Greetings, Art Start Fam!
This past week at one of our shelters, we had some monumentally magical moments with our 5-12 year olds in Monday Night Drum Circle. Drumming with the youth this summer has been a roller coaster for the crew, full of joys and special challenges. The kids find drumming as a new way to release their stress, learn Buddha-like patience, create utter cacophony that later becomes magic, and learn, along with our volunteers, to take lots of deep breaths!
The volunteers and youth drummers have really come through some emotional times, learning to drum, learning to respect the equipment and each other, listening to each other’s beats, playing together as a corps - even just standing still with drum sticks in their hands! No small feats here. Young kids pent up in a shelter want nothing more than to make their voice heard loudly. Other kids pent up in a shelter hide, yearning for the courage to make their voice heard. Art Start Drum Circle has had both of these kids in our workshop this summer.
Corralling their focus with drum sticks in hand each Monday has been trying, but we keep at it little by little, and this week we had a huge breakthrough!
The song for the week, in honor of the late Michael Jackson, was “They Don’t Really Care About Us.” If you’ve seen the video or heard the song, you know how moving it is. Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCqQ2JcQWGs
The kids watched the video and immediately got to work, dividing up into two rooms, drummers in one and singers/dancers in the other.
First, the drum group had an improvisational warm up, to get their juices flowing. Every week during the improv exercise you can kind of hear a pattern coming, but there would always be someone adding chaos to it and the beat would never really come together. But this week, all the kids were able to focus on our instructions, listen to each other, and then make up a simple beat that goes with the lead person. This week, the lead was 11 year old Saquil- a natural talent, always picking up every beat right away. The whole group followed his basic beat and then joined in with his or her own beat. We had a great cadence going strong. Then, all the sudden, Saquil started playing these amazing solo beats over the top! Everyone in the room, especially the kids, started smiling and laughing so loudly because we actually sounded like a real drum line! We kept it going and while we were playing, the singers and dancers next door heard our music and stopped their rehearsal, just to listen to our beats! Outside in the hallway, shelter residents who normally blew off our “pounding” were collecting around our door, just to listen to us. The best part of the whole night was seeing the drummers’ prideful excitement. They KNEW they sounded great and finally got it!
On to the Michael Jackson piece…
Drummers got to working on the basic drum beat for the song. They were able to take the positive energy from the improv success and apply it toward focusing on this new beat that they would all play in unison. Once they got it down, some kids started to take turns experimenting with their own solo beat on top of the group. This is something they’d never done before! The confidence to experiment was palpable.
Next door, the singers and dancers were hard at work, learning the lyrics and dance moves from the video.
We all came together at the end for our own rendition of the song and it was absolutely amazing!
Next week, the group will review as many songs as they can remember from the past 5 weeks, and then take their performance outside onto the sidewalk in front of the shelter for anyone to see and hear.
This week was just a reminder of how incredible it is to work with our beautiful, courageous kids. One of the unique elements of Art Start’s workshops is that some kids come and go each week due to the unpredictable nature of their lives. Other kids are there every week for six months. This makes for a very challenging traditional learning environment, which is why what we do is so special. We base our workshop model on this level of inconsistency. Because of it, kids can finally feel at home somewhere, able to participate in organized activities that don’t require them to have control over life situations that are inherently out of their control as a shelter kid.
To welcome them, we have a very consistent schedule and the same super committed volunteer faces each week. This provides a safe space for homeless youth to try new things and grow through creativity without the stigma or shame they sometimes feel joining groups outside the shelter. We present mini-projects that are complete each workshop, inside a larger project that spans weeks. This provides a sense of completion each night, tailored for kids that may never return to Art Start if they move out, while providing a larger sense of accomplishment and project completion for kids that happen to be able to stay in the workshop for multiple weeks.
From a project planning perspective, it is a constant challenge. Huge progress one week is often thwarted the following week when half of the kids move out and new kids move in. It can feel discouraging. But it is at the core of our mission to reach all of those children that fall between all of the cracks because of circumstances beyond their control. Art Start volunteers have a special coat of resilience to continue to plow through these challenges and love our kids because of these challenges, not in spite of them.
This week, when our kids exhibited the courage and confidence to play their own creative solo drum beats over a group of their peers, the compassion to listen to each other’s beats and collaborate to make beautiful music, and the confidence to cheer for their friends’ success, we felt as though our special recipe for creative expression in a place that is inherently unstable and chaotic was a huge success. It was one of those GREAT weeks.
The Art Start Family never ceases to inspire and move me to be a better person. This month, one of our volunteer artists is blowing my mind. I hope you’ll join me on October 1st when he performs a live show in Gramercy Park, featuring the Art Start teens, all to benefit Art Start.
