Regent Theatre Hosts Keith Terry

Trained as a jazz drummer Keith treats the human frame as though it were a trap set with a large battery of drums. In his solo performance, Terry claps, jumps, slaps his butt cheeks, shuffles his feet, patty-cakes his thighs, scuffs his shoes, clicks his tongue, and glides across the floor, switching up tempos and altering rhythms with dexterity.

Terry has played drums professionally for most of his life, in a wide variety of music and dance settings, including keeping time for an older generation of tap dancers, like Eddie Brown, Charles "Honi" Coles, and Charles "Cookie" Cook.

About thirty years ago Keith Terry was a founding member of the Jazz Tap Ensemble and created his first body music piece, which quickly got inserted into the company's repertoire. When he demonstrated some of the movements for Coles and Cook, they compared it to the hambone dances they were doing in vaudeville. But rhythmically, Terry was onto something else, they said. Terry liked the idea of harking back to an older tradition, while adding innovations of his own. Three decades, hundreds of compositions, and thousands of performances later, Terry was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

As a soloist Keith Terry has appeared in such settings as Lincoln Center, Bumbershoot, NPR's All Things Considered, the Vienna International keithDance Festival and the Paradiso van Slag World Drum Festival in Amsterdam. As a band leader his groups SLAMMIN All-Body Band, Crosspulse Percussion Ensemble, Professor Terry's Circus Band Extraordinaire, and Body Tjak (with I Wayan Dibia) have performed in venues including Joe's Pub, WNYC, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors (NYC), Grand Performances, LACMA Jazz, the Roxy, and the Skirball Center (LA), SFJazz, Vancouver Island MusicFest, and the Bali Arts Festival. In addition, Keith has performed with a wide range of artists including Charles "Honi" Coles, Turtle Island String Quartet, Jovino Santos Neto, Gamelan Sekar Jaya (charter member), Kenny Endo, Freddie Hubbard, Tex Williams, Robin Williams and Bobby McFerrin. As a producer he has created 5 CDs and 4 DVDs on Crosspulse Media.

From 1998 to 2005 Keith was on the faculty at UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, where he designed and taught a dozen courses on the relationship of music and dance; deep listening; synchronicity, time and timing; and intercultural communication in the arts. In 2006 he conceived and directed the first international body music performance project for the Orff Institute in Salzburg with artists from Turkey, Finland, Spain, Austria and the US.

As Artistic Director, he produced the First International Body Music Festival in Oakland/San Francisco in December, 2008. The second IBMF will take place in December 2009. Keith tours extensively in the Americas, Asia and Europe, where his Body Music performances, workshops, residencies and choreographic commissions are popular among professional performers and educators.

"Sophisticated and up-to-the-minute in its intellectual appeal, in its multicultural inspirations and in its blending of boundaries between art forms." -- THE WASHINGTON POST

"Keith Terry ’s unique “body percussion” performance was like a great vintage wine, so smooth and tangy were his rhythms and sounds, so slyly intoxicating." -- SALI ANN KRIEGSMAN, DANCE VIEW TIMES

". . . not just crossing cultural borders, but jaywalking across the lines that separate music from the visual arts." -- RHYTHM MUSIC MAGAZINE

"A virtuoso invertebrate, bending, bouncing, flopping and popping (literally) in our midst but rarely seeming to come down to earth." -- DANCE MAGAZINE

"Terry lifts you to a philosophical plane of exquisite lucidity usually reached only by means of controlled substances." -- THE VILLAGE VOICE

"This guy is a one-man band machine. I expected flames to come out of his head by the time he was through." -- THE NEW YORK PRESS -- www.regenttheatre.com