October 6, 2018 by Michael Huebner It’s hard to imagine a more integrated merger of dance and percussion than that presented Friday at the Alys Stephens Center. Two dynamic ensembles, each a powerful force in their respective art forms, combined for two retrospective works, then let loose in a world premiere with boundless expression. No stranger to premieres, the New York-based dance troupe Seán Curran Company has presented 27 of them around the world, according to its web site. Third Coast Percussion, by its very nature, has commissioned a long list of composers on its way to a 2017 Grammy award. “Everywhere All the Time,” an ASC commission, was presented for the first time at this event, and represented an expansive departure from the two works presented earlier in the program, each reworkings from 2000 and 2001. Three large movable gates, adorned with black patterns suggestive of woody vines, pervaded “Everywhere.” They were a…

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September 28, 2018 by Chris Jones Hubbard Street’s Season 41 Fall Series asks a lot of its audience: The new environmentalist collaboration between the choreographers Emma Portner, Lil Buck and Jon Boogz runs close to 90 minutes without a break, a relative rarity in the world of contemporary dance. Alas, there is no discreet exit from the Harris Theater, and thus the price paid by that decision Thursday night was a stream of people heading variously and loudly for the exit, all the way up to the top of the theater. They were missing a very interesting collage of diverse talents, given that the original music here was composed by Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) and performed live by Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion. I suspect the artists, most of whom are new to Hubbard Street, wanted to encourage their viewers to make sustained narrative connections about their stated theme of…

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September 28, 2018 by Sharon Hoyer Those seeking light hearted diversion from our present moment, turn elsewhere. For their Fall Series, Chicago’s leading contemporary dance company commissioned works—which unfolded as one evening-length collaboration—from young, emerging choreographers around themes of the physical and political environment. The resulting theater was potent, urgent and, with opening night falling on a particularly emotionally turbulent day in the news cycle, highly topical. The collaboration included an extraordinary performance of compositions by Devonté Hynes from Third Coast Percussion, who, from a row of xylophones, gongs, bells and bowls flanking the stage, poured a ceaseless river of sound through the Harris Theater from well before the lights came up to after the curtain fell. The scene opened on “There Was Nothing,” a vision of creation as imagined by Lil Buck and Jon Boogz, the creative partnership known as Movement Art Is. Boogz and Buck are street dancers by…

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September 13, 2018 by Shannon Thomason Seán Curran Company will opens its 20th anniversary season with its debut performance with Third Coast Percussion at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center. For the performance, Curran and nine exceptional dancers look back at the company’s history, reimagining its hallmark “Abstract Concrete” from 2000, and look forward, continuing their investigation into human connections, relationships and universal truths with the world premiere of a piece commissioned by the Alys Stephens Center, “Everywhere All the Time.” The program includes live music by Grammy Award-winning ensemble Third Coast Percussion, who performed at the ASC in March 2018. An “Inside the Arts” pre-performance talk is at 7 p.m. The performance is at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 5. Tickets are $25, with $10 student tickets. Call 205-975-2787 or click here for tickets. Percussion music has permeated Curran’s spirited, postmodern work. Its inherent rhythm serves as the beating heart of the robust “Abstract Concrete.” First performed…

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June 30, 2018 by Graham Rickson "This is an enormously enjoyable album...the best percussion disc I've heard in ages." Musical material which might in some circumstances seem naïve or simplistic rarely does so when scored for percussion. Take a work like Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood - who'd have imagined that the thwacking of different sized sticks could sound so cool? Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion have already recorded an impressive Reich CD, but this new one is based around something different. Paddle to the Sea is a suite composed collaboratively by the group's players, designed to accompany showings of a 1966 film adaptation of an iconic children's book about a toy canoe travelling from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. It's a substantial, 33 minute work, a parade of enchanting watery vignettes. The pace ebbs and flows to match the watercourses traversed by the canoe, the mood veering between serenity and agitation.…

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