What’s the point?
Last Saturday, I saw one of the most anarchic, joyful, and truly pointless things I think I’ve ever seen, and it made me think a lot about how we fixate on doing meaningful things in practice.
One of my doctoral students is a child psychotherapist. A guy in his early 50s, he grew up listening to bands like Crass in the era of political, hard core punk in the UK (this kind of thing, for instance). He’s been a drummer for years, but isn't formally trained.
He has this belief that anyone can play music, or at least make a pretty unruly noise, and you shouldn’t have to be trained musician to be able to express yourself through sound.
His latest project is a collaboration with two other drummers in the 30 minute performance I saw last week.
Their parameters were set down in advance:
They would have a basic structure to the piece (first five minutes quiet, playing a lot of cymbals, then louder…, and so on);
They weren’t allowed to fall back on habitual or common drummers’ riffs. If they found themselves getting lazy, they had to stop it and do things they wouldn’t normally do;
And they had to play independently of one another. No following, or call-and-response type thing. If they found themselves attending to what another drummer was doing, they had to break their pattern and focus only on what they were doing.
Here’s a short excerpt of what they produced. Headphones turned up high are definitely recommended.
It loses a lot not being able to be there, but just imagine that unholy racket for 30 minutes! Apart from anything else, it was a hell of an aerobic workout for the drummers. Alan, my student, was wringing wet with sweat at the end.
But what actually was the point? Why bother? Why go to all that trouble to do something that produces nothing of value, and is as fleeting as the smoke from a blown-out match?
A couple of years ago, someone I knew decided to do some work with their local community.
She put up a poster in the community centre by the park, asking if people wanted to join an anarchist exercise group. Eight people turned up to the first meeting, and they were all ages, levels of fitness, shapes and sizes.
My friend, Moana, decided they made a pretty good looking marching band. So they made up some moves, practiced them, and then scheduled a friend to put a drum kit on the back of a truck for their performance.
They made massive majorette hats - some of them three feet tall - and gathered one Thursday evening for their performance.
They lined up, the drums started up with a random marching beat, and off they went down the street and around the park. There was no-one there, except a kid leaning on his BMX bike, looking at them as if they’d just fallen from the sky.
They completed their loop around the park. All of their practiced moves had gone by the wayside after the first 200 yards, but that didn’t stop them. And over the course of the next 15 minutes or so, a whole host of new marching band moves were ‘discovered’.
They got back to the hall, took off their hats, helped Daryl pack his drums into his car, and went home.
So again, why bother?
It seems so obvious to us that our work should be purposeful; that there should be no fat in the system; that we should meet our targets, achieve our outcomes, and do only those things that are evidence-based and scientifically justifiable.
It would be completely ridiculous to suggest that we should spend an hour with our students snowball fighting, or use the patient’s 30 minute appointment to learn how to juggle. We would probably be struck off if we spent an hour with a group of chronic pain patients singing sea shanties. And we’d almost certainly be accused of being unprofessional if we took the patient’s money and taught them how to dance the tarantella.
Now I know all the reasons why those things are true, but I do wonder why they have to be.
One thing that holds a lot of anarchic arts-based work apart from practices like physiotherapy is that it is Political (with a capital P). It deliberately holds a mirror up to the way we live, and says, “No!” Playing 30 minutes of free-form drumming is a way of reminding us how formulaic, safe, and sterile a lot of the rest of the music world can be. Practicing for eight weeks to march around a park for no other reason than it makes you smile is a response to the idea that everything has to be marketable, purposeful, efficient, and important.
Physiotherapy has long been on the right hand side of this equation. We like our practice to be purposeful, scientifically predictable, and repeatable. But physiotherapy like this runs a serious risk of becoming an empty commodity; a sales pitch for acceptable, white middle class values; a simulation of real life; a bland diet of spiceless mediocrity.
Footnote: In the next few weeks, a good friend of mine will be spending an hour with their physiotherapy students snowball fighting. Wherever you are in the world, and whatever COVID is doing to you, I hope one of their snowballs lands in your lap, and makes you get up and dance.