Presented by the OzAsia Festival
Reviewed Saturday 2nd October 2010
http://www.ozasiafestival.com.au
Venue: Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre
Season: one performance
Duration: 2hrs
The 2010 OzAsia Festival ended, not with a whimper, but with a bang, provided by this energetic and enthusiastic Anglo-Indian percussion-based group. In an innovative and highly appreciated move, the Festival Centre allowed dancing in the entire stalls section, and patrons certainly took advantage of the opportunity. There was dancing in the aisles, not to mention any other space that people could find, with most people dancing in the small area in front of their allocated seats. The leader of the group, Johnny Kalsi, expressed his amazement several times during the concert at the fact that the forward thinking Festival Centre management had taken the bold move to turn the stalls into a giant mosh pit. Adelaide leads the world, yet again.
Artistic director, Kalsi, took centre stage, flanked either side by two more dhol drummers, Rav Sandhu, Gurpal Bhachu, Onkar Phul and Dav Dehaley. Behind them was the best known of the Indian percussion instruments, the pair of drums known as the tabla, played by Bindi Sagoo, along with Toby Drummond on drum kit, Gavin Lombos on guitar and Robert Gilmore on five string bass guitar. A further series of layers of sound were added by recorded soundtracks of electronic sounds, other acoustic instruments, and vocals.
As if that was not enough, Kulwant Singh Bhamrah joined the group from time to time to provide Bhangra vocals, encouraging the audience to join in on call and response sections of the songs. He did not have to ask them twice. By the time he made his first appearance, the audience was so involved with the performance that there was no way that he could have stopped them from joining in.
Throughout the concert it was the driving rhythms of the five dhol drummers that kept the audience on its feet, dancing, jumping up and down, waving their arms in the air and singing along. The dhol is a long, wooden, cylindrical drum with a head at each end, one tuned high and played with a cane at a fast rhythm, the other tuned low and struck with a hard curved stick, providing bass accents. This drum originated in the Punjab, in the north of India. With a dhol weighing around 15kg one cannot help but be in awe of the way that the five drummers constantly leap, twirl, whirl, jump and dance around the stage, as though the drums weighed nothing.
The musical influences were wide, ranging from Indian, techno, funk and Reggae, through to Irish and Scottish reels and jigs, that latter influence no doubt coming from Kalsi’s involvement with another great fusion band, the Afro Celt Sound System (keep an eye open for announcements about this group nearer to March). Kalsi injected humour into the performance with his witty repartee between numbers, and he drew considerable applause and cheering when he announced that he had some pre-release copies of the band’s fourth CD for sale after the performance. The long queue in the foyer after the show suggested that he would definitely not be taking them back to London.
The scheduled ninety minute performance ran overtime by around another thirty minutes, but nobody was complaining. I suspect, in fact, that many would still be there dancing through to the end of the long weekend, given half a chance. This was an exciting and engaging end to the Festival that had brought us so many terrific performances. The Dhol Foundation was a perfect choice for what was, effectively, a closing night dance party in the fully booked Festival Theatre. This very successful and popular Festival was a tribute to the good taste and hard work of Jacinta Thompson and her team, as well as to Douglas Gautier and all at the Festival Centre whose individual and group efforts made it possible.
Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Arts Editor, Glam Adelaide.
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