Stomp
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Even those who’ve grown roots into the couch over the past couple years probably know what Stomp is: the group on MTV and in commercials for Target, Heineken, and Coca-Cola who make music with found objects or by slapping their own bodies. Those who venture off the couch may have seen them here about a year ago, also at the Shubert Theatre. Created by Britishers Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, Stomp evolved over ten years and debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1991. It remains an eight-member ensemble, though almost all the performers have changed: the group on this tour are Americans recruited for the New York engagement that concluded last year’s tour.
Stomp is understandably popular. It’s fun, it’s funny, and it’s loud. Perfect for kids, it allows everyone in the audience to be a kid again–to revel in the energy and ingenuity that can overcome harsh circumstances. The sounds and visual images are wide-ranging and clever, from folks hopping along in wooden packing crates to the flipping of Zippo lighters and ghostly faces glowing briefly in the dark. Everything has a rhythm, visually and aurally, sometimes complicated and subtle, sometimes raucous and rough. Perhaps the most appealing of the evening’s dozen or so bits is the newspaper section. It starts quietly, as many of the sections do, with the performers coming onstage one by one; seating themselves on overturned buckets, they proceed to read the paper. They’re like morning el riders, irritated at just about everything: the person sitting next to them or crowding them in the aisle, the fact that they have to go to work. Isolated from one another yet as snug as eggs in a carton, they begin producing a rhythmic symphony of irritating sounds: rattling, snapping, and shaking their newspapers and sniffing, sneezing, coughing, and emitting barks of laughter.
And who are the performers? According to a story in Variety last January, they’re talented young people desperate for a real job: “What [the agents] weren’t prepared for was how many recent drama school graduates with great circus and dance skills there were waiting tables in the East Village. Hundreds auditioned.” Ironically, the corporate approach that has produced downsizing and underemployment–don’t pay anyone a livable salary, hire multinational companies that employ minimum-wage “service workers” for everything from mail-room duties to xeroxing–also underlies this show. Stomp not only relies on the disaffection of underemployed young people for its box office but employs such young people–as wage slaves, not as artists. Because Stomp is big business. It’s entertainment. It’s not art.
