{"id":8,"date":"2014-03-08T13:05:49","date_gmt":"2014-03-08T13:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.leekelo.com\/?page_id=8"},"modified":"2023-04-17T07:50:23","modified_gmt":"2023-04-17T07:50:23","slug":"meet-the-director","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/?page_id=8","title":{"rendered":"Meet The Director: Ben Hansen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"8\"<\/h2>\n

\"3\"What is Street Beat?<\/h2>\n

Street Beat is the marriage of drums and dance, framed in a vibrantly theatrical setting. But it\u2019s more than that, because seeing a Street Beat show is like going to the wedding of drum and dance, and having the best time of your life.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the philosophy behind Street Beat?<\/h2>\n

Dancing and Drumming are surely the most ancient art forms of homo sapiens, and they are absolutely wedded together, two sides of the same thing.\u00a0 The beat of the heart, running across the savannah, this is the primal expression of what it is to be alive for humans. And it\u2019s all one thing.\u00a0 So, we are practicing the primal, tribal art and transplanting it to the modern urban landscape.\u00a0 It has never died.\u00a0 It changes, it evolves; it is a living thing.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your personal story, Ben?<\/h2>\n

\"1173811_10151755575706708_410748074_n\"I\u2019ve been pounding on things almost since I came out of the womb. Family legend has it that I banged my head on a dresser as a baby, and instead of crying I laughed and did it again.\u00a0 Another story about me is that I used to love thunderstorms, the louder, the better.\u00a0 I\u2019d squeal with delight and yell back at the sky. But Danes aren\u2019t generally known for being boisterous and loud.\u00a0 They\u2019re famous for being quiet\u2026and melancholy. <\/em>So, after disturbing the peace and taxing my neighbors\u2019 patience for 24 years, I came to America, land of joyful noise. And if you think about it, music is just organized noise, and drumming is just music at it\u2019s most elemental level. Drumming and dancing are in our blood. They go back to the dawn of civilization\u2026or at least back to the afternoon of civilization. My earliest memory of drumming magic is hearing a Gene Krupa solo on a record of my Dad\u2019s. Remember records?\u00a0 Those black discs with a hole in the middle? I dented everything in the kitchen that night.\u00a0 It was so immediate, and yet it was so tribal, ancient.\u00a0 I was hooked.<\/p>\n

What sets you apart from other drum groups?<\/h2>\n

\"drummerWe take African, Cuban, Latin, West African and jazz concepts and mix them all into a gumbo of our own to produce something dynamic and complex, yet simple to grasp and full of raw energy at the same time.\u00a0 Art should inform, but it also ought to taste good. In the theatrical setting, we can really focus this energy and make the audience an integral part of the experience.\u00a0 The audience is a huge part of the experience, as we\u2019re feeding off each other\u2019s energy.\u00a0 That\u2019s when the walls melt away, the curtains dissolve; that\u2019s when we become the agents of magic.\u00a0 People go to the theater to be transformed, to feel renewed and connect on the deepest level with what it means to be a human being.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Dave<\/p>\n

What inspires you to get up on stage every night?<\/h2>\n

What\u2019s really inspiring to me \u2013 and, hopefully, to every audience member we\u2019ve ever touched \u2013 is that we create this moment, this shared experience, using ordinary, everyday items you\u2019d find around your house, and we show how to make the ordinary extraordinary. It\u2019s what we call repurposed percussion, demonstrating that almost any object can be used to make sound.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t worked marshmallows and pillows into the act yet, but we\u2019re working on it. We unlock the magic in the mundane and work our tails off proving you really can\u2019t judge a book by its cover.\u00a0 That\u2019s a good message to share, that\u2019s the takeaway:\u00a0 we all look pretty much the same, but we all carry the unique, the unexpected within us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If you had a metaphor for Street Beat, what would it be?<\/h2>\n

I often think of Street Beat as a time machine.\u00a0 We take the ancient past, bring it into the immediate moment and point toward the future, dancing all the way. One happy critic called us \u201can urbanized journey through percussion,\u201d which I think rings true.\u00a0 But we\u2019re also a tribal journey through the urban age.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is Street Beat? Street Beat is the marriage of drums and dance, framed in a vibrantly theatrical setting. But it\u2019s more than that, because seeing a Street Beat show is like going to the wedding of drum and dance, and having the best time of your life. What\u2019s the philosophy behind Street Beat? Dancing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"contentpage.php","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253,"href":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8\/revisions\/253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.streetbeattheshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}