Agogô a-go-go

Not one to sit on my laurels or even a very hard seat at a concert hall for too long, I've branched out further since the Patti Smith music hall review, becoming not only a passive audience member but an active participant in the performance. Let's chalk it up to being scared/scarred for life by a certain bookcart drill team routine.

By chance, last week my friend Fouchat sent me an email advertising some Latin dance classes to be held in my neighborhood over the past weekend. Latin dance? ¡Ay! Too much sass in the salsa. Too much rhumba in the rumpus. Really, just too many steps to memorize, rinse, repeat. Thanks, I'll stick with the bump. I have ample resources to implement it.

But in the same email was reference to an organization called Samba Pittsburgh (two words you would never really expect to see conjoined, hunh?) and their upcoming percussion and dance workshop. Hmmm, now we're talking.

I have had a fantasy ever since childhood of being a percussionist--except that, in the traditional bass-cymbals-snare universe, I don't orbit so good. Thus, I tend to favor intricate, world-music-oriented drumming, the stuff you find way out in the tabla-conga-bongo solar system. When I lived in D.C. centuries ago, I used to love to hear the African drummers perform at Dupont Circle on a Sunday afternoon. There was little more sublime than enjoying some splendour in the grass with friends, a book, and a blanket, accompanied by the expect drumming and organic, go-with-the-flow rhythms.

Come Saturday, I walked into the Attack Theater in Garfield (or thereabouts), anticipating that the drummers would be off to one side, setting up, and getting ready for their performance, while I would head to the seats on the opposite side and listen attentively.

"Oh, hi, look everyone, he's here for the drumming workshop!" someone said to me, and before I had a chance to say, no, no, I'm just Susie Sorority of the Silent and Extremely Uptight Majority, and I'll stand in the corner, cheers thanks lots, this very friendly woman began introducing me to members of the bateria (the band in Brazilian samba). And then someone handed me an agogô to play.

Agogô? But I just got here . . .

An agogô is this double-bell instrument that you play with a drumstick. You tap out a rhythm that works to "decorate" the sound of the bateria, playing over it to add lightness and color to the bass and the popping, crackling drums. (Editor's note: There are a couple of sound files of an agogô being played here.)

OK, so it's probably the Brazilian equivalent of the triangle, but before long, I was getting the beat, not perfectly but steadily, and following along with the conductor quite well, knowing when to start, increase or decrease speed, and stop, all by listening to him play a whistle and nod his head. There were about six or seven of us in this little bateria, led by an expert and encouraging conductor from São Paulo. And dare I say it? Dare I even think it? After about an hour of practice, we sounded pretty good!

I don't think anyone in Brazil has to worry about samba jobs being outsourced to North America, mind you, but we did alright. In fact, I kept thinking, I want more. I don't want this to end.

But it did, and we moved on to the samba dance workshop, which was really the only thing I intended to participate in all along. Somewhat less successfully, though, I should admit. Oh, I enjoyed it, but I'm not necessarily good at patterned dances. Still, the samba that we practiced wasn't all that patterned--it wasn't the formal, ballroom dancing samba that you might see Apollo Ohno glide (or, worse, Billy Ray Cyrus churn) through on Dancing with the Stars, but, instead, the type of samba you might do at a party in Brazil or as part of a samba school during carnaval.

Eh, despite the lowkey, people's samba approach, I still needed some work. I felt rusty and stiff in my step and awkward in my body. There were probably too many people for the room, and I think by now we know how I feel about crowds. The instructor was a sweetheart, though, and even the professional dancers who were there from the theater's resident company were incredibly charming and mellow, learning and laughing right along with us.

Of course, it wouldn't be a day in my life without a total stranger on a public conveyance confessing their sins to me or, in this case, some bitter crone in a leotard, piled-high hair, and a permanent sneer, glaring at me, seeming to resent my very existence. She spent most of the workshop giving me the hairy eyeball for sweating too much, taking up too much space, or graduating from a state school and not a private one. Or something.

Sigh. Perhaps she didn't like crowds either.

Nonetheless, I made it through the workshop without having Miss Flashdance (what, no cut-off sweatshirt? no welder's hat?) have a Showgirls moment and throw marbles on the floor to ruin my chances for stardom in a gen-u-wine Las Vegas-style review. No, that I did all on my own with my very shaky abilities at being my funky self in a different cultural context.

Nonetheless, I managed to end the day on a high note--an invitation from the music conductor to come practice with the bateria whenever I wanted to. So have agogô will travel!

Since then, I've been surfing the web for agogô and drumsticks--they are surprisingly inexpensive (see note above about Brazil's answer to the triangle)--and think I might just have to make the purchase, then join the band at Flagstaff Hill in Schenley Park on one of these nights when it doesn't rain two inches per hour for a rousing lesson in assault and bateria.

One of the neat things about samba music and samba dancing, at least that I gleaned from these workshops, is that kids, it's OK if you try this at home. Everybody rhumba and anyone can samba. It's not designed to be formal, rigid, oppressively detailed, or exquisitely refined in such a way that one needs to be able to read notes, have an advanced degree in musicology, or be able to turn one's legs backwards from the rest of one's body before stepping out onto the stage. Não, with samba, we're just supposed to get steppin'.

I'll happily comply, whether I find the right agogô or no.

Because too often I've been scared off by doing and trying anything in the realm of art, figuring I don't have what it takes--enough talent, enough coordination, enough skill, enough bravado. As a child, I used to like to draw, but I gave that up, figuring I'd never be Da Vinci or even the artist behind the Magic Drawing-Board on Captain Kangaroo. I used to want to be an architect until I learned there was science and math involved, and Barbie that I am, I quickly realized that math is hard! I've struggled with writing over the years, sometimes doing it, sometimes not, and for years trying to force myself to be a short-story writer, when that is so clearly what I'm not. (All the fiction I make up for this blog really happens.) I didn't try out for grade school band or drama club or perfect my Spanish or finish my African animals origami project because, well, I got busy or felt ashamed or figured I'd never be great, so why try?

Sad, really. Worse, it's just plain pathetic. Forty-five and rarely ever been blissed out in art of his own making.

But what if it's simply a matter of enjoying and doing and not being necessarily great (or even good) at it? What if it's simply a matter of having fun? Birds do it, bees do it, even educated Brazilians apparently do it. Have fun, that is.

So away we agogô. This school for samba looks like it might just teach me more than how to follow steps and feel the beat. The lesson to be learned may turn out to be that, well, there's really no lesson at all. Just have fun.

For all my vague yearnings over the years for more meaning in my life, something deeper, something "real," really all I have ever wanted out of this move to Pittsburgh--or any move for that matter--was a better, more supportive, more freeing environment in which to explore my interests and follow my heart's desires, both the personal and professional ones.

Right now Pittsburgh is playing my song. And not only can I dance to it, I can also accompany it on percussion.