Bang on a can

Stomp leaps back to town

by Bill Rodriguez

Talk about your found art. Stomp takes sounds that we ignore every day and mixes them into a show of percussive rhythm and movement that comes on like a symphony of pile drivers choreographed to hip-hop. They made whiz-bang magic in 1996 at the Oscars and again when they came through town, and they promise to do it again April 25-27 at Providence Performing Arts Center.

It all started on the streets of Brighton, England, in 1981 when a couple of street performers named Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas were pounding the pavement literally. Whacking plastic buckets, hub caps and trash cans, before long they had put together a show that started getting attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Clinking bottles of Heineken in a UK commercial and chopping ice in one for Coke over here. Touring to encouraging applause and splendid reviews.

Since it's not melodic, some wouldn't call Stomp music. It sets up scenes, but it's wordless and not ordinary theater. The choreography is fascinating but has more to do with close-order drill than conventional dance.

Their opening signature piece starts out with a lone janitor pushing a stiff-bristle broom and noticing his catchy rhythms. Before the dust settles, the stage is filled with custodial clones in a razzle-dazzle pas de crew that shakes the rafters. By the end of the show, the eight performers have played with and on everything from clacking wooden poles and clattering garbage cans to clumping rubber boots and a rustling New York Times. There's even a light show, of a sort, as they flick on Zippo lighters with counter-rhythm abandon.

The performers now touring the States are not the original British buskers, but last year's PPAC spectacle demonstrated that the show translates well. All of the performers have backgrounds as percussionists. The 11 members of the traveling troupes of twentysomethings rotate their schedules, with eight on stage each night.

From North Carolina originally, Steven Dean Davis majored in acting and directing and minored in music and dance. He has been in national commercials as well as in TV episodes of Matlock and The Young Indiana Jones, and has been traveling with Stomp for nearly two years. He spoke by phone about the show.

Q: How do you describe Stomp?

A: It's a great rediscovery of sounds and rhythms here in the world that I think we have taken for granted. We are surrounded by music on a daily basis. We're showing audiences that music can be made with unconventional instruments.

Q: Do you find yourself hearing everyday street sounds differently these days?

A: I've been a drummer all my life, so I've always heard rhythm in everything. I was very pleasing when I encountered the show it was perfect for me.

Q: Your bio says that you were "drumming since birth."

A: I was born playing drums, without any lessons or anything. So I began playing at a very young age. Playing my mother's pots and pans. And so now I get paid to do it.

Q: Stomp incorporates movement rather than flat-out dance. How is that worked in?

A: A lot of us have done a lot of dance, from ballet to jazz to modern. So we have some people in the show who are just dancers, some that are just drummers, some that are actor/singer/dancers. Stomp encompasses a lot of different backgrounds, which really makes it unique from any other show that's out there right now.

The show allows us to express ourselves, and express ourselves differently every night. In a usual dance piece, you have set choreography that you have to do strictly every evening. In Stomp there are a lot of avenues for improv. And depending upon what people we have in the show, with what diverse background, the show actually changes slightly every evening. It's very much alive and it breathes and it grows and expands out of the 11 people, from whatever combination we decide to put in. You can see the show many times and you're going to see something different each time.

Q: With all those counter-rhythms going, some of the routines look pretty complex. Which were the hardest to learn?

A: The three largest numbers are with the brooms, the poles we play and the trash can routine at the end. I guess they would be the three most complex.

Q: Percussive dance is getting hotter and hotter these days, from Noise/Funk to Riverdance. What do you think audiences are responding to in your show?

A: That's something that's been around for a long, long time. We're just reigniting the interest, bringing it out again. I think from the beginning of time there was expression in rhythm, expression in percussion and dance.

Q: The original troupe is British. Yours has a couple of Brazilians but is mostly Americans. Do you think your particular mix gives the show a different character, or is that established pretty much by the material?

A: No, the material that we're doing is the skeleton of the show. There's an off-Broadway show, two touring companies and one international company, and each show is going to be slightly different even though we're performing the same routines. That's because of the diversity of the eight performers, the background that they bring to express the material.