Maura Troester, Chicago Reader April 29, 1994

Jellyeye's drum performance Blood Lotus--carefully choreographed chaos for eight drummers, ten drums, and three movie screens--is a sort of moving mandala that can transport the audience to another spiritual plane. On a good night watching Jellyeye flail their arms, kick up their legs, and invoke their odd, intense rhythms can cleanse the emotions slowly but steadily they draw you into their strange, rhythmic world. But the world they create is a fragile one, and filmmaker Ariana Gerstein and her assistant Kathleen Kirka are given free rein with the images they put on the screens. At times a musty pretentiousness creeps in, especially when the film segments overshadow the power of the rhythms. But this is a work in progress, after all, just a segment of Jellyeye's upcoming full-length drum opera of the same name, and part of its charm lies in the fact that every performance is a different experience.


?The practice room throbbed as the drummers circled their instruments, laying on rim shots, accents and counter patterns. When they stopped, Andrew Kingsford looked like he was in pain.


Chicago Tribune Mar 24, 1994

I'm going to use cotton in my ears when we get onstage," he told Shu Shubat, who had flagged the rehearsal to a halt.

Shubat, a founder of Jellyeye Drum Theater, wasn't happy to hear that. "We should learn to adjust how we play to the room," she said. "I want us to get more sensitive, not less."

It seemed reasonable enough, but Kingsford wasn't convinced. After a beat or two, he went for the last word: "I'm not talking about a lot of cotton," he said in his thick Australian accent, "just a little bit." Everybody cracked up; clearly it was time for a break.

Breaks have been rare and brief for the eight Jellyeye drummers in the last two months. They have been furiously rehearsing the complex rhythms and movements of "Blood Lotus," a 45-minute "drum opera" that opens Friday for an eight-week run at Chicago Filmmakers, 1543 W. Division St., following each evening's performance of Theater Oobleck's "The Making of Freud."

The drummers will gather in silence around 12 custom-built drums circled on the bare stage. They'll begin with quiet, random drumbeats, but the sound level will rise as they start to move, the precision of their playing offset by the randomness of abstract film patterns projected on their white costumes.

Raising their sticks high, they'll twirl, change places and leap into the air, their rhythms clashing and then meshing perfectly, their volume changing from a rustle of rimshots to a roar. As the performance evolves, they'll wheel the drums around, opening the circle into a "U" and then into rows.

It looks and sounds like a loud, hypnotic ceremony from an unknown culture.

"I hope (the people in the audience) feel that they were being spiraled down into different layers, like they were being pulled in deeper and deeper," Shubat said. "This gets people at a place where they don't have to think. It's like a primal thing; it involves them in that ritual space."

Shubat, 39, who was named Laura at birth but goes by Shu, has been working toward "Blood Lotus" for much of the last decade. The original bass player with the Chicago rock band Eleventh Dream Day, she used her interest in numerology to contribute "Eleventh" to the band's name. (Numerology also figured in naming Jellyeye and "Blood Lotus.")

Before leaving commercial music, she began studying percussion with Chicago drummer Oliver Seay. He had exchanged his University of Chicago math textbooks for the rock 'n' roll life, but his interest was waning after several years playing Chicago clubs, and Shubat's artistic instincts inspired him.

"A lot of my background is more conservative," said Seay, 36, who now lives in north Georgia. "I was intrigued when Shu would ask `Why?' about certain things. I always came up against my own limitations with her and ended up blowing them all away little by little."

Working with multi-instrumentalist Winston Damon and others, they began creating performance pieces that combined dance and drumming during workshops at Chicago's MoMing Dance and Arts Center before it closed its doors in 1990.

"We started small," Shubat said, "and just kept evolving the idea of moving and drumming at the same time," a style she now calls action drumming. They kept massaging their performance pieces, finding ways to link small rhythmic fragments into larger pieces, not always knowing where they were going.

"It was becoming really narrative," she said. "We realized it would be great if we had a writer to work with."

They chose playwright and actor Bryn Magnus, 36, of the Chicago acting Magnuses. His sister Jenny helped found Curious Theatre Branch, which staged several of his plays, including the 1991 production of "The Weirdly Sisters" that Shubat saw. "There was a little show afterwards," she said. "They had a mock rock band, which Bryn was fronting, so I thought: `This guy's a frustrated musician. We should get him."'

"Avalanch Ranch," which emerged after Magnus joined the team, appeared in finished form at Chicago Filmmakers in 1992. It was not a conventional evening of theater. Magnus' plot involved cattle mutilation, alien spaceships and a quest for really effective cosmetics. At times, Shubat swooped elliptically across the stage in a long dress while wearing one roller skate. At others, she joined Magnus and fellow cast members Rick Kubes and Ben Rayner to beat and whirl around four-wheeled tom-toms decorated like Holsteins.

A non-musician, Magnus was challenged by the drumming. "It was really frustrating at first because I wasn't a drummer and I couldn't enter into that part of the process," he said. "I'm a cerebral person, so there's a lot of interference in the way. But I spend so much more time drumming now than I do writing, there's no comparison. I surprise myself all the time. Now I can actually pick something up by hearing it off of a tape."

"Bryn wasn't somebody you'd call a natural drummer," said Shubat, who is impressed with his progress. "It's like a five-sided wheel, the way Bryn plays sometimes."

Need to dig deeper

Though "Avalanch Ranch" got good reviews, Shubat was dissatisfied. "Spiritually and meditatively, it wasn't deep enough," she said.

So they began again in mid-1992, rehearsing fragments of rhythm and movement developed over several years and planning a drumming piece for eight players. "We worked six months just getting the germ of the piece together with four members," said Seay. "We knew we wanted more than that."

Seay, who wasn't heavily involved in "Avalanch Ranch," returned as composer and musical director, conducting Shubat, Magnus and two other drummers, Rick Kubes, 26, and Bill Wallace, 28. "Avalanch Ranch" veteran Kubes studied theater in college ("We were taught how to be Steppenwolf," he recalls with some disgust) and African drumming and dance with Muntu Dance Troupe in Chicago. Wallace, an artist specializing in interactive sound sculpture, designed what Magnus calls "techno-primitive" drums for the show.

The drums, built by Wallace and other Jellyeye members, are mounted on wheeled carriages and capped with animal skins. The cylinder drums and goblet-shaped bass drums look vaguely African, though they're made from carved PVC plumbing joints rather than wood.

Hourglass drums, the largest of the instruments, were made by battering 55-gallon oil drums with sledgehammers. They look like remnants of a nuclear attack.

In a traditional culture, Wallace said, a drummaker would "go into the woods, find a tree, give a little prayer, maybe play drums around it, and apologize for taking a section out of it. There'd be a whole ritual around it. Now you're not going to be able to find a tree anywhere near that size; you're going to find sewer pipes and hunks of metal. It's like the ritual has changed."

What may be Wallace's wildest creations won't appear during the Chicago Filmmakers run, though they figure in Jellyeye's future plans. They are a pair of playable drum costumes that transform their wearers into weird fantasy warriors. A drummer wearing the cast-aluminum "Belly Buddha" suit, with a TV set in its stomach, can strike its metal surfaces with thick drumsticks while blowing a trumpet curling around its devil's-head mask, moving like a squatting Sumo wrestler under its hundred-pound weight. The second costume, unnamed but insect-like, uses a whale's vertebra for a backbone and features a towering cowl made from a streetlight housing. Other costumes, including dresses made of springs and jingles, are in the works.

Seay was primarily responsible for creating the complex score of "Blood Lotus," Shubat said. "Ollie is the drumming rhythmic brain," she said. "He's like the architect, you know. He's good at mathematically moving large groups of people around; I'm good at what images are in that movement and what the movements mean.

"I'm like the guy in the prow of the ship, saying, `We need to go here.' Then you need experts to get you there, and that was Ollie's skill. And Bryn has a lot of skill as a writer. I'm not so big on skill, but I've got, like, the picture, the map."

Seay politely dismisses the title of architect. "There were just so many things that were happenstance, things that happened in the room completely in the moment," he said. The group would videotape each rehearsal, then dissect the tapes and discuss how each drumbeat and movement could be improved. "At times the videotapes seemed like a hindering thing," Seay said, "but you can only pursue the rehearsal groove for so long; it's so important to go back and see the picture of it."

After such sessions, he would use graph paper and his own notation to record "snapshots" of the sections the group had just worked on. The job became even more complicated last summer when four new drummers, attracted by posters in music shops and classified ads in the Reader, joined the group.

Breaking in new drummers

Asking newcomers to jump right into Seay's score, with eight separate drum parts moving apart and together, would have been more difficult if Shubat hadn't created a rhyming language that echoes the rhythmic pattern of the entire piece. Rather than counting for nearly an hour, each player memorizes a string of nonsense phrases like "bonita conchita," "bulldog chihuahua," or "put your foot down Betty" that matches the beats and accents of the score.

"If people can't hear it, they can't play it," Shubat said. "Once they can sing it, they can play it pretty easy. If they can't sing it you can see where they're breaking down because they're using the wrong words or putting little predicates in there that don't belong."

The group rehearsed for two months, then performed "Blood Lotus" twice, first in August at Links Hall, a popular venue for performance art in Chicago, and then outdoors, in business suits, during a concert at Daley Plaza in October. But because of prior commitments, each of the new drummers left the group after the Daley Plaza performance. Shortly after that, Seay moved to Georgia to deal with some family matters.

Shubat and Magnus had to find four new drummers willing to learn the piece for the performances that begin Friday. After auditioning at least 30 drummers, many of them professionals, they chose four dedicated amateurs: Whayne Braswell, Mike Dailey, Andrew Kingsford and Jacqueline Westhead. Braswell, 30, a student of African drumming, is interested in creating his own percussion group; Dailey, 26, appeared in "Tony and Tina's Wedding" and performed with Shozo Sato, who created "Kabuki Medea"; sound engineer Kingsford, 24, worked on "Avalanch Ranch"; and Westhead, 24, another African drum student, helped build the Jellyeye drums.

Teaching the piece to the new group has been easier because each of the core members knows the music so well, Shubat said, and because of constructive criticism from their new musical director, Indian drummer Kalyan Pathak. With films by Ariana Gerstein and Kathleen Kirka and a sound backdrop by David Hunter, Jellyeye is ready to perform.

But they haven't stopped planning.

Once the present run is complete, they'll mold the drum piece into the core of a three-hour performance work that may also include Magnus monologues, Shubat songs and Wallace's fantastic drum costumes. The expanded piece could be ready a year from now.

"What this is," said Shubat with a laugh, "is really `Blood Lotus' from the album of the same name.