Elizabeth Streb Ringside.

Circuses in Russia and China have always displayed a finer gauge of material than those here at home. However expert our own circus acts, their thrills seem notably cheaper. I often think of traditions for circus coarseness when watching concerts of Elizabeth Streb's work. The latest presentation by Streb and company had the look of a wannabe recreation park with a postmodern personality.

Safety nets, mattress-thick mats, scaling walls, rigging cables, and large-size video screens converted the Joyce Theater into a playland gymnasium. Once Streb and her troupe of eight (plus apprentices) got moving in this environment, her show became as much a soundscape as a display of hardworking bodies: Augmenting the amplified sounds created by bodies repeatedly making contact with cleverly miked surfaces were the incessant grunts and groans emitted by the performers during the often bone-crunching maneuvers. The result was mostly a heavy-handed "song" of very knowing experience.

The nearer Streb's work comes to sheer acrobatics, the less impressive its impact. The fabulous troupes of Chinese acrobats I've seen elevate such stunts to a fine art; Streb reduces them to a level of basic competence with off-putting bids for our sympathy at what she makes groaningly hard work.

The one piece that did more than deliver mundane acrobatics begging loudly for admiration was Line, a premiere. Against a black wall fixed with a thick yellow horizontal pole about the height of a ballet barre, all nine Ringsiders climbed, slid, slammed, and interlocked, bluntly but effectively arranging and rearranging themselves like so many red figures on a Greek vase. Instead of making little more than crude work of belly flopping dives, elementary tumbles, and fencetop balancing, Streb's Line created vivid, moving pictures with bodies that sometimes formed geometric patterns and at other times piled up like collegiate pranksters.

Lookup! (1993), a wall-walking number originally presented in a raw space under the Brooklyn Bridge, had a crudity like that of Ringside's other simplistic stunts. But this one at least also had a dance joke. When a harnessed foursome is cued, "Chaine," we can smile about dancers posing as acrobats, rather than wonder why such effortful acrobatics should be proposed as impressive stuff.