似充非實

Enrichment or waste of time?


For the past two days, I've been attending rehearsals for this Saturday's Community Drumming Festival, it was a full day event from 9am to 5pm... I'm in the group that plays only the Djembé, that very painful hand drum... There are around 40 over people in this group, only 3 or 4 people knows how to play that instrument... When I first knew that, I was shocked... "This is gonna be a disaster" I thought... Much to my relief, I think we'll be ready for this Saturday's performance... I must say the instructor is a very competent one... There is a combined rehearsal later on, I'm looking forward to see what other groups there are...

For these two days, they had been teaching the very basics of playing the Djembé... Everyone is to play a very small part of the entire rhythm, very different from what I'm used to... That's probably cause my band doesn't have that much members, two Djembés is all we have to produce the entire rhythm... Finally coming to the topic of this post, I haven't been taught anything useful... All I had was lots of practice, and it feels like I've improved a bit on my technique... At first I thought it was great that I learnt something, but today when I finally got some time to rest, I took a step back and had doubts about that... Was it really enriching or was it just a waste of time? What I learnt isn't justified with the amount of time spent, I could had been taught advance techniques with two full days of time... Maybe it's still too early to judge how enriching this event is, guess I'll give my judgement after this Sat...

For those of you who are in Singapore and seen this before 19 June, check the news on that day, not sure whether there will be a long report of it though...