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Students with the Southside Elementary School’s YMCA after-school program were treated to a special preview performance by POWERHOUSE!!!, a percussive dance company that will perform on Oct. 2-4 at the upcoming San Benito County Fair.
Founded in 2000, POWERHOUSE!!! mixes various dance styles into a high-energy program that teaches the basics of percussion, rhythm and tempo by getting everyone involved, stomping along to the beat until the whole room is moving.
“We teach the kids about the connection of music to this kind of dance,” said POWERHOUSE!!! founder Brian Bon. “The words ‘percussion, rhythm, and tempo’ don’t stick in their heads. So we’re going to workshop it: get them on their feet and define it in a practical way.”
Instead of just pointing to a drum, for example, Bon teaches that percussion is two things hitting together to make a sound.”
“When a student stomps their foot against the floor,” he said, ‘they realize they are creating percussion. It’s practical and easy to see. If percussion is the sound, then rhythm is the pattern. Then we teach them that tempo is the speed we go.”
To reinforce this, the dancers perform without musical accompaniment, letting the children call out changes to speed up or slow down the dancers’ tempo in real time.
“I wanted a simple, practical thing they can carry away,” Bon said. “As they call out to us, we explain, ‘Oh look! You just connected what you learned to what we’re doing.’ It’s a good way to make the vocabulary stick in their heads.”
Bon began dancing in 1984 at 14 and got his professional start at 15 by winning a dance competition which led to his first appearance on the “Hee Haw” TV show. His group remains the only one to win the show’s clog dancing competition five times.
“My momma made me take it up,” Bon said, “and I hated it at first. But within a year, being on Hee Haw changed my life. On my first day of work, I met Johnny Cash, Roy Clark, and the rest of the cast. It was really cool.”
Since then, Bon has made over two dozen appearances on shows like “America’s Got Talent” and “Fast Track to Fame,” and has performed at over 70 festivals and fairs. POWERHOUSE!!! currently performs up to 400 shows annually across the U.S., focusing heavily on school assemblies.
The group’s dance routines evolved from traditional clog dancing, where metal-tipped shoes provide a percussive sound.
Similar in approach to tap dancing, clog dancing uses heavier steel taps rather than aluminum for a deeper sound, and the steps are performed in a more aggressive style than tap’s “intricate and pretty” style. Bon quotes clogging pioneer Burton Edwards, who said that clog is a “freedom dance, because you’re free to do it however you want.”
In his own interpretation of that freedom, Bon choreographs with elements of tap dance, Irish step dance, Riverdance, stomp, jazz, and hip-hop. He starts by finding the music, then listening to it on repeat until the rhythm takes shape in his mind.
“When the mental blueprint is ready, I translate it physically,” he said. “Once I put it on its feet, it just goes pretty quick. If it doesn’t go quick, it’s not meant to be.”
Bon describes the result as a melting pot of a dance, a little bit of everything.
“Most people don’t know what we’re doing when they see it,” he said. “I don’t care, as long as they’re really connected and enjoying the show.”
During the performances, Bon also tosses in throwbacks to his beloved “Hee Haw,” using corny jokes as transitions between routines:
“I just got back from Alaska, and I don’t know if you knew this, but in Alaska they used to use wooden tractors. They had wooden wheels, a wooden body, and a wooden motor, but they wooden work.”
The afterschool performances were done in collaboration with the YMCA, POWERHOUSE!!! and the San Benito County Fair. Adriana Ramirez, who oversees the YMCA program at South Side, said she thought that guests like POWERHOUSE!!! let the students see what other kinds of activities are open to them.
“I think these days, there’s just so many tech things the kiddos are doing,” she said. “They can be good, but doing them all the time is not so good for them. I think anything that will get their feet moving and their hands going is great.”
If the reception Bon got at Southside Elementary was any indication, this is a formula that kids take to like catnip. Within a few minutes of getting them out on the dance platform, they were laughing, dancing and calling out the moves: “percussion,” “rhythm,” “tempo.”
It was easy to see that Bon had them enraptured from the first stomp and tap. The “freedom dance” was on full display as the kids hopped, bopped and bounced off of each other, doing their best to keep the beat with Bon as their Pied Piper.
“I think dance is part of our cultural history,” he said. “It’s an unwritten record of the culture of the time. Clogging was created by people with no training, just stomping their feet at the end of a hard week in the factory or in the field. I love seeing the kids get excited about it.”
POWERHOUSE!!! Percussive Dance brings its interactive presentation to the Patio Stage at the San Benito County Fair for eight shows:
- Oct. 2: 2–2:30 p.m. and 5:30–6 p.m.
- Oct. 3: 1–1:30 p.m., 3–3:30 p.m., and 5:30–6 p.m.
- Oct. 4: 12:30–1 p.m., 2–2:30 p.m., and 4–4:30 p.m.
Presale tickets for the fair, with discounted admission and carnival rides, are available at Ace Hardware, True Value Hardware and Postal Graphics in Hollister, Pizza Factory in San Juan Bautista and County Line Designs 831 in Tres Pinos.
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