![]() Want more? Subscribe to the quinterly newsletter for exclusive content. Like the blog? Subscribe (form at the bottom of my website) to never miss an issue. To stomp! And Now a Word From Our Sponsor The dancers, amazing athletes all, demonstrate the freedom of allowing that sound to move through the body and respond to it. Beat and rhythm repeated, amplified, hushed, broken, and rearranged until we hear it afresh. The music is the sound of the city-abstract, dissonance noise corralled into patterns. The gritty sets and costumes speak to the show’s roots in street theater. Stomp invites us to listen to the world with new ears. Even hearing a spoken-word tale inspires mental pictures. Or I watch plays, movies, and video entertainment and view photographs, paintings, and prints for the stories they can show me. I primarily enjoy fiction through what I see: words on a page evoke mental images. Stomp made me think about how visually oriented I am in regard to sensory experience. And story literally resonates in the audience’s mind and body. With Stomp, we realize it can be found anywhere and everywhere. ![]() What’s The Stomp Story?Īs I discussed in my first blog post, story can be found throughout the arts. And, again like the sounds, often that tale is more abstract than literal (although the show features some pretty funny pantomime and sight gags!). Like the story the sounds want to tell us, the performers’ movements convey narrative, as well. Audiences are accustomed to dance performances telling stories-any ballet has a plotline, for example, and dance is a key element of musical theater storytelling. ![]() Musical theater is not a concert performance, of course, and Stomp delivers energetic choreography. And thus we can hear the story of the broom sweeping, the bins clanging, and the drains gurgling. Stomp finds everyday sounds and shows them to the audience in fresh ways. Artists first used the term “ found object” to talk about visual arts-a common thing from the day-to-day environment that is elevated to art by the attention of the viewer. It’s all percussion and found-object percussion, at that. We may think of percussion (literally, sounds produced by striking something) as an accent to a musical piece, or at most the backbeat, but Stomp frees the percussion section to tell the tale. As the musical piece progresses, those feelings grow and evolve-a story is there to be experienced, and the audience has an active part in the creative process. The melody and harmony sing to something in us and evoke feelings, just as hearing the words of a tale. Obviously, lyrics convey a storyline, but instrumental music also has a narrative to convey to the listener, much like an abstract painting does for the careful viewer. Almost twenty years later, the show continues to tour the world, record soundtracks for film and commercials, and make film shorts, as well as appear on Broadway. Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas created the show, Stomp, in Brighton, UK, in 1991, although the show is rooted in their street band’s and theater group’s work throughout the 1980s.
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