Damson in Kaapstad.: Facilitation Course.

As promised, here is my post for the facilitation course that I did...with pictures!

It was held at a mental health clinic as most, if not all, the other people on the course were occupational therapists. This meant that a lot of the methods and tips we were given were geared specially towards using drumming in a therapeutic environment which was incredibly interesting!

First off, about the guy running the course. His name is Bevil and in my eyes he is a drumming god! I think he's been running circles for about 15 years and from the sound of it he has worked with every conceivable group of people. He's worked in hospitals of all kinds with patients suffering from burns to mental illnesses. He has worked in prisons - I think he said the maximum security types! He also does work with blind and deaf children (at different times) as well as autistic people. All of this experience gets channelled into the facilitation course!

On the first two days we focused on the 'lesson plan' of the circle if you want to call it that. It was how you start a circle, what you fill it with and where to put things like rhythms and solos (what order) as well as how to finish a circle. Bevil told us about the energy levels and how you control them. Drumming gets you buzzed. After a circle I usually feel incredibly relaxed but also kind of twitchy, my hands are still wanting to move and my body still wants music. When I used to sing in choirs I'd get something similar after a concert, it's like a music high! So Bevil was telling us about how to control that energy and to respect it. From a therapists point of view, he was saying if you have circle just before meal times and you have patients that have difficulty, or refuse to eat, if you end the session loud and fast, with a lot of energy, more often than not, all the patients will go off and eat wonderfully! Apparently there was a circle in America that kept getting a lot of trouble from the police, drummers would get repeatedly hassled on their way home, some of them even got arrested. It was all because the guy running the group didn't know how the energy levels were affecting the drummers, so when the left the venue, they were all full of energy, jittery and twitchy. The police, of course, are trained to pick up on that kind of energy and were just pulling members of the group up left right and centre, wanting to know what they'd taken! On the other hand, you can use gongs and bells and bring the energy levels right down at the end of a session and everybody leaves feeling far more relaxed (but still slightly buzzed!)

We also learnt how to signal what we wanted people to do. Especially if you have a large group, you can't really use your voice properly to communicate because the drums are so loud, so using hand signals is a given. There were about 13-15 people on the course so we were split into groups and got lots of practise running circles! Whenever we were shown something new, we had to go away in our groups and plan a circle, when we came back, we then had to run that circle for everyone else, from start to finish. It was a great confidence builder!

The third day was spent more away from the drums. Bevil wanted to show us that you don't actually need drums to run a circle so we were given a bag of scrap each and had to run a 5 minute session using only the scrap. Ribbed pipes, plastic bottles with rice in, boomwhackers. It was great fun! Bevil said: "if you were dropped in the desert with nothing, could you still teach a bunch of kids what you do?" which I think is a great phrase to live life by. We're so used to depending on gadgets or instruments to do what we do, but if you take them away, can you still make do?!

On the fourth and final day we had a surprise! Bevil took us into Woodstock and had us run a drum circle there at a community wellness fair. It was a big circle, but there wasn't enough time for all of us to take the lead so me, one of the volunteers and one of the therapists took the circle. It was mildly terrifying but so much fun! After we'd finished there we went onto Long Street and Green Market Square where we found that drums are much more expensive if you don't have a south african accent before moving onto longmarket street to join a circle that meets every week.