…continued from here
We started the BAC Beatbox Academy with some outreach workshops in schools and youth clubs. One teacher responded to our follow up call with: “No, no you don’t want to bother contacting him, he’s a nightmare. He is disruptive, noisy, sometimes violent and cannot concentrate on anything for more than 5 seconds. He’s been excluded from this school.”
Eventually we got hold of him through his mates. He is one of the most dedicated, focused and fast-learning students I have ever worked with.
During the Academy’s term, a group of kids come together for two hours every Saturday. Some of them are from difficult backgrounds, with little going on at school that they care about. When they are with us, they work together to develop their own music, experiment with their voices and improvise in a group situation. At the end of the course, each young beatboxer records a video for a DVD which they can take home and show to their mates, and the course ends with a show for family and friends.
The next big step is to teach some of the older kids how to be leaders themselves, so that the movement can keep on developing.
Bringing all these young beatboxers onstage at the QEH earlier this month has proved to me that beatboxing is a way of bringing people together. In the past year I’ve seen grannies beatboxing side by side with “hoodies”, and I’ve seen parents amazed by the talent they never realised their child had.
Group beatbox teaching is a unique technique for encouraging people to connect with others in a positive, musical way, without looking un-cool.
I think these ideas have the potential to change the attitudes of certain young people. Attitudes which are currently leading to a downward spiral of post-code wars, drugs, knife crime and in some areas gun crime. It gives young people an excuse to take an interest in learning, applying themselves, and taking some positive steps out of the vicious chain of events in their lives.
Tags: beatboxacademy, education
May 27th, 2008 at 9:47 am
[...] To be continued… (see rest of post here) [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Here’s one of the videos from the BAC Beatbox Academy Allstars DVD. It’s The Maveric!!
November 20th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
[...] OK it’s true, I have a strange belief that beatboxing can save the world. I’ve talked about this before on this very blog, but the essence of what I’m getting at is this: music can be a powerful tool [...]