Also this issue: Out of this World -Susan Hagen Lee Blessing -Interview by David Anthony Fox He Talks Pretty -David Anthony Fox Family Affair -Debra Auspitz Quilting Bucks -Helen i-lin Hwang From Chippendale to Talavera -Lori Hill Moving to the Desert -Deni Kasrel Stage Flight -Debra Auspitz

October 17-23, 2002

art

Spontaneous Combustion

Rhythm and a Dancer: Rennie Harris Puremovementâs Ron Wood rehearses for Flammable Contents to percussion from Spoken Hand.

Dance, drums and tabla combine to light up the Painted Bride.

by Deni Kasrel

Zakir Hussain, Rennie Harris Puremovement and Spoken Hand Percussion Orchestra. Any one of these three acts can pack the house at the Painted Bride. Put them all on the same bill at the arts center and it’ll be one of those get-out-the-crowbar-to-fit-everyone-in evenings.

Things may be tight at the Bride tonight, when these acts share the stage for a show called Flammable Contents: ZH/RH/SH. But the program organizers factored in the collective popularity of the headliners and have scheduled the gig to run through Oct. 20, so there should be room for all who want to catch this collaboration between three distinct performers who share a common vision.

Hussain is an acclaimed master of classical Indian tabla, Rennie Harris Puremovement is a progressive hip-hop dance company and Spoken Hand is a drum-based percussion ensemble. Sounds like pretty different territory, but each assumes a like-minded approach to art. As Lenny Seidman of Spoken Hand says, "It's about digging deeply into our own traditions, but at the same time we share a vision of adding a contemporary flair and finding a way to be innovative and push the tradition."

At the first rehearsal with all parties present, things are just beginning to come together. Hussain and Spoken Hand fine-tune arrangements to their material -- a polyrhythmic panoply of beats. Meanwhile, Harris workshops his crew though a series of steps -- slow-motion deconstructions of breakdance and b-boy moves. The three groups are not fully in synch at this stage, but that's part of the plan. Hussain, who flew in the day before from his home base in San Francisco, says, "It would be suicide to write a complete piece without first interacting with the others -- their energy will change it. So we've brought an outline to the table."

Up until this evening, Harris has been working ideas out in the studio, taking his group though phrases that may or may not make their way into the actual performance. He agrees that the real work for this show happens during the next 10 days of concentrated rehearsals with both the dancers and musicians. "What I normally do is create a base and go from there. Right now I'm just going to explore and see what happens," he says.

Odds are, sparks will fly when Flammable Contents fires in front of an audience. And while the program marks the first time these three have officially collaborated, there are some longstanding connections between some of the artists.

Seeds for this show were planted back in 1991, at a residency held at the Painted Bride led by Hussain. Harris and two people who would go on to co-found Spoken Hand, Seidman and Daryl Kwasi Burgee, took part in the program. Seidman says the difference between now and then is that Flammable Contents is a three-way creative endeavor. "Before Zakir was the entity, and I assembled these dancers and drummers to be a part of the residency. Since then Rennie Harris and Spoken Hand have become pioneers in their own right. So this carries a lot more experience, and we're all contributing to the collaboration."

Hussain, whose prior collaborations include work with Shakti (featuring John McLaughlin and L. Shankar), the Diga Rhythm Band and Planet Drum (featuring Mickey Hart), says that writing pieces for Spoken Hand, which features percussion batteries playing music based on Brazilian samba, Afro-Cuban bata, West African djembe and North Indian tabla, offers unique compositional possibilities. "With Planet Drum, or my own Masters of Percussion, there was just one musician per instrument, but here there are whole sections. You can have harmonies, counterpoints and microtones, so it's like a symphonic approach, yet there's also room to maneuver." That maneuverability allows for spontaneity among the drummers, who must take into account the actions of the dancers, which, while set, will certainly vary to some degree from night to night.

For Harris and Puremovement, who normally perform to recorded music, the challenge is creating and performing with a live ensemble that plays music far afield from hip-hop stylings. "We'll pull from each other," says Harris, who expects that the rehearsals will help determine in what direction he'll go. "We may try and find a through-line. I have to figure out what makes sense with the musical landscape."

Hussain, Harris and his dancers and the members of Spoken Hand all agree that the combination of elements that comprise Flammable Contents represents an experimental convergence of traditions. The trick will be to take these seemingly disparate traditions and find artistic common ground. For Hussain, it will be found at the root of all three entities' work: "The rhythm.... the pulse is universal."

Flammable Contents: ZH/RH/SH, Thu., Oct. 17-Sun., Oct. 20, $30 ($75 for the Sat., Oct. 19 benefit performance), Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St., 215-925-9914.