One of RedZebra’s engaging workshops, used at many team development events, leadership workshops and corporate conferences, is Body Percussion.
The history of this workshop is a wonderful story of empowerment through creativity, dating back to 1999.
RedZebra co-founders Ollie and Mark travelled to New York for a creativity conference, they went into the inner city schools delivering musical workshops. It was in one of the more underprivileged schools they saw what the children called ‘stepping;’ A form of dance that uses the body to produce rhythms and sounds. It included feet stamps, finger clicks, hand claps and so many other unexpected sounds created using only the human body.
During another visit, in June 2004, they attended a Juneteenth event (a holiday celebrating the abolition of slavery in the USA) and here they saw more ‘Stepping.’ This time it was a competition, lots of drill teams performing their routines (you can see the scale of it in our picture below). It was an inspirational event, showing the power of music to unite and empower school children.
Ollie and Mark loved this concept and have adapted it into a workshop form that can be used at any corporate or community event and called it Body Percussion.
So what happens…
The facilitators do a short performance to inspire participants with the capabilities of the human body to create rhythm!
We break into teams and each learn a different rhythm sequence: contemporary hip hop dance beats, traditional African, Brazilian and Cuban.
They then return for their big performance and often showcase some individual dance moves.
The finale takes it up another level as RedZebra facilitate a medley of all teams simultaneously!
Workshops can be anything from 15 minutes to 4 hours, it can be indoors or Outdoors and involve 10 to 10000 participants.
And the outcome….
- Unifies the group
- Inspiring and energetic
- The power of collaboration
A Case study …
We used the Body percussion workshops in our Dance4life programme. We had 59000 kids in 19 different countries all performing one of our Body Percussion routines… it was incredible! The power and unity created through this routine was truly amazing.
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