STREB’s PowerPoint presentation at the Teaching & Learning Celebration will depict the particular concerns that STREB EXTREME ACTION has brought to the presentation and invention of action over the last 20 years. These concerns begin with questioning issues of actual “staged presentations” of action including how humans perceive action when they themselves are not moving; what affect “angle of viewing” has on the experience of action; how “frame of reference” is tampered with in presenting movement; and how we comprehend size, distance, rate, and physical rhythms. We are also investigating the question, “What is movement’s ‘vanishing point’?”

STREB EXTREME ACTION and PopAction (the technique Streb invented) attempt to exhibit movement in an extreme manner under dangerous conditions. This is done for the purpose of creating a certain alarm in spectators similar to those who covet the experience of NASCAR and World Wrestling, boxing, the circus, bull riding, those that cause rubbernecking on superhighways, and other extreme physical spectacles. The other agenda STREB has through the utilization of “danger” is to construct non-predictive physical moments. Humans want to be near an event that may result in disaster. This is common and we accept this as part of the content of our work. The anthropology of the lineage and origin of meaning in movement is examined. Beauty is most often eschewed, or at the very least it is not a goal but an emergent quality, a mere detail. Within STREB’s PowerPoint presentation, she acknowledges these issues and deconstructs and examines some ideas behind the general human attraction to physical risk.

Anthropologically speaking, “movement-as-subject” has little history in academia. STREB as a practitioner (not a scholar) works at framing the potential “archetypal” languages that combine to inscribe the “American” liturgy of named actions. The potential for Action to have deep content is here, within the un-named rhythms, and the origins of all the movements done to date in the United States. STREB is continually engaged in the naming and collecting of influences from stunt work, slapstick, vaudeville, circus, acrobatics, kids, animals, things, labor and dance, as well as the physical material that erupts from other daredevil maniacs.