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Feel the rhythm

By Max Woodworth
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Jan 11, 2002, Page 7

Feeing a performance is rarely a physically exhausting undertaking. Sometimes it can be mentally taxing if the themes are complex or the performance is especially boring. But not often do we emerge from a theater actually weary from exertion.

You will be tired, though, after seeing the Camut Band from Barcelona and their show Life is Rhythm, which will embark on a five-city tour of Taiwan next week.

The performance is a wild mix of West African percussion and tap dance that draws, or some say forces, the audience out of their seats into rapturous foot stomping and chanting of "tic-a-tac-a-tic-a-tac-a" (the Spanish onomatopeia for the clicking sound of tap dancing).

"My job is to break the wall between the audience and the stage," Tony Espanol, one of the quintet's percussionists said in a telephone interview with Taipei Times. He breaks the metaphorical wall, he says, by making the audience become conscious of the beats that fill our environment.

An example of this pervasive rhythm is regular footsteps, which are essentially the basis of tap dance. Audience members are urged out of their seats to take part in the creation of frantic beats that become gradually complex, but awaken people to the percussive possibilities of their bodies.

The Camut Band combines tap dance with percussion to create Rhythm is Life. PHOTO COURTESY OF PARIS INTERNATIONAL

Most of the audience is left behind when the moves become too complex, but this is in part Espanol's intention and helps add some humor to the show.

Espanol, who is a long-time percussionist, says that when he was approached by his colleagues Lluis and Rafael Mendez to form a "tap dance" troupe, his reaction was simple: "I said no because I don't like tap dance. I always thought of tap dance as a weak sound." So the Mendez brothers reassured him that their idea was not so much tap, as foot-generated percussion. "When they said it would be more like drums, I said okay." This led to the odd, yet logical next step in which the troupe built three large shallow drums on top of which they dance to accompaniment by two percussionists on djembe drums, creating a dual effect of tap and drum percussion.

Performance Notes: What: Camut Band "Rhythm is Life" When & Where: Jan. 18 -- Jan. 20 at Taipei's Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Jan. 20 at Kaohsiung's Chihteh Hall, Jan. 23 at Taichung's Chungshan Hall, Jan. 24 at Tainan's Municipal Arts Center and Jan. 25 at Hsinchu's Municipal Performance Hall. Tickets: NT$300 -- NT$1,500, available through ERA ticketing.

"Each drum is made with different woods and each person is of a different weight and dances in a different way. The sounds are completely distinct, but come together in the rhythm," Espanola said. "That's our purpose, to explore the different sounds of the drums." Rhythm is Life is divided into six parts, not always related, but which share an emphasis on beat.

"My job is to break the wall between the audience and the stage."

Tony Espanol, percussionist for Camut Band

In one section, three of the characters are seated at a table and look to be engaged in heated discussion. The talk quickly escalates into an anarchic round-table beeboxing session, where vocals take on the qualities of percussion.

"We came up with that section sitting around at a bar. We would go to a bar after rehearsals for a drink and end up bantering around a table. It just struck us that this had potential," Espanola said.

Other parts of the show see the use of a Nigerian ceramic percussion instrument called an udu filtered through digital delay effects and slow dance routines to keyboard music. The whole has been described variously as trippy and spiritual.

The Camut Band formed in 1995 with Espanol and the Mendez brothers and in 1999 expanded with the addition of the percussionist dancer Guillem Alonso and percussionist Jordi Satorra.

The African element of the band comes from Espanola, who spent seven years travelling, working and living in various countries of West Africa. There he picked up the different strains of music, which tend to be percussion-heavy, and brought them back to his native Catalonia to found the African percussion and dance troupe Cae Ma Deila. It was the appeal of something universal in percussion, which arguably finds its best manifestation in those regions, that drew him to Africa.

"Growing up, I wanted to be black. I wanted to feel the rhythms. Africa is like this. There is no distance between the stage and the audience there," he said. He credits Africa for his inspiration by saying simply, "Africa has given me a lot." The Camut Band is on a tear recently, coming from a stay in New York, where their show rode out the Broadway doldrums following the Sept. 11 attacks, receiving rave reviews followed by an equally well-received late-autumn tour of Spain.

This will be the group's first time performing in Asia, which offers interesting opportunities, Espanol said, as well as challenges -- foremost among them getting the audience to understand the troupe's instructions in the parts that require their participation. If rhythm is, indeed, universal there should not be a communication problem.

Aficionados of percussion who were disappointed by the U Theatre's rather soulless recent show Meeting with Manjusri Bodhjsattva or the bloated extravagance of Stomp and its Korean carbon copy Cookin' may find solace in Rhythm is Life. Those who were blown away by those shows, however, would probably feel satisfied by the percussive amalgam is Rhythm is Life. Either way, be sure to wear comfortable sneakers to the show in preparation of some serious foot stomping.
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