Originally created and staged in 2009 by GroundWorks’ Artistic Director David Shimotakahara, Boom Boom celebrates the Blues with a range of styles and artists, from John Lee Hooker to Odetta to Muddy Waters. Shimotakahara pays tribute to the essence of the blues: “For all its pain and suffering it is also full of life. There is loneliness and endless journeys, but there is also an attitude about survival.”

Although all of dance is collaborative in nature, I would particularly like to acknowledge the contributions of the company artists to the creation of BOOM BOOM. Through various processes, movement vocabulary developed by each of them was incorporated into various sections of the work. 

I assembled the score for Boom Boom from the deep well of America’s blues heritage. Researching the music, I was continually struck by the depth and range of styles of this vast canon. Based in the African American experience the blues has been and continues to be interpreted, reinterpreted, and passed on, in as many ways as time, place, and circumstance recombine, which is simply to say it is a virtually limitless, and authentic human voice.  It was impossible to include all of the selections I would have liked to, impossible to do justice to even a small percent of the legendary blues artists whose music we all admire.  

In addition to celebrating a range of styles and individual artists, I have tried to pay tribute to something about the essence of the blues. For all it’s pain and suffering it is also full of life. There is loneliness and endless journeys but there is also an attitude about survival. In an essay for the award winning CD and film series “Martin Scorsese presents The Blues” Tom Piazza wrote– “To all this the blues added a specific overtly erotic urgency – an exultation in the body and sexuality, combined with a sense that they were and abiding source of trouble. Perhaps because of that, the spirit of the blues is often close to the spirit of a joke.- A piece of hard luck, but you laugh at it. Or you dance to it.”