- Description
Tap Dance America is a reference work of bibliographic information and does not point to digitized versions of the items described. The Library of Congress may or may not own a copy of a particular film or video. To request additional information Ask a Librarian.
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Stomp / Luke Cresswell [theatrical performance]
- Title
- Stomp [Theatrical Performance]
- Performer
- Cresswell, Luke
- Published/Created
- 1994-02-27
- Genre
- Theatrical Performance
- Venue
- Orpheum Theater
- Abstract
- Opened in New York City on Febuary 27, 1994
Orpheum Theater, New York, on May 11, 1994. Produced by Columbia Artists Management Inc., Harriet Newman Leve, James D. Stern, Morton Wolkowitz, Schuster/Maxwell, Gallin/Sandler, and Markley/Manocherian. Executive producers: Richard Frankel Productions/Marc Routh.
Created and directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas and billing itself as a percussive extravaganza, features eight performers from varying backgrounds using a variety of objects (dustbins, brooms, matchboxes, zippo lighters, and their own bodies) to create a dynamic and eclectic mix of drumming, dance, and theatre.
The show made its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1991 and played the Orpheum Theatre in New York City the month of March 1994. Performed by Luke Cresswell, Nick Dwyer, Sarah Eddy, Theseus Gerard, Fraser Morrison, David Olrod, Carl Smith, and Fiona Wilkes. A percussive performance that lies between dance and music; drummers who move and movers who drum. Performed at the Jazz Tap hip-Hop Festival in Boston's Dance Umbrella in 1993.
They play patty-cake with trash can lids, orchestrate rhythms with both ends of a broomstick and hulk across the stage with oil drums strapped to their feet, smashing hubcaps, crashing crates and clomping in heavy boots. They're STOMP, the British troupe of six men and two women you've seen picking away at ice in the last Coke commercial, who are hellbent on discovering the rhythmic possibilities in everything and will use anything but conventional percussion instruments to do it....STOMP has blown the downtown dance scene to smithereens with its post-punk, neo-Futurist noise-machine that's driving rhythm-hungry audiences wild with excitement.
The junkyard scene set at the Orpheum Theatre is an assemblage off highway signs and hubcaps, cans and drainpipes. Out walks a guy with a broom to sweep the stage. He's in a work clothes and his steady brush work is accented by wooden top and side of his broom--and his steel-tipped boots. He's joined by a crew of two who sweep in. counterpoint and they are joined by muscle-armed women and brawny men who altogether become a work train of swooshes, cracks, thwacks and smacks. The broom's brush loses out to new interest in the broom's stick as the gang of eight turns into a chorus line of boot-stamping, stick-flipping vaudevillians who cannot be quiet. Unlike Astaire's classy handling of the cane in "Top Hat" STOMP is unquenchably curious about the sound potential of the mundane. Match boxes get shaken, rattled and rolled, turning the guys smacking them into the palms of their hand into a doo-wop street corner quartet. Rubber hoses, in different lengths and thicknesses, get stuck on the floor in varying intensities to magically produce the sound of a wind chime.
Domestic items such as pots, pans, rubber gloves, plastic bags, newspapers and everything up to and including the kitchen sink, gets played. Believe it: five metal sinks, complete with soapy water and dishes, were strapped to the nicks of performers and turned them into romping conga line of rubber-gloved dishwashers.
But there is nothing soft or sudsy about these hard-bodied, testosterone-driven performers. they will slap things, pop cheeks, smack butts and thump stomachs to produce a sound that roars. Nothing beats the climactic ending of STOMP's symphony of found sound:
First the rumble of rubber mallets on the floor. Then the rattle of tin pails and the thunder of trash cans stuck with knotted-and-weighted socks, as three performers hanging from the back wall of the set and swinging (back and forth) like window-washers hanging off a skyscraper), make sweet music by striking the wall of oil and coffee cans, hubcaps, fenders, street signs, pipes and drains.
All that sweet thunder to accompany, of course, the parade of the giant oil cans: four-foot-high oil drums were strapped onto the boots of Stompers created a surreal, carnival-esque nightmare.
STOMP's run at the Orpheum was ended. but the end of the month it looked like they had found a second home.
(Constance Valis Hill, "Troupe Strikes Anything to Become a Rhythmic Hit" Albany Times Union 3/17/1994 p. 22.)
Last Updated: 12-16-2015