Just want to Play on their Drums All day
They were black and white, mostly in their 40s and 50s. But what all the women on the panel--teachers at the first Catskill Mountain Womyn's World Drum & Percussion Happen'n--had in common was their sense of drumming as something they were born to do. All but one had discovered drumming as children or young women at a time, in the not so distant past, when it was a male thing and women simply didn't drum. (The exception was Emilia Biancardi, founder of the local all-woman Brazilian band Iabas; she grew up in Bahia, where drumming is such an integral part of life that every morning everyone, male and female, goes down to the beach with their drum, and throughout the day the rhythm continues on tabletops, pots and pans, garbage cans, or whatever else is handy.)
As a very occasional participant in local women's drum circles over the years, it was with some shyness and a borrowed drum that I went last Saturday to the "Happen'n", a three day event. But I needn't have feared. The event was designed to be inclusive, and the level of skills ranged from women who had never touched a drum before to those whose drumming is as natural as their breathing.
The Happen'n was inspired by a dream the Woodstock musician Fre Atlast had last November. She was at a festival and kept running into all her women drumming friends. They wanted to play together, but whenever they tried, someone would stop them. She woke up and said "We need to have a women's drumming festival!"
Fre called another local musician, longtime friend and colleague Leaf miller, who had just returned from a drumming trip to Ghana. A women's drumming event like that had been a fantasy of Leaf's for years, and just the weeks before she had been talking about it to a mutual friend, Ubaka Hill. A recent émigré to this area, Hill's band, Shapeshifters is Ladyslipper's top-selling recording group; Hill is also a teacher and founder of the Drumsong Institute, an archive of women's world-wide drumming traditions.
While there's an annual women's drumming camp in California, none had ever been held on the East Coast before. The three organizers decided to go for it, and formed Drum Central. In a matter of months they had a highly respected roster of teachers (including the grandmother of the modern women's drumming movement, Edwina Lee Tyler), found a place, made a flyer, and sent it out to their respective mailing lists. The flyer was picked up by women's newsletters and websites, and reservations started coming in from all over the country. Well before August, they were booked solid. Final registration represented more than 200 women from 18 states and Canada, ranging in age from their teens to 80s, with a good-sized contingent from Woodstock.
The prevailing atmosphere was one of joy, serenity and focus. The event was well-organized, with as many as four workshops taking place simultaneously on Saturday and Sunday in beginner and advanced drumming styles from around the world taught by pioneers in the modern women's drumming movement, as well as classes in musical notation, drum tuning and repair, instrument building, and movement. The prevailing attitude was one of sharing. With most of the teachers having had to work hard to come by their musical knowledge and experience, there was an eagerness and generosity in their teaching styles to make drumming available to all women. "I hope by the time you leave here," said Tyler, teacher of many of the teachers there and an internationally known drummer and dancer, "you've discovered that you want to play the drum. The more the merrier!"
Miller, who's been building and playing drums for 27 years and held an ongoing instrument building workshop plus a class on the rhythms of Ghana, spoke of the transformative aspect of drumming. "It's one of the oldest instruments there is," she said, "totally connected to our hearts. You see what happens to people when they're around drumming--they start dancing. In many cultures it's the drum that connects people to the spirit of the world. It's very powerful, and I think that's why women connect with it. Here we are connecting more and more with our own power. Reconnecting with the drum is also a way of connecting with our power, individually and collectively." As we spoke, the nighttime rhythm of the katydids provided a noisy accompaniment. "That's it!" she said. "That's where all music comes from, from nature. It's so basic. How transformed you get, when you walk outside on a night like tonight. How fulfilled you are. It's the same thing with the drums, they just fill you."...
While many of the teachers and seasoned drummers acknowledged men they'd enjoyed learning from and playing with, there was a sense of real joy and relief that they were seeing the day when women, particularly younger women, could gather together to get information from women--not so much to the "exclusion of men" but to balance the isolation they had long felt in all of the music world, where no one thinks twice about most groups being all male. Miller pointed out that in traditional societies, one usually sees men playing with men and women playing with women.
Throughout the varied offerings, there was respect for the fact that herein the United States, where we are exposed to rhythms from all over the world, we have been synthesizing different rhythms and styles to create new ones, and in the process, are creating a new and unique tradition of women's drumming. "We are still young as a tribe of women," Hill reminded us.
Carol Seitz, a photographer from Woodstock, expressed the feelings of everyone I spoke to when she came up to Fre before dinner Saturday and said, "Can I tell you how happy I am? I've never been to anything like this before!" A tired but exhilarated crowd entertained each other under a large tent with showcase performances after the evening's workshops, and Hill concluded the outdoor activities with a more shamanic use of the drum and rattle in a group healing circle. When I left close to 2am with sore palms and glowing heart, an all-night jam session, for those who still had juice, was just getting under way.
Plans are already brewing at Drum Central for a winter intensive as well as a possible week-long event next summer. Meanwhile, for those who can't wait that long, Fre hosts a drum circle, open to both women and men, most Sundays at the Woodstock Community Center from 4 to 5:30pm. For information, email: info@drumcentral.net