I recently (November, 2019) had the good fortune to attend a touring performance of the musical Stomp. As one of my fellow theater patrons said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Stomp seamlessly combines story elements of percussion music, dance, and visual comedy in a crowd-pleasing entertainment spectacle.
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. 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.
Found-Object Percussion
Music tells a story. 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. The melody and harmony sing to something in us and evoke feelings, just as hearing the words of a 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.
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. It’s all percussion and found-object percussion, at that. 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. Stomp finds everyday sounds and shows them to the audience in fresh ways. And thus we can hear the story of the broom sweeping, the bins clanging, and the drains gurgling.
Stomp is Dance as Athletics
Musical theater is not a concert performance, of course, and Stomp delivers energetic choreography. 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. Like the story the sounds want to tell us, the performers’ movements convey narrative, as well. And, again like the sounds, often that tale is more abstract than literal (although the show features some pretty funny pantomime and sight gags!).
What’s The Stomp Story?
As I discussed in my first blog post, story can be found throughout the arts. With Stomp, we realize it can be found anywhere and everywhere. Stomp is all about sound and movement. And story literally resonates in the audience’s mind and body.
Stomp made me think about how visually oriented I am in regard to sensory experience. I primarily enjoy fiction through what I see: words on a page evoke mental images. Or I watch plays, movies, and video entertainment and view photographs, paintings, and prints for the stories they can show me. Even hearing a spoken-word tale inspires mental pictures.
Stomp invites us to listen to the world with new ears. It is loud and vibrant. The gritty sets and costumes speak to the show’s roots in street theater. The music is the sound of the city—abstract, dissonance noise corralled into patterns. Beat and rhythm repeated, amplified, hushed, broken, and rearranged until we hear it afresh. The dancers, amazing athletes all, demonstrate the freedom of allowing that sound to move through the body and respond to it. To express our own story. To stomp!
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