Elizabeth Streb has an impact on Pittsburgh.

PITTSBURGH--Pop action choreographer Elizabeth Streb loves the sound of sheet metal reverberating. Her new work, Echo, which is inspired by the roll and rattle of loading-dock portals, will test the mettle of the six-member Dance Alloy company, for which the piece was created, when they perform it at the Fulton Theatre in Pittsburgh, March 3 and 4.

Streb, who primarily choreographs for Ringside, her own troupe in New York City, was brought to Pittsburgh by a National Dance Repertory Enrichment Program grant and by Dance Alloy's artistic director, Mark Taylor, who is a longtime fan.

Divided into two performance zones, Echo's ten minutes of action focus on a double-sided, eight-by-eight-foot aluminum wall secured by metal cables to four projecting feet. Sandwiched between the wall's two surfaces are bells, chimes, chains, metal balls, and Slinkys.

Atypically, "this is a sound piece," says Streb, whose works are usually spatially inspired, their body-slam sound scores produced as by-products. In Echo, as groups of two or three dancers scale the wall, perch on top, bounce off or dangle from it, their deliberately aimed crashes and pounding feet activate miked chambers.

"I didn't have a chance to meet the Alloy before coming here," she says. "I didn't know what to expect. But they knew what they were getting into and were one-hundred-percent ready. They are strong, agile, and have guts."

Streb acclimated the dancers to her floor-work technique as a "preparation for what will be done in the air," she says. "I changed the connectors in their bodies, taught them to be inverted and aligned."

Since Streb's work typically involves percussive contact between dancers and rigid surfaces, she also concentrated on impact training and helped the Alloy dancers to "unpeel" their fears. "Overcoming fear is a private thing," Streb says. "Everyone will find a pocket of fear in a certain position. I tell them to have respect for fear. Don't talk themselves out of it or let someone else talk them out of it. Instead, I tell them to make a note of where they are physically at this moment. I want them to pay attention to what's happening," and to identify where they are in space and time." She adds that the Alloy dancers experienced problems "feeling positions" while caught in spatial blind spots.

Streb explains that high-impact movement is "a tricky thing to ask people to do, because it's not a normal [dance] vocabulary. I'd been under the assumption that it wouldn't translate onto other bodies without a year or two of intensive training." Following fifteen years of experimentation, Streb has developed a methodology that can be used to train dancers in her technique. Yet she is not marketing her pieces and says that she would only consider creating works for dancers who are 'constitutionally very strong, with no chronic injuries.

"Mark and I are trying this out," Streb says. "I think about this dance twenty-four hours a day. This has been a tremendously creative, inspired period for me."