Streb/Ringside
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara
The events that comprised “Action Occupation,” a series of performances by Elizabeth Streb’s decade-old group Streb/Ringside, were a cross between acrobatics and modern dance, fighting and flying, football and ballet. Bodies plummeted through space, slammed against walls, dangled precariously from harnesses, battered each other, or lay inert, waiting to be crushed. At their best, the “Action Occupation” events were exhilaratingly energetic; at their worst, they resembled an amateur game of rugby, in which chaotically hurtling bodies threatened to reduce each other to heaps of motionless flesh.