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DRUMMING IN THE PARK Just beat it


West Coast Music School’s Drumming In The Park is an interactive opportunity for people of all ages to participate in a high energy drumming circle this Fringe World.
Running each day at 4:00pm from Saturday, January 16 until Sunday, January 31 (except Tuesdays and Wednesdays) under the trees at The Woodside Pleasure Garden, the show promises to break you out of your comfort zone with the help of rhythm and sound (get more info here). MICHAEL HOLLICK talked to Drumming Circle leader and Fringe fanatic, Kiara Macri from West Coast Music School to find out more.

Drumming In The Park offers people of all ages the opportunity to take part in a drumming circle. For the uninitiated, can you tell us exactly what a drum circle is?  

It’s a lot of chaos in a very controlled environment. It’s literally a circle of drums, hand-drums that is, and whoever wants to simply comes along and joins in. All the drummers are led by one of our mentors, who take you through a bunch of activities within the half hour.  

Is this Drumming In The Park‘s first year at Fringe? And where did the idea of doing the show at Fringe come from? 

This is going to be our second year doing it for the Fringe World, and it originally came from an idea I had. I was walking around the Pleasure Garden one year, as I personally have been doing Fringe for a few years now, and I remember walking around The Pleasure Garden and thinking “this would be the perfect place to do one of West Coast’s drumming circles.” So, from there, I made all my work colleagues get on board and yeah it was it was awesome when we did it last year, so we are very happy and excited to do it again this year. 

Can you tell me more about the people behind the show, West Coast Music School? 

West Coast Music School has traditionally had a focus on private lessons, but we have always tried to get out into the community and the drumming circles have been a big part of this throughout those years. With the drumming circles, we’ve come into nursing homes and day-cares and conducted community events like the one we are sharing with the public at Fringe.  

We are in our second year now of offering our own drumming curriculum at the school, which is a four-term long package that you can book into for weekly drumming circles. The drumming curriculum features people of mixed ages and mixed levels, and now that it is in its second year, it’s growing into something really cool as some of the older kids who have done a couple of terms of the drumming circle programme now help the newer kids and even some of the newer adults! 

Where is the West Coast Music School located? 

We have five studios located across Perth, there’s Butler, North Beach, Doubleview, Bellevue and Mandurah, but we also do home lessons, where we offer private lessons for a range of instruments. In addition to the private lessons, we do Group lessons, where we do activities like drumming circles and choir.  

This year we have started a band programme which is very exciting. We basically looked at the community that we currently have and we had all these little ideas of which students that we think would really get along and the students that we think would really complement each other with their instruments and so we were like “they should be in a band!”  

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