Today was our African drumming workshop and it was great! We had 130 people (not counting performers and librarians) move in and out of the room or hover around the door and glassed-in entryway. Two performers from Benin and Senegal kept the room absolutely mesmerized, with kids banging on drums and rattling the shakers brought by the drummers.
We moved most of the chairs out to the side of the room to leave a big open space in the middle and set up fans to try to keep the air moving. This branch doesn’t have air conditioning and it was about 85 today, so it was pretty brutal in the room – we had a bunch of people hang out in the anteroom and then leave after the first song was over; I can only assume it was because of the heat. My supervisor handed me a clicker to keep track of door counts and it made things MUCH easier than my usual “count three times and average them” method for storytime, although it also helped that the kids were all seated and pretty static – storytimes can get kind of wiggly.
The performance itself was pretty self-contained. The guys had clearly been doing this for a while. They played a few songs, then guided the kids (and adults) through some basic rhythms, split the room up into a few groups and led the groups through banging out different rhythms together to see how they interact, practiced getting everyone to stop when the drummer made a hand motion (Crucial!), and made sure that the kids rotated to let everyone get a chance with a drum or a shaker. It was completely adorable watching the toddlers who were old enough to hear and “get” the rhythm, but lacked the fine motor control to actually follow it.
This was one of the highest-interest programs I’ve seen this summer. People entering and leaving the library were stopping constantly to look in through the glass-fronted meeting room, ducking in and out for a few moments, hanging around the entryway, etc. A couple of kids who clearly hadn’t come for the program all but dragged their parents inside.
Before the program started, my supervisor sent me out into the stacks to grab some books on African instruments and Africa itself. Africa itself wasn’t hard – we had several books on the continent as a whole, plus smaller ones on individual countries (I made sure to ask the performers where they were from and put books about those countries on display), but then I found the one book we had on African instruments. “Musical instruments of Africa…”, yup, sounding okay so far…”Their nature, use, and place in the life of a deeply musical people.”…Um. Ooookay. Published in 1965, a year noted for, oh, say, the Watts Riots and the second (failed) attempt at a Selma-Montgomery march. An era known for its clear-eyed open-mindedness on the subject of racial equality and human rights. Not. So. Much.
People, this is why we weed.
(I brought the book to my supervisor and she said, “Oh great!” up until she read the part about deeply musical people. At which point we nodded and took it in back to go to the great library in the sky. I believe I prefaced presenting it to her with the phrase “I think we need to burn this” which okay, was probably not the best way to put it but um. Yeah. That book had no business circulating any more.)