Annual Dancers Drummers Dreamers performance wows audience
There’s a ting. It’s on the left. No, there it is again on the right. Wait, coming through the dark. There. The lights come up on the opening scene of the University of Idaho’s 24th annual Dancer Drummers Dreamers (DDD) performance.
Amelia C. Warden | Argonaut
A group of dance theatre and percussion students practice on Wednesday night for their performance.
DDD is a student directed, student produced, collaborative effort between the Lionel Hampton School of Music and the dance department. It was performed last Thursday through Saturday in the Hartung Theater.
Students from the dance department came up with ideas and choreography and work with student musicians to produce a musical piece to go with it. Musicians also work on creating their own pieces played between each dance.
This year, the group of students used plastic bottles as their drums. There were bin fights, aliens and fiddlers. At one point in the second half of the performance, a drummer was pushed across the stage in a bin singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
Other highlights from DDD included two young pregnant women battling to see whose baby bump was cuter, tap dancing clowns getting pied in the face and a good old-fashioned hoedown.
Amelia C. Warden | Argonaut
University of Idaho theatre and percussion ensemble rehearse in the Hartung Theatre on Wednesday night for the upcoming DancersDrummersDreamers “Calculated Chaos!” performance.
This year, dancers also worked with guest choreographer Christy McNeil to produce the second to last set “Granma’s Club.” The piece was a throwback to the jazz era and sophomore dance student Lisa Nikssarian said it was the most fun piece to work on.
UI sophomore Brendan Souvenir said the entire performance was fantastic.
He said the clown tap dance piece bothered him because the clowns weren’t tapping in time with the drumbeat, but he still enjoyed the antics of the serious clown and the over excited clown.
Sargon Hamad, UI junior, said he enjoyed the “Voyagers from Venus” dance, along with the bottle playing at the beginning of the show. He said he laughed through the “BBB: Buns, Bumps and Battles” and enjoyed all the drummers’ parts in between.
Throughout the performance, the drummers and dancers kept the audience engaged, encouraging them to clap along and even at one point assisting in singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” If a gauge of a successful show is how often an audience laughs during a performance, then DDD was as successful as they come.
“It was a lot of fun to see,” Souvenir said. “It moved very quickly and was very different and fresh.”
Claire Whitley can be reached at [email protected]