Elizabeth Streb: My quest to defy gravity and fly
Elizabeth Streb is an extreme action specialist who flies, crash-lands and invents hardware to get higher, faster, sooner, harder. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
learning to fly my whole life.
on the northern shore of Lake Ontario,
father around.
by things that moved,
holding them in my hands,
its unrelenting force,
my father's barn down --
I caught a fly in a mason jar.
in midair with acute angles,
there were things moving.
with their very own causal rhythms,
on their component parts:
kangaroos hopped.
was falling accidentally, tripping,
out from under you,
I did my experiments alone,
across the United States
I mimicked that fly in the box.
something about flight.
New York City loft,
didn't really enjoy getting hurt,
that we weren't flying yet
to that false idea
Minutes, maybe hours.
rather interesting, foreign sensation."
we were going to have to learn to land.
one of them -- said,
when you try to land it."
an impact technique?
our base of support?"
sound than "wham-o."
the streets of New York City
all over the world a little bit,
to go to Kitty Hawk
of flight with the Wright Brothers.
to stay there longer.
you will do well to sit on a fence
you must mount a machine
with its tricks by actual trial."
junkie inside of me.
to unhabitual places in space --
our vertical comfort zone,
and moves out from under us --
who is trying to hit a note
of my prototypic machines.
higher, faster, sooner, harder,
our very own spaceships.
invisible, dangerous territories,
to try this, let me know.
of our best machines to London
we unlocked our brake and fell --
of London's City Hall.
300 feet above the ground,
the sky, a bird, a plane -- and then us.
is for everybody.
mason jar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
for Action Mechanics.
the use of a petri dish,
and invent extreme action together.
every class, all genders,
the outcast and the cool,
all over the world,
a flying training center.
to just dream about flying,
the hit and the impact,
getting up afterwards.
causes smiles to get more common,
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Elizabeth Streb - Action and hardware architectElizabeth Streb is an extreme action specialist who flies, crash-lands and invents hardware to get higher, faster, sooner, harder.
Why you should listen
Elizabeth Streb is known for her unique brand of movement, "Pop Action," which intertwines dance, athletics, boxing, rodeo, the circus, stunt work and the invention of action gizmos. In 1985, she founded STREB Extreme Action Company to push the limitations of the human body and, in 2003, she established SLAM (STREB Lab for Action Mechanics) in Brooklyn. For the 2012 London Olympic Games, the company was commissioned to create One Extraordinary Day, a series of events across the city that included dancers "bungee dancing" off Millennium Bridge and abseiling down City Hall. The 2016 film OXD, directed by Craig Lowy, follows these events. In 2017, STREB was commissioned by Bloomberg LLP to create a series of events to open the new corporate headquarters in London and to launch the CityLab Conference in Paris.
Streb is the recipient of numerous honors including a MacArthur Fellowship (1997) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987). She lectures regularly across the country and her book, STREB: How to Become an Extreme Action Hero, was published by Feminist Press in 2010. In 2014, Born to Fly: STREB vs. Gravity a documentary directed by Catherine Gund, premiered at Film Forum NYC, was aired on PBS and nominated for an Emmy. It is available on iTunes and Netflix. STREB's rehearsals at SLAM are always open to the public.
Elizabeth Streb | Speaker | TED.com