It’s Friday!! #FeelGoodFriday to be exact! And we have something different to share this Friday. This Friday we’re sharing with you

HOW WE RAN A 40 PERSON REHEARSAL…ONLINE

At the start of the year, we had a new plan to do Bloco Sessions every month to get all of our amazing young people to hang out together and keep learning and creating some fab music. However, then we met coronavirus and the plan got changed!!! But in this new season we decided that we are still going to do our best to keep our creative family together and so we had our first go at an online Bloco rehearsal last Friday night with 40 young musicians and dancers in attendance. Quite a few people asked us to let them know how it goes, as we know everyone is trying to figure out how to do this thing. So all of you who asked – Arts Council, Serious, Southbank Centre, Greater London Authority, Lambeth Music Centre, Crystal Palace Progress Band – we had a LOT of fun, a LOAD of laughs and the LATENCY was real!

Social distancing really doesn’t allow for great ensemble playing! However in the spirit of Bloco we enjoyed the whole process and all of our young people really enjoyed the experience of connecting together and playing and dancing even if it was quite a comedy outcome. We had a lovely moment at the end where a few of our players shared something they had been working on and that music was beautiful and so lovely to hear them play live.

Our amazing team already had a bunch of suggestions and ideas of how to make the next one better so we will be back with it soon. To share our thoughts and learning so far:

  • We are not trying to create an amazing piece of music together to show the world, rather we are trying to connect our amazing young people so that they can play music together and keep expanding their music and social skills at this difficult time.
  • When playing in a group everyone in the group needs to be muted except for the leader who plays and then everyone else just plays along at home
  • Then leave space for the participants to ask questions or get 1-2-1 support from the leader
  • The Mute All button is essential!
  • The Zoom Rooms work really well if you want to have a big group and then break it down into smaller groups all on the same call
  • We can give space for people to play solos so will try more of a jam session next time where the bass line or groove plays out of everyone’s computer and then they jam along one by one and the rest of us listen.

That’s what we have learnt so far and we hope that our recording of the brass section playing (not really) together gives you some #FeelGoodFriday vibes!

Here’s what our young people thought of it:

“enjoyed being in touch was very fun. 10/10 will chat again. latency was amazing” Noah

“not even a pandemic stops kinetika bloco” Phoebe

“Yass! I loved it!” ZyAnn

“That was sick” Cassius

 

Tamzyn French

CEO