STOMP: Discarded Scrap Waiting to Be Heard
Paramount Theatre,
March 5
Remember the lyrics “Get into that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans,” from the song “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”? Well, Luke Cresswell and Steve McNichols, the creators of STOMP, a unique mixture of percussion, movement, and comedy, took this order beyond the cookware thing and then some. STOMP‘s 12 performers also rattled oil drums, tin pails, plastic barrels, road signs, hubcaps, fire extinguishers, washing boards, Thermos bottles, newspapers, tire rims, rubber tubing, brooms, matchboxes, trash cans, and more stuff. Every piece of unimaginable junk was transformed into a percussive instrument, even the kitchen sink! They did not confine themselves to the kitchen, either, but to the stage at the Paramount Theatre, which resembled a tidy salvage yard, consisting of discarded scrap just waiting to be heard.
But it wasn’t only the junk that helped compose the percussive sound scores; the performers’ bodies accompanied the junk with snaps, slaps, stomps, coughs, gasps, scowls, smiles, spits, clicks, howls, giggles, and hilarious subtle looks. This interchangeable, polyrhythmic composition, synchronized between the body and scrap metal and diced with streetwise humor, signed up the audience’s attention in a flash. Using rhythmic claps and stomps, the performers also engaged the audience in a call-and-response challenge. Sometimes the STOMPers playfully let the kids in the audience orchestrate the next move and cleverly allowed the young people to indulge in their sweet triumph before going on to the next piece … and the next and the next.
Yes, there were approximately 25 vignettes, each featuring a different décor of utensils with its own distinct variety of sounds. There was the opening broom duel, the matchbox strikers’ quartet, the finger-snappin’ sand shuffle, the dustbroom pan/wastebasket-lid collaboration, the cylindrical rubber tubing sonata, the pail-and-soup-ladle solo, the kitchen sink pissing contest (the female sink won), the plunger-plucking ensemble, the mop pas de deux, the wooden-staff round dance/combat improvisation, the carpenter’s tool suite, and many more numbers. In fact, there were too many.
However, out of the 25 sound-breakers, the company’s signature piece — a Desi Arnaz “ba-ba-loo” drumming trash-can bit, embellished with a body-twirling hit-the-trash-can-lid move, picked up the lull in the continual clamor. Accompanied by the shrieking clang of the aluminum’s surly vocals, this entertainingly impressive and succinctly executed bash drew my attention back into focus. And the “just hanging out and reading the newspaper” piece had a calming, humorous draw. The STOMPers theatricalized being in the moment and having fun with it. They choreographed annoying, idiosyncratic people sounds into a rhythmic wave of delightful humor. This eccentric score began with the annoying click of a pen against a mouthful of teeth, then the rustle of a newspaper, the raspy abruptness of a repetitive cough, the muffling of smothered giggles punctuated by snorting up a goober and spitting into the classified section, and the crescendo to all these sounds was an outlandish operatic Tarzan call! Well, I wasn’t the only adult in the audience who related to the enticing silliness of letting go and misbehaving in public places. The Paramount Theatre rocked with the laughter of all ages.
STOMP was a magnetic, interactive dose of show-stopping ingenuity executed by performers who made the demanding tools of their trade sing with attitudinal flair and gusto.
This article appears in March 17 • 2000.