Groove Construction
A DrumCircle Facilitator prepares the space, sets up the instruments, welcomes the people and then focuses on leading the group to a point where they can groove. He or she may do lots of other things along the way but when the group reaches the point of grooving together there is a feeling of job done.
A groove is a complex relationship of musical elements. It is self supporting and sustainable.
I often think of it in terms of architecture. In creating a building you need elements such as foundations, walls, joists, doors, a roof and stairways. The single elements cannot really exist on their own. A roof cannot really exist without walls and a stairway will not stand up on its own.
The same is true of a groove. There are foundations, supports and rhythms and there exist relationships between all the different elements which serve to keep the whole thing in place.
The truth of this can often be experienced at the beginning of a drumcircle. One of the first things that can happen is that everyone starts playing the same rhythm and then it speeds up, crashes and burns. This is like attempting to put up walls before you have created the foundations. The whole thing is unstable.
A groove is in place when the music is self sustaining. There are usually a number of different rhythms as well as foundation and support elements. They all interrelate and exhibit the basic rule of teamwork "the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts."
At first the idea may seem counter-intuitive. The group is playing something really simple and cannot sustain it or keep it from speeding up and collapsing. Your first reaction may be to simplify things further but this would merely exacerbate the problem. I am suggesting that by introducing complexity you will make it easier for the group to sustain the music.
I first experienced this idea whilst attempting to teach children a specific set of african style rhythms. I would teach the whole group each rhythm in turn and then attempt to allocate each group one of those rhythms that they had learnt and put it all together. It took ages and was ultimately frustrating and we rarely achieved a state of groove.
While trying out drumcircle facilitation ideas I used a different approach. I did not formally teach any of the rhythms at all I simply started a few people playing each element and gradually layered the whole thing up. The revelation was that we achieved a state of groove in a fraction of the time.
Music is a complex system of relationships between a whole range of individual elements and the state of groove is an holistic experience of this complexity.