Imagine mapping a dance's movements. The results would look like a drawing made with a Spirograph. Now, imagine separating the movements of each dancer within that piece, and mapping those; a bunch of Spirograph drawings. This is the type of investigation that Elizabeth Streb conducts in her particular form of "pop-action" dance. She knows where each dancer will be, has been, and will go and the scientific equations of those actions. The physics and mathematics of movement. It's mind-boggling. It's extreme.

Most dancers I know are light and airy. It's an art, after all. Streb takes the art of dance and creates another language; body parts as parts of speech, the grammar of the human body. I won't even pretend that I intellectually understood even half of what she said during her presentation as part of the Caroline Werner Gannett Lecture Series Monday night at RIT. But it resonated in some subjective area of my brain. Even though I couldn't make sense of it, it made sense. Her passion is catching. And I had the wildest dreams last night where it all rang true as a bell, even though I couldn't begin to say what it all meant.

Maybe I'm not meant to intellectually understand it. Maybe that doesn't matter, any more than the seeming coincidence that yesterday morning there was a new Extreme Caffeine coffee choice at my usual stop. Maybe trying to understand it will take an extreme amount of effort that I don't want to make, especially when it's so much easier to simply grok it. If I wanted to be one of her dancers, it probably would matter. But I don't. I like to watch.

Speaking of being one of her dancers, someone asked about her auditioning process. She says it's more like a three-day self-elimination. The whole company constructs the audition exercises. A blind vote is conducted on whoever is left after the three days. She asks that they make a commitment of two years, and most only last about three. I guess her Brooklyn studio isn't called SLAM (Streb Lab for Action Mechanics) for nuthin'.

Along with the extreme physical demands, Streb throws in two more variables weighing the commitment balance: strangers and interruption. Unlike most studios, which are closed to the public until the production is unveiled in its high-polished finish, the SLAM studio is open to the public so they can view the process. Which throws in monkey-wrench No. 2: interruption. While most beginning artists are used to working in shared conditions and its interruptions, most established artists choose to be, in a sense, "protected" from their audience until their product is complete. Streb says these two things -- strangers and interruption -- keep it real.

Watching Streb's dancers, it's difficult to discern what is real. Did that person just fly? Go through a sheet of glass? Propel into a wall? I don't know. All I know is I like it. It makes me go, "OMG, what was that!?!" And I'm looking forward to her return to Rochester, when she introduces her new piece featuring an elephant standing on dancers, against the venue backdrop of Pinnacle Hill. Hey, it could be real!

Next up: "Godlesses" at Renaissance Art Gallery