Beat the Donkey gets down at Manifest

File Cyro Baptista and Beat the Donkey, a 10-member Brazilian percussionist group and this year’s headlining act, perform on the Main Stage at 7:45 p.m.

Cyro Baptista may not exactly be a well-known musician on the college circuit, but that doesn’t mean he won’t steal the show at this year’s Manifest arts festival, which he is headlining.
In fact, Baptista, a 50-something Brazilian native, regarded by many as one of the world’s greatest percussionists, said his recent performance at Wesleyan University in Connecticut stands out even among his gigs around the world alongside music legends such as Sting and Phish’s Trey Anastasio.

“The college kids—they are great,” he said. “You never know what’s going to happen. When we played Wesleyan, they went totally bananas; they were taking their clothes off. It’s amazing how they react and interact with the show.”

At Manifest, one can expect Beat The Donkey, a 10-member outfit that includes Baptista and an array of other musicians, dancers and artists, to do a lot more than simply play musical selections from their latest release, 2002’s Beat the Donkey.

“There’s like 11 dudes and girls on stage,” explained HotHouse’s Tim Bisig, who booked the band for Manifest. “They have all crazy costumes and even crazier instruments that you would never imagine, and they start creating different beats and different rhythms with washboards and weird Asian instruments.

“They fly all over the stage and they do martial arts. ... It might look like break dancing, but it’s from some other part of the world. A lot of people in the band are artists and performance artists and musicians, and they made this collective that’s like a percussion ensemble. Maybe you can think of them like Blue Man Group but a little wilder, and a little bit more Brazilian.”

The end result leaves even Baptista a bit bewildered.

“I don’t know what it is, if it’s pop music or jazz. It’s not world music—it’s music of the world,” he said.
“It’s more like a story. It’s not just music. I don’t think percussion can exist without dance,” he said. “So there’s some dance. I love theater. There’s some theater elements. It’s these three things: music, theater and dance.”

Bisig agreed, “It’s a very diverse show. It’s all sorts of different genres mixed into one.”

According to Baptista, who recently returned from a Russian trek alongside famed jazz composer John Zorn, Beat The Donkey will be playing, among other instruments, a part of a refrigerator and a Gatorade bottle.

Baptista said he learned at a very young age that instruments didn’t have to be of the guitar and drums variety.
“I had a teacher when I was a kid in Brazil, and at the time, the music that they were teaching in the schools was really boring,” he said. “This teacher said, ‘no screw that, let’s do percussion.’ The school had no money to buy instruments, so we started getting cans and putting rice inside. My first instrument was a coconut.”

Since that time, Baptista has established himself as one of the world’s leading percussionists, touring and recording with Yo-Yo Ma, David Byrne, Melissa Etheridge, Bobby McFerrin, Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock, James Taylor and countless others.

“I’ve been very lucky in my career,” he said. “One day I’m playing with a classical musician or country musician, then the other day, I played with a heavy metal band.”

For his Manifest performance, Baptista advises those in attendance to “expect the unexpected.”
“Anything can happen,” he said.