Hit It! Sampler

Pounding the earth with your feet, or instruments with your hands, or old tin cans with anything lying around, is a primal urge right up there with breeding and bellowing. But the Southern Theater's first-ever Hit It! Festival amply demonstrates how dancers and musicians have honed the act of percussive release to a fine art with plenty of teeth. The festival presents four companies over nine weeks in performances that range from Appalachian clogging by the Wild Goose Chase Cloggers to the post-industrial antics of Savage Aural Hotbed playing everything from found objects to power tools. And who could resist a Savage take on seasonal music? Highlights include the Flying Foot Forum's animated "Percussion Project" in which collaborators Joe Chvala, Karla Grotting, and Peter O'Gorman play custom-made instruments, the floor, some zippers, and every part of their own bodies with polyrhythmic panache; and Mary Ellen Child's CRASH, a cornucopia of percussive possibilities including drummers on wheels, Marimbas on exercise bikes, really big gongs, and crash cymbals that light up (nicotine free, of course). You can sample all four in programs at 8:00 p.m. on December 6 and December 12, or pick your fave from the performance schedule.
Thu., Dec. 6, 8 p.m.; Wed., Dec. 12, 8 p.m., 2007