This form is intended to help players connect the events of Serafine’s story to their playing. Essentially, the goal is to practice the skill of creating or finding the pulse within a given rhythm, and to improvise around it.
Here’s how it works:
For this exercise, you’ll need noisemakers of some kind – egg shakers, birdcalls, whistles, rain sticks, or bells. Hand out noisemakers and ask players to stand in a circle. Begin by setting the stage. They are going to imitate the sound of night in the rainforest. To help, I ask them to close their eyes and listen to an audio recording of the sound of insects in the forest at night. We listen for at least a good five minutes, and while they listen, I ask them to pick out any repeated patterns they can discern in the chaotic noise of the insects at night. Can they hear the ways in which the insects repeat each other, call and respond to each other, and create rhythms with their songs?
After listening for a few minutes, invite players to begin to imitate the sounds they hear by using their noisemakers. Then, simply groove away. As the playing in the space inevitably gets louder, turn off the recorded sounds. The goal is for participants to create rhythms together using their noisemakers and by imitating and communicating with each other. It’s nice to have a variety of sounds – birdcalls, cricket noisemakers, shakers, and bells, so that you can really imitate the variety of sounds in the rainforest.
After a few minutes of jamming like this, we follow up with a brief discussion about the rhythms of the forest at night, and the ways in which they affected Serafine in the story. I take care to point out how she began responding to the rhythm by moving her body. Finding the pulse in her body was essential to her being able to respond to it and join in the groove. This is the same concept we apply to all elements of rhythm in our musicianship and in our improvising with other musicians. First, we have to get the pulse into our bodies, and only then can we begin to respond to it, and create our own rhythmic dance with the it.