Week 2 of the adult drumming workshops covered kassa rhythms from Guinea. We learned to play after the “break,” and had half the circle playing one rhythm while the other half played another. It wasn’t easy, but after some practice, it sounded pretty awesome. I think I speak for most when I say that our hands are pretty sore today!

Here is a short video of the kassa rhythm:

Week 2 of the adult dance workshops was also successful: we reviewed sean-nós (old style) steps from last week and then reviewed the “3s” before attempting a céili dance (a variation of the Walls of Limerick). Everyone was sweating and smiling by the end!

We had a fun first day of workshops at St. Augustine School! A big “thank you” to Mrs. Claudia Skerritt, head teacher at St. Augustine, for helping us with the registration and organization.

There were about 30 students the drumming class and about 30 in the dance class, and we split them into 2 half-hour groups of 15 students. It seems that the girls are more interested in the dancing while the boys are more interested in drumming, but there were a few girls in the drumming class as well. We had just enough drums for all the children and decided to split up the groups by grade (K-2 and 3-5). We wanted to make it possible for some of the children to do both drumming and dancing, but none of them was interested in doing both.

The drummers practiced in the outside assembly area and the dancers took the Kindergarten classroom, which has a good solid floor. Both groups learned basic rhythms and were taught to put patterns together. One of the dancers added a “clap” to the “sevens” side step, which was a great addition to the basic Irish dance step. This kind of creative input is exactly what these workshops are about!

It was a promising start, seeing how much talent these children have. They have a great sense of rhythm and their energy is infectious.

We are looking forward to next week so we can continue building on the fundamentals and work towards a performance piece during St. Patrick’s Festival!

Drummers learn a basic rhythm pattern with a clap

Dancers learn to “advance” and “retire” and do a side step

The girls say “cheese” after an energetic class

A short video of some of the rhythm patterns the students learned:

We had a great first day of workshops!

First, we went to the Lookout/Brades primary schools in Lookout and had a huge number of students! It turned out that the boys wanted to drum first and the girls wanted to dance first, so the groups were split by boys and girls.

We were able to gather a good number of conga drums from across the island for the workshops. They’re not djembes, but the drums are similar enough, and we hope to have some djembes here soon so that students can learn the technique on the correct drum.

The kids were energetic and caught on really quickly to both the drumming and the dancing! It’s exciting to see so much innate rhythm in the students.

In the evening, we taught our first adult workshops at the Old Primary School in Salem. Again, we were thrilled to see such a great turnout. There were over 20 students in each workshop! The drumming class was first, and Dominique taught some basic rhythms like “lamba” and other patterns.

Kate taught the Irish dance class after a short break, and she showed students the basic “threes” and “sevens” of Irish step dance, as well as some basic patterns from “old style” sean nós Irish dance.

At the end, Kate and Dominique gave an impromptu “blended rhythms” demonstration: Irish dancing to African drumming!

We received great feedback from the participants and are excited to develop and improve the workshops further as we progress towards St. Patrick’s Day here in Montserrat.

Here is a video of the first adult workshops: