Who: Stomp
Where: Jubilee Auditorium
Dates: November 8-13
Tickets and info here
What is Stomp? Technically it’s a group of people creating musical rhythms with unusual objects while performing a choreographed dance. But perhaps I can do a better job explaining what the show is about.
I suggest that you pay attention to the noises around you—the kind of noise that we often like to ignore by zoning out or listening to our iPods. But right now, if you were to pay attention to the sounds around you, what would you hear? Is there a tick tock from a clock? Are there people talking around you? If you are tapping your feet on the floor, or playing with a pen—how does that sound? Can you find the rhythm in that? Perhaps if you use the arrows on your keypad to scroll up and down the page—up, down, up, down—and you pay attention to the sound that the keys are making, do you now notice it? You may even begin to change the pattern— up, up, down, down, left, right, up, up down, left, left, right. There! You’ve created rhythm—and that is what Stomp is about.
Before jazz and pop, and rock and metal; before the violin and the guitar, there was only rhythm. Stomp rediscovers pure rhythm by using everyday objects—that, in this context, we call instruments. Stomp portrays the basic nature of music, and one of the show’s most amazing qualities is perhaps the simplicity behind it that, at the same time, seems to send one very powerful message—music is everywhere. If you pay attention to it.
Stomp presents a group that, once they get together, “spontaneously“ engages in a choreographed musical act in which the most basic objects get transformed into instruments: garbage cans, brooms, basketballs. Stomp helps us take notice of all of the sounds that, more often than not, we ignore. It may also aid us in appreciating the rhythm hidden in our lives: the rhythm of the city, of traffic, of typing in a computer. Except in real life, I don’t expect an elaborate musical composition to suddenly break out—but wouldn’t it be wonderful if it did?
