now that Streb is experimenting with motors and pneumatic devices, “The sky’s the limit,” she said.