Hanging out on a summer afternoon at SLAM, the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is like being inside a comic book. The kids are swinging—whee!—from trapezes overhead. They are practicing falling on their backs by first running at top speed—splat!—into a wall. They are climbing onto the trusses and belly-flopping off them—wa-pack! (Their falls and slams are cushioned by thick mats, if you were worried.)

This activity is all an extension of Elizabeth Streb's ongoing experiments with bodies, physics, and equipment or what she calls "hardware enhancements," huge toys that could fill Godzooky's playground. A common way for a Streb dancer to stop moving is by slamming into a wall or another immovable object. A common way for a Streb dancer to dismount a piece of equipment is to dive into a face-plant from as high as 25 feet. She calls it "PopAction," and tries to answer two questions with it: What is choreography? What can movement do best? As a contingent set of answers, she says, "We invent action ideas which we think are archetypal, noticeable, understandable."

Her company's noisy performances—dancers shout out their cues and sometimes make Twitter-brief comments on the lunacy of what they are about to do—tend to send dancers headlong into plastic walls, up and around huge dangerous machines, into oh-no-please-don't games with rapidly spinning steel beams, and over-rotating out of aerial flips to land hard onto their backs. (B-boys used to have a name for this last move: "suicides.") Elizabeth Streb's aesthetics—she often simply goes by "Streb", which she says stands for "Strength Trust Risk Energy Body" and which kids often use as a verb—require speed, precision, and fearlessness. They demand, in her words, "action heroes".

Company dancer Cassandre Joseph is a former gymnast who specialized in the floor exercise. "In gymnastics, you are told what to do. Body image is important," she says. It was about achieving the perfect score. After two years with the company, she sees her body differently, and conveys this when she teaches children's classes at Ringside (which most of the company members do). "The practice is liberating. It's open and safe and encourages creativity," she says. It is also theoretically rich with math and physics, the underpinnings of Streb's PopAction theory.

But there's also a universal appeal to Streb's work. The work, which some say either in tribute and to dis, can resemble a circus. As well as touring the country and the world, it has been performed in the Lincoln Center Festival, at Grand Central Station, and for audiences of wildly cheering young families at SLAM. This is contemporary dance that the critics may not always understand—the legendarily toxic Arlene Croce once called it "sports-minded and task-oriented…gruelling (sic) but flavorless"—but the kids always do.

When we sit down to meet with the Ringside team in the huge primary-colors-only SLAM space, they offer us popcorn in classic red-striped paper containers. Above us chiffon-work dancers practice their poses on towering twin strands of fabric, others bounce off vaults or trampolines or experiment with body harnesses. There are balls to roll, walls to climb, nets to catch falling bodies. Streb and the Ringside staff have placed our meeting tables in the middle of all this. "This is our Petri dish," says Streb, but the image of cells slowly changing in agar seems like a poor metaphor. Like the city they call home, this is a setting where actions are causing reactions, senses are firing everywhere.

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