Here we go!

February 2013 

Greetings! And welcome to my blog! I have created this page with the purpose of documenting the progress of my current project. Let me give you the rundown on what I've been up to......

Presently, I am working on adapting Turkish darbuka rhythms for the percussive dance medium. This sounds really random but it's not! This project has been a few years in the making now. It has developed in stages, but the actual idea for it came to me a little over a year ago. I'll explain everything...

After retiring from stepdance competitions in 2009, I started experimenting with tap dance. I had been watching some videos of tappers on Youtube and wanted so badly to be able to do what they did. So one day I decided that I would just teach myself. I got to experience the freedom of improvisation and for two years, all I did was improv, mostly A capella but sometimes with jazz or old school hip-hop and rap. I was amazed by the crazy stuff my feet were able to do and I was finally getting a taste of the creative and rhythmic fulfillment that had been lacking when I was stepdancing exclusively. I have always had a passion for rhythm, ever since I was a wee one. Apparently, when I was little and would cry in the night, my mom rocked me back and forth in my cradle next to where she was sleeping. The cradle was close to the wall and would bang into it when she rocked it one way and make a knocking sound went it rocked the other way, but it turned out that these sounds actually calmed me down. To amuse herself and keep me happy at the same time, my mom would play around with syncopated rhythms. I am convinced that this started it all! When I was 5 or 6, I got my hands on one of our tambourines and absolutely loved making driving 4/4 rhythms with it. That was also around the time that I first saw Riverdance on TV. That was what sparked my interest in percussive dance. I was totally obsessed with it and watched it all the time. 

Jean Butler and Colin Dunne in Riverdance: The New Show, 1996

A few years later, my family and I moved to India for 10 months. There I got to be exposed to the amazing music of that country. Indian percussion is so moving and infectious. There's nothing like it. In India we met some incredible people, including a guy named Santhosh, who is a good friend of ours and a very gifted drummer. He showed me how to do a few things on the congas and before we flew back to Canada my parents surprised me with my own set of congas to bring home. :D I almost cried! Anyways, shortly after we got back, I began taking Ottawa Valley stepdance lessons with Chad Wolfe in North Bay. I was so fortunate to have had a teacher that was 15 minutes away, as many stepdancers in Ontario have to travel long distances for lessons. Chad always encouraged me to experiment and push boundaries - to try anything and everything. I sometimes wonder, if Chad hadn't been so encouraging in that way, would I feel the same sort of sense of creative freedom that I do today? After about a year or so under his tutelage, I began competing in the Ontario circuit. Competitions really pushed me technically and provided some good incentive to strive for improvement. With competitions, I developed a good work ethic and focused my attention on musicality and executing clean, precise footwork. I was ecstatic when I moved up into the Open category and had to choreograph my own routines to whatever tunes I wanted! I invested all I could, emotionally and creatively, into my competition routines, but by September 2009, after 9 years of competing, I knew I had gotten everything I could out of the circuit and had to accept that it was TIME TO MOVE ON and keep growing. 

Competition in Bobcaygeon, Ontario.

So that brings me to the tap dancing stuff, which I already covered so I'll just skip that and continue....

After a couple of years of doing tap improv and being super rebellious (in terms of percussive dance) and not choreographing ANYTHING at all, I was starting to get a craving for set pieces again. I should mention that half-way through my rebellious tap dance phase I began listening to a lot of world percussion, believing that exposure to it would really influence the rhythms of my feet, which it absolutely did by the way. I discovered and was fascinated by the world of frame drumming. I was so inspired by it, in fact, that I took up the frame drum, learning how to play via Layne Redmond's tutorials and David Kuckhermann's video podcasts, all of which are available on Youtube. While browsing videos of percussionists on Youtube one day I came across a video of a Turkish drummer. His name is Onur Il and he was playing the darbuka. The stuff that he was doing just freaked the heck out of me (in a good way!) and I was so blown away and thrilled to have found videos of his playing. He was SO FAST and clean and his rhythms were so clever. I bookmarked every video I could find of him. Here's a video of Onur Il playing darbuka. With that in mind, back to choreographed pieces we go now....

So I began choreographing again. This time however, things were different and I was viewing my pieces more as musical compositions. I started throwing in Eastern rhythms, accessorizing with Indian ghungroo (ankle bells) and experimenting with funky time signatures. Looking back, it's amazing to me that my style had changed so drastically from my competitive stepdancing days in just a couple of years. Crazy!

I also joined a networking site for percussionists, which provided me with more info on drummers that I look up on the web. :) I was happy as could be at that point. I figured that was it and I had discovered my calling as a stepdance/tap/world percussion fusion artist. Yay! I had performed at festivals with my bandmates, debuting my new pieces for receptive audiences. Things were looking up in the summer and fall of 2011! 

Ciccone and Hyatt at Celtic Colours 2011

 But winter rolled around and I was beginning to feel something lacking again. This was frustrating. My work STILL wasn't percussive enough to satisfy me. Darn it! "What is it?!", I thought. "What am I missing here?" During the Christmas holidays, I had been listening obsessively to Misirli Ahmet. Here's a video of Misirli Ahmet performing.

He is the father of the Turkish split-hand technique for playing the darbuka (goblet drum). This is the very technique that Onur Il was using in those videos I found of him.

Misirli Ahmet

Misirli Ahmet's incredible work inspired me to take a shot at making another piece. So I did, shortly after Christmas 2011. I recorded a track of myself holding a Saidi rhythm on the frame drum and then I soloed percussive dance on top of it with phrases greatly influenced by Ahmet's split-hand drumming. It was neat, and probably the most rhythmically intricate thing I had thus far cranked out, but the excitement of that piece quickly wore off for me. Just as I was beginning to veer off in totally wrong and irrelevant directions out of desperation, I took a step back to Misirli Ahmet and thought, "Man, that Turkish stuff is amazing. I just wish I could do that with my feet!"..................Oh my goodness........... DING DING DING DING DING. That was my "Aha" moment. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. What if I was able to translate every hit and sound so it could be done with my feet? I remember going to my little brother's hockey practice and talking with my dad about it and pretty much yelling the whole time because I was so excited! I began learning rhythms by ear and listening to as much Turkish darbuka as I could get my hands on. I knew though that I would never be able to accomplish what I wanted to without actually working intensively with a darbuka master. So when the summer came, I felt that I knew my project well enough to take it a step further, contact someone and get really serious about it. I wrote Raquy Danziger, who is a darbuka master and teacher living in Istanbul, Turkey. Here's a video of Raquy playing a duet with her teacher, Bunyamin Olguncan.  And one of her solo work...

Thankfully, she didn't think I was a big weirdo due to the far-out nature of my project. I hoped that she would be able to point me in the right direction and offer some tips. Her advice was simple: "Come to Istanbul!". I think that deep down I was secretly wanting to hear those words! She also recommended getting a copy of her instructional book and DVD for learning the Turkish split-hand technique. I ordered it right away and it arrived just before Christmas of 2012. 

Now things were getting serious. Once I cracked the book open and mulled things over, everything got much more technical. I had learned rhythms by ear up until then, but my footwork was kind of all over the place and in terms of efficiency didn't make much sense. I had to reconfigure pretty much everything. I decided that the best, most authentic and accurate way to do this was to match my feet to the corresponding hand that is required for each hit on the darbuka. For instance, I simply cannot do the split-finger thing with my toes. That's ridiculous. But I CAN use the ball of my foot and heel in place of the first finger and third finger. And for dums and teks I can use the heel and ball of my other foot. I'll post some video samples or a diagram somewhere down the road to better explain this.

At present, my plan is to travel to Istanbul in September of this year for a 6 week duration. I am awaiting the results of a professional development grant that I have applied for through the Canada Council for the Arts. I should find out mid-May what the verdict is there, but in the meantime, I'm going to be working as hard as I can at this project and trying to scrape together funds so I can still make the trip if I don't get the grant. I've set up this blog so I can document/monitor my progress in this journey. It'll be very handy for me and also... I don't know, maybe somebody else will get a kick out of it as well! I'm going to try to commit to monthly updates (or bi-weekly if I can swing it), which will include video footage of what I've been working on as well as other tidbits. I can't wait to share the "goings-on" as they come with anyone who's interested in hearing about it. So without further delay, I declare this blog....officially up and running! HERE WE GO!

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Laozi