Kiwi dancer Simon Watts performs as part of the the Stomp crew to hit NZ stages soon. / Video by Peter Meecham
Get your feet stomping to the soundtrack of everyday life, writes Dionne Christian.
For an industrial zone crowded with factories and warehouses, Pilkington Rd in Panmure is remarkably quiet - at least it is on an overcast Thursday morning away from the road and down a network of driveways.
Then comes the thunder.
No rain, no lightning - just a pounding beat made by work boots on scaffolding, banging bin lids and drumsticks on metal. The performers from Stomp are back in town, treating a small audience of media to what they do best - combine rhythm, dance, theatre and comedy to create high-energy musical magic.
Eight performers use ordinarily mundane objects to create a soundtrack inspired by the commotion of everyday life. Because it's wordless, witty and primal, the show travels easily around the world.
It's 20 years since the troupe first visited New Zealand; among their number this time, two Kiwis, Ian Vincent and Simon Watts. Both have been part of the global sensation for several years.
Watts, 27, saw Stomp in Auckland in 2013; three months later, he was in London auditioning to join one of its five troupes. He'd been saving to take nearly three months off and travel across India; the trip is still on hold.
"I came home, got a call to say could I be back in two weeks' time to start training and went back to London," Watts says. "I'd work, training hard-out from 10am-6pm six days a week, so I was falling asleep on the Tube every day. It was mentally and physically exhausting."
But there was nothing Watts wanted to do more. He started dance classes as a toddler when his mother found him in the laundry dancing to the beat of the washing machine. Watts ended up at Boyzdance, started by Jacqui Cesan to keep her three sons - Josh, Andrew and Richie - dancing. Watts remembers it as an ideal place to build up strength and power, and confidence about being a male dancer. As Year 13 students, Watts and Andrew Cesan made the finals of New Zealand's Got Talent.
Simon Watts as a Year 13 student on New Zealand s Got Talent.
Watts thought he might be a builder, but dance work kept coming - teaching, touring Europe with a show called Tap Reloaded and then NZ and Australian tours with various dance and musical productions.
"I've always been fascinated with rhythm and dance and Stomp was a show that took all my experiences from a young age and morphed them together."
Simon Watts.
So, that's what Watts loves about it. What does he think audiences get from it? "It's rhythm; it's an international language and everybody wants to dance."
Unstoppable rhythm
•Stomp was created in 1991 by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas and performed in small venues in Brighton and London and at the Edinburgh Festival. The duo decided to make a full Stomp show after making a Heineken commercial featuring thirsty bin men banging on rubbish bins and bottles.
•International promoters who saw the show in Edinburgh immediately booked it and it started touring that same year, playing in Hong Kong, Barcelona, Dublin and Sydney during the next three years. The tour culminated in 1994 with performances at London's Sadler's Wells.
•Stomp has now been touring the globe for 26 years, playing more than 20,000 performances to 12 million people in 55 countries on six continents.
•How do the cast and crew keep up? Because there's not one production. At any one time, there can be up to five Stomp companies performing worldwide: one in North America, another throughout Europe or touring the rest of the world, one in New York and one in London (the latter closed in January after 15 years on the West End).
•The largest assembly of Stomp performers ever (40 from 12 different countries) came together for a specially choreographed appearance at the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.
•Cresswell was one of the original eight performers; some 150 performers, from all over the world, have been part of the show and many of those have been recruited from open auditions.
•Though the performers look like a construction crew and the set resembles a building site, Cresswell and McNicholas didn't actually get the idea from working as chippies. They were both keen musicians - Cresswell started playing drums when he was 9 - who met in 1981 in a street band called Pookiesnackenburger.
•The show has used more than 60,000 boxes of matches, 40,000 brooms, 30,000 bins, 20,000 drumsticks and 35,000 litres of black paint applied by 780 paint rollers.
•Stomp has featured in two commercials for JACCS in Japan, one for Apples in Australia, one for Coca-Cola International, five for Target Department stores in the US and three for Toyota in Japan (one of which was filmed in the South Island in 1996; the company did its first NZ tour in 1998). In 2006, the New York team also took part in a public service campaign to "stomp out litter".
•Several of those ads have won industry awards; Stomp has also won, theatre, film and television awards. Cresswell and McNicholas have continued making commercials, documentaries and IMAX 3D nature films including Wild Ocean, The Last Reef and Great White Shark.
•Their activism doesn't stop with environmental awareness. Since 2010, they have owned The Old Market Theatre in Brighton, the town they've long called home. It was the first venue they ever performed together in and now stages theatre, music, comedy and art exhibition as well as providing support and opportunities to local artists.
•Stomp also led to the creation of the Lost and Found Orchestra, where each section of an orchestra was replaced with invented instruments and found objects. It performed at this year's Adelaide Festival.
