Human flowers and “extreme” playing with gravity: the themes of Extraordinary Moves at the Battery Park City Marina in a memorable pre-sunset event in the Hudson River waterfront, from the River to River series of free events.
Australia Strange Fruit, a fusion of dance, theater and circus, presented the New York City premiere of The Three Belles. The dancers climbed to their perch —13-foot-high poles 15 feet above ground, on what appeared to the audience below as rigid steel poles. After reaching their perch the three belles pulled up their bellowing gowns, as a flowering corolla. What appeared as a rigid pole became a flexible swaying stem in a beautiful extravaganza of seemingly like human flower.
Master juggler Michael Moschen performed Triangle, an acrobatic fusion of movement, coordination and in a spatial relationship between human body, form and flying balls, of course.
And then evening got transformed in a gravitational field as in Einstein’s space-time-gravity —at least in my perception— when the STREB Extreme Action Company performed Human Fountain. Inspired by the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas, the action piece involved performers “falling” from a 30 feet high scaffolding “to create cascades of airborne liquid muscle. The outcome is a mixture of slam dancing, amazing human flight and wild action sport.” The choreographer Elizabeth Streb, whose company is based in Williamsburg and holds classes for all ages, charmingly introduced the work and the dancers, taking a few questions from the audience including “Are you afraid of heights?”
