Kodo Drummers at Constitution Hall 3/22/01

by Alan Greenblatt

They hit, they hit with sticks -- or however it was Benjy put it in "The Sound and the Fury." They hit big beautiful drums that could easily be converted into hot tubs with what look like rounded off two-by-fours. They hit little hollow sounding rope drums with what look like pencils. They are the Kodo Drummers, a troop from Japan that put on a two-hour show this past Thursday at Constitution Hall.

They filled that big old place with large sounds, about 16 different performers in different combinations banging on drums while doing painful-looking stomach crunches or banging on big drums in a crouch and deliver position. There was always more than one, so that there could be a simple repetitive rhythm that the lead player could improvise on top of.

Occasionally there were flutes and at one point there were these xylophone type devices but mostly it was just drumming. Still, there were enough different rhythms on enough different sounding instruments that the show never lagged.

There was even a heavier beat the next night at Dance Place, where Rennie Harris Puremovement, a Philadelphia-based ensemble presented a hip hop dance version of "Romeo and Juliet" called "Rome & Jewels."

The set was a standard 90s model bare stage, with a high cyclone fence and video projection screen and a turntable/scratching set-up for three. There were 10 dancers in gangs called the Monster Qs and the Caps. The dancing was inspired, sometimes with unison movement of small groups in a hip hop fashion, often with sets of individual dancers doing breakdance moves, flipping around and spinning on their heads and generally pumping you with that great energy you get off of performers who are joyful in their bodies.

I wasn't as wild about the show as the Washington Post was. I didn't think the drama worked all that well. The dances, which were mostly quite short, would stop and the Romeo character or someone else would speak in soliloquy words from Shakespeare (not necessarily from the source play) or rap. They mostly talked about accountability and personal responsibility and the need despite all difficulties to be nice to others. It didn't gibe with the ending, which was a stage full of dead people. This wasn't "Hamlet," after all; I seem to remember there were a few people left over to mourn Romeo and Juliet's hasty deaths.

This version had no Jewels, just Rome's imagination of this woman who could make him care, finally, for another human being. This didn't work and also didn't fit in with the sense you had of his character development. Choreographer Rennie Harris told the audience that when he watched "West Side Story" as a kid, he thought it could have been better with hip hop. I'm not convinced (although that movie would have been better with leads who could sing).

Nonetheless, there was much superb, highly energetic dancing. The crowd got into it in a way that the staid Constitution Hall audience probably could not have imagined.