This year I’m affiliated with a humanities institute; I’m one of 10 fellows spending the year there working on a project. Most of us are writing books. It’s a multi-disciplinary place (and also broad in its definition of humanities – although I mentioned my music in my application, my academic work has only a tangential relationship to the traditional humanities). In addition to giving us lots of time to work on our projects, there are weekly lunches in which we read and comment on each others work in progress, and a weekly public presentation accompanied by wine and cheese that is often by one of the fellows – I present next week – but also sometimes by other interesting people coming through. Today’s presentation was entitled Body Music, and it was by a group of performers who have been in residence at the college all week. They were folks involved with the International Body Music Festival, started by Keith Terry, who was (is) a percussive dancer in an Crosspulse, in Oakland. This festival brings together people who make percussive music with their bodies from many different places and cultures, and a dozen or so of them were here for this week’s events. They talked a little bit about who they are and what they do, but then said that the best way to understand it was to demonstrate it. So Keith set up (without having warned the other performers) an improv in which one person would start and a second one would join; the second one would then pick someone else to take his place, and so on. (Eventually it grew organically to three people simultaneously.) It was glorious – started with a guy doing hambone, then a woman doing other types of body rhythms, and then moved through folks doing things with feet, hands, voices. There were performers from the US, Europe, Cuba, Brazil, and Indonesia and they all had different styles. Eventually people finishing started picking people from the audience to replace them, and I was the very first audience member chosen. I don’t know what gave them the impression that I would be a safe pick – maybe the fact that I was sitting on the sofa to make sure I could see everything that was happening, or that I was always finding some way to mark the rhythm of whatever they were doing. Of course I jumped up and jumped in – not even sure what I did, but it involved stops and claps playing off the rhythms of the other folks in the jam. It was an awful lot of fun, and I had to let go of the fact that I didn’t know what I was “supposed” to be doing, and just do something rhythmic. I’d love to learn more of the techniques and approaches from the different styles, or even just see them in a more formal performance. But for now it was a great introduction to the fact that, as they said in the post-performance discussion, we all have access to this great instrument that we carry around with us daily, and we just need to not be afraid to use it.