‘When I’m auditioning performers, I’m looking for beautiful movers. I want a wild animal. I’m looking for someone extraordinary. They’ve got to be so thirsty to get into that zone that no one’s been to before. There has to be a willingness to put your body through enormous training.’ Elizabeth Streb, American ‘radical choreographer’, knows what she’s talking about: her relationship with movement and dance began over 40 years ago. Childhood obsessions with baseball, skiing and motorbikes evolved into a lifelong exploration of the physical limitations of the body, beginning with dance training in New York. 

‘I wouldn’t describe myself as a dance lover. But I wanted to follow a dream of inventing action,’ she explains over Zoom from the Williamsburg studio of SLAM (Streb Lab For Action Mechanics), a busy community space she opened in 2003. She calls it an ‘action factory’, a ‘laboratory for artistic experimentation’; her skilled performers train here alongside kids learning trapeze and acrobatics.

A quick Google around Streb’s astonishing career throws up a YouTube clip of her contorting with frenzied precision around a box barely bigger than her body (1985’s Little Ease, inspired by a medieval torture device). The routine will feature in Time Machine, her exhilarating show receiving its Australian premiere at Adelaide Festival. In fact, Time Machine winds the clock all the way back to 1977, when Streb was squatting in a Soho loft, experimenting with long poles and planks of wood to develop her extreme style of acrobat arts. For example, Add is a piece she originally danced very close to the ground, throwing herself gracefully around the mat, using her wrists, elbows and knees as powerful hinges, while Buster reflects her love of slapstick movies. 

Time Machine follows her career to California, where she studied with visionary contemporary dancer Merce Cunningham and became influenced by the experimental rhythms of John Cage: 7 minutes 43 seconds is a solo inspired by Cage. The opening daredevil dance, Tip, features eight people on a giant semi-circle, a half wheel that they must balance upon as it rocks onstage.

Instead of performing, these days Streb invents machines for her company of ‘action heroes’. Her choreography is a celebration of physics, ultra-precise timing and huge technical control from the performers. ‘I don’t like to call it circus. Yes, we use ropes and trapeze and trampolines, and there is for sure an element of danger, absolutely. It’s about challenging bodies, pushing potential, creating new skills. It’s entering into a whole new forcefield.’ 

Time Machine, Her Majesty’s Theatre, 14–17 March, times vary.