PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : Troupe Drums Up Rock’s Barest Essence

Stripping rock music to its fundamental components, “Beat of the Traps” brought to Gindi Auditorium, University of Judaism, on Monday an intriguing multidisciplinary experiment in cultural context.

Performed with deliberately seedy pizazz by actor Alan Abelew, the image-laden, stream-of-consciousness texts by Mike Kelley used the same counts as four songs that also turned up elsewhere on the program as drum showpieces and as the accompaniment for postmodern choreography.

Most often, these texts bitterly commented on the myths and social influence of rock culture, though Kelley grew more personal and even elegiac in a poetic sketch of the late Keith Moon, drummer extraordinaire of the Who.

Back to those four songs: shorn of everything here except their drum patterns as originally played by Moon, John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), Mitch Mitchell (the Jimi Hendrix Experience) and Paul Whaley (Blue Cheer). These transcribed drum texts or scores now served M. B. Gordy and Jonathan Norton in a series of demanding duets.

Sometimes the result proved maddening: the same 12-beat motif repeated endlessly without the guitars, vocals or keyboards that should be dominant. Elsewhere, however, these isolated, re-created drum tracks yielded insights about personal style and creativity--as well as giving dancers Anita Pace and Carl Burkley an opportunity for chilly interaction.

Pace’s choreography resolutely avoided pop-dance elements or any whole-body statement. Instead, she most often explored brittle cycles of movement in place: the feet taking impacted little steps, for instance, while the hands curled in to touch the chest and then reached stiffly up and down while the head nodded.

Program notes revealed a number of complex structural gambits in these dances that may have been related to Pace’s current employment as a computer network analyst. However, her sequencing ingenuity scarcely compensated for a poverty of imagination regarding movement shape and vocabulary.

Perhaps the most enigmatic portions of the 15-part program involved vocalist-guitarist Stephen Prina and his segments based on the top single from the latest Billboard magazine chart. Not only did we hear both sides of the Sir Mix-A-Lot single played over the loudspeakers, but Prina himself also re-performed them in a devastatingly cerebral deadpan.

Once again, we found the rock experience reduced to its essence--but it’s definitely an act of deconstruction when a white adult who sounds like T. S. Eliot repeats street-rap attacking “cake boys” or celebrating the lower anatomy of black women.

Is it fair to pull words or drum tracks out of an audio mix and focus intently on them? Does it show us something in a familiar landscape that we may have ignored? For all its percussive flamboyance, “Beat of the Traps” remained deeply ambivalent about the cultural artifacts it so inventively pared down and highlighted. If that ambivalence showed in the dances, the evening might achieve a sense of unity that, right now, only the drumming provides.