Benchmarking The Push

The previous session had me questioning whether I'd pushed solares participants too hard. An instructor can tell when people are at their learning limits by observing the quality of inconsistency: the larger the swings, the closer the limit. Last week the percussionist-dancers at Solares where at cliff's edge.

I was inclined to ease up on the development pace, but because we'd been working together for a long while, I felt it important that participants able to feed back their thoughts and experiences to me. So i consulted each of them in turn, in private conversation. They were all of similar mind:

• Yes, they found it hard at first to grasp the concepts. That made it difficult for them to know how to perform the exercises. But they all felt that, now they know what was required, continued reiterations of the exercises would improve them.
• None of them wanted the pace to be slowed.
• All of them wanted more exercises in ensemble.
• Every one of them felt they understood the importance, relevance, and desirability of the skills being developed.
• Each of them wanted me to stick with this theme and develop it to its fullest possible extent.

It seemed to me that the most appropriate solution was to concentrate on one attack position until consistent fluency was achieved, before moving on to the next - a process which I estimate will take more than a month per position. Ordered from easiest to most challenging, it would be 'pushed', 'laid back', then 'in the pocket'. I would provide the benchmark attack against pre-recorded studio tracks as reference.

So that's how last night's session panned out. Just one exercise, reiterated:

Exercise One: Benchmarking to music, 'pushed' attack
Group practice in circle, son montuno maracas rhythm, atiempo embodiment rhythm, to music. Participants began in ensemble until they were synchronised. I then joined the ensemble, providing the benchmark through playing the maracas in the early 'pushed' attack position.

Observations

The ensemble's attack kept slipping towards a later position whenever the benchmark was absent.
This was because the consciously-played maracas 'pushed' attack was being pulled back by the subconsciously-played embodiment 'in the pocket' attack. There are two possible solutions to this, either: fully-decouple one attack from the other (very challenging), or fully align the maracas and embodiment attacks (slightly less challenging). We went for the latter.

Pushing the embodiment attack earlier resulted in maracas attack being too early. This is because each individual had grown accustomed to the interval-distance between the two attacks - the offset - and subconsciously preserved it as the embodiment attack was 'pushed' earlier i.e. the same offset was maintained as the embodiment attack was pushed earlier, making the maracas attack earlier still, to the point when it was off time. The solution is to decrease the offset.

I anticipate that we will continue with the practice for a few more weeks, until participants gain a sense of: 'push' attack; how to adjust offset; and completely aligned attacks (maracas and embodiment). Along the way, we will be exploring parts of the beat which they have hitherto never explored before.

Loo Yen