A Doodle after an Interview: Elizabeth Streb

This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Streb, extreme action choreographer, for a series of articles I am writing about how drawing figures in a creative person’s process.

After reading her interview in The 99 Percent, where she said that drawing was the first thing she did when she had a new idea, I knew I had to meet her. Her drawings show how something monumental started with a series of lines and shapes.

Interestingly, her work invokes involuntary memory as well. In her talk in CUNY, someone in the audience asked about her definition of a true movement.

“A real move has to do with being itself…. It’s telling its own physical story, and maybe it would remind you of your mother’s perfume, maybe these memories are embedded in ourselves and it happened to you going down a hill or bumping into a tree with your sled. And what I’m trying to do is usurp those memories that are primarily physical and not tabulated because there’s no real nomenclature for it.”

I was also thrilled that she knew Lisa Randall, a physicist whose work I’m a big fan of, and it made me think how amazing it is that all these wonderful things are connected in some way.

Article/s to follow, but I was so moved by the interview that I decided to draw. She is one classy lady and a true artist. Thank you, Elizabeth, for such a lovely, gracious interview.