This month we had the pleasure of providing a Boomwhacker workshop for a rather well known search engine company known as Google. Here is Steve Rivers’ account of the event: ‘‘There was something unusual about delivering this event. Like nearly everyone in the world who has a computer, I use Google everyday. Google’s logo is probably the most familiar icon in the 21st Century. If you are trying to get from A to B, exchange big files online, researching or uploading videos, sending and receiving emails, planning your diaries, or simply wanting to know everything you need to know about almost anything, Google is sure to be involved somewhere.
I can therefore be forgiven for being somewhat thrown when I received an enquiry from one of their representatives. Rather embarrassingly, I even asked the enquirer to spell the name of their organisation because I couldn’t quite hear it – it sounded a bit like Google! Anyway I felt incredibly honoured and excited to be asked to deliver an event for them.
Google wanted us to work with a group of outstanding students from the UK who had been attending their Bold Immersion Education Programme. The Boomwhacker session was scheduled to close their course with something to energise and bring everybody together.
The group were absolutely brilliant to work with! They were bright, confident, and really up for giving things a try. As a music facilitator it is always really refreshing to work with a group who give you so much back. When they clashed the Boomwhackers together, the group really gave the percussion tubes some ‘pow’! A small group of only 30 began to have the sound of 100! By the end of the session we had managed involve the diatonic, pentatonic and chromatic colours from the Boomwhacker range and had managed to create the complex ‘Dorian’ rhythm which combines up to seven rhythm parts. All this was combined with dance movements which the participants fused with their rhythm grooves. The final two minutes of the session? – Awesome!
Finally I was completely inspired by working at the Google office. However, ‘office’ is not quite the right word – it was more like walking into an art gallery. How can I describe it? You know how every now and then you click onto Google and the logo has been changed to some new visual theme or topic. Well it’s like seeing all those things in 3D! There were so many things to attract the eye – colours, shapes, weird pods, Telephone boxes! The place was perhaps as one might expect - unmistakably ‘Googly’ – an environment buzzing with fresh ideas and creative energy.’’
Unbeatable Energy would like to thank Google for giving us the opportunity to work with their students and we hope we can have the opportunity to work with them again in the future.