The sound of hail beating down on the roof fills the room.
The performers walk slowly across the stage, intermittently clapping their hands above their heads and snapping.
Then, the performance takes a turn. They begin slapping their hands on their thighs, heads and the floor.
Soon they’re off to the next piece.
They flail shiny, silver space blankets in the air, crumpling them as the performers spin. A low hum of drums banging begins to fill the room.
Then to the next.
Four performers walk on stage donning beach towels and flip-flops. They place their sandals at the front of the stage, before returning to the back to start the performance.
Towels laid on the floor, they strut across stage spraying water in the air, complementing it with a light “chh.”
Performers in DancersDrummersDreamers (DDD), an annual show at the University of Idaho in its 28th year, employ unusual methods to create sound with objects and themselves, culminating in a work that titillates the eyes and ears.
“We do the whole thing in four months,” said Diane Walker, co-director of the production and a UI professor emerita of dance. “Which is really a mammoth undertaking because everything is created, everything is original.”
Alex Brizee | Argonaut
DancersDrummersDreamers will perform Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
This collaborative show — working together with dance and music programs — results in a performance described as a modern Vaudeville show, according to Walker.
She said the music is unique to each piece, as choreographers and composers work together to create them.
Blending movement and sound
When Walker and Dan Bukvich, co-director and UI percussion professor, created the show in 1991, they wanted to blend movement and sound.
“So, the musicians would move and the dancers would make sound,” she said.
More than 50 performers have worked night and day for the past few months preparing for the performance. They share that sense of awe of a collaborative experience.
Aleks Day, a dance student, is in her fourth year at UI. A dancer and choreographer for DDD, Day organized a set featuring dancers gliding across the stage on roller boards with four-wheels on them.
“By senior year, you’ve got to shake it up,” she said.
At times, they even do cartwheels with the boards.
“I have really tried to think out of the box on these. I want to come up with something that the audience has never seen,” said Day, who performs in multiple pieces.
Day’s mother works with elementary school students, which gave her the inspiration to use the roller boards.
“I wanted something unique and my immediate thought was something that slams and jingles and can give my dancers a way to travel that the audience wouldn’t be expecting,” said Day, who last year used ballet bars on stage in the piece she choreographed.
A collaborative experience
Day appreciates the collaboration between music and dance, reminding her of her days of dancing to jazz as part of a Lindy Hop dance group years ago in her training.
“Just being able to return to that and to refine that groove … it was really fun at the same time as being a really intense process,” she said, referring to the week in which dancers worked with a guest artist to create a nine-minute piece.
That guest artist, Erinn Liebhard, said DDD is undoubtedly of its own.
“From my experience in dance in higher ed, it’s really something I would have loved to have but it’s unusual … because dance and music programs have such different goals most of the time, it can be hard to create a situation where collaboration is possible,” said Liebhard, a jazz choreographer from the Minneapolis-St. Paul region in Minnesota.
Liebhard’s residence was funded by the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, the College of Education Health and Human Sciences dean’s office, and the UI Dance program.
Alex Brizee | Argonaut
DancersDrummersDreamers will perform Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Belle Baggs, co-director of DDD and UI dance professor, said the show’s directors always aim to serve a family-friendly audience.
The performance this year will feature a variety of objects used to emit sound, such as space blankets and Velcro.
“We have all different variations of that problem being solved,” Baggs said. “We have some roller boards, we have hula-hoops, we have space blankets, voice and body percussion.”
Baggs said dancers and musicians often have a lot of similarities, but that they sometime speak different languages, so this performance is unique in its collaborative nature.
“In many ways, dance and music are just really a lively pairing and can be really inspiring, I think, for both ways,” she said. “Dance can be inspired by music and music can be inspired by dance.”
Cole Hitesman, studying dance and exercise science with a focus on pre-physical therapy, is in his second-year at UI. Like Day, Hitesman — a DDD dancer — was attracted to UI because of its dance program, and he appreciates the opportunity to collaborate with musicians.
“Most universities don’t really have that opportunity to work with live music and to work with musicians to create pieces together,” he said. “I enjoy how much of your own personal flavor you could add to it.
“With modern, you can add your own kind of taste to it, but with jazz music there’s a lot of improvisation,” Hitesman said. “You have to be able to think on your feet. You have to be able to really feel the music and just do what feels correct.”
DDD has no down time between pieces, with performers entertaining the audience in between main pieces. Walker said this keeps the rhythm going throughout the show.
“What it does is it creates energy,” she said. “And then the energy never drops because the audience isn’t sitting there waiting.”
Walker said her favorite aspect is the creativity in creating the show.
“It’s not so much the product as the process,” she said. “You’re molding something.
Kyle Pfannenstiel can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @pfannyyy
Event information: This year’s DDD performance will debut 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It will show again 2 p.m. Saturday. Tickets run $10 for seniors and $12 for adults, or $8 for students and youth.