Drumming could be a good way to boost morale at work. Angela Long reports.
Phones are ringing, people are arguing, e-mails you don't want to get keep popping up, time is short, work is piling up . . . . How do you get relief? You bang your drum. Or your bongos. Or you shake your maracas.
In no time you'll be feeling so much better, even beaming at the idiot in human resources you clashed with at the budget meeting, because now his darabukas - Middle Eastern drums - are chiming in so well after your booming intro.
Samba for stress, the louder and more carnival the better, is the business solution being embraced by big Irish companies such as Irish Life and AIB and even the more peacefully inclined Glencree Centre for Reconciliation.
The man leading the band is Dave McFarlane, percussionist, veteran of numerous groups and the brains behind a venture called Teamsamba. He tells how he got senior managers and trainee pups to bang together. "I was asked to do a workshop for a theatre about two years ago. People were coming up to me afterwards, saying: 'I've been having a really bad week, but now I feel great!' They were getting rid of all their frustrations. So I took the idea to corporate situations, companies like Dell, and now it is really catching on."
AIB's offices on Adelaide Road in Dublin had a 20-week course in samba percussion, says training executive Kate Quane. "It was great. We really enjoyed it and it was very good for team-building." Staff at PFPC, a fund manager at the Irish Life Centre, were looking for a Brazilian music group to play at their end-of-summer party when they heard about Teamsamba, says fund accountant Síle Loughrey. "At first some people were against it, but our managing director, Joan Kehoe, was very enthusiastic and promised to get 10 managers on board if we could get as many rank-and-file staff." They had three practice sessions before their big night at the party, in the Lansdowne Road entertainment room. "It was such a success some of the guys are going to learn drumming properly."
McFarlane also does samba percussion training in schools, where it is wildly popular with the students, and even the teachers seem pleased to see their charges so happy, obedient and anxious to get it right. Transition year - fourth year of secondary school - is a natural home for the more imaginative approach to social and musical skills that the samba session teaches. A group of 44 girls from Loreto College on St Stephen's Green in Dublin metamorphosed from a gaggle of maroon-clad teenagers to a tight samba band in an hour.
"Anyone can do this," he says. "I've had people, especially in the corporate work, come up to me beforehand and say: 'Look, I can't do this.' Either they are too embarrassed to play drums before their colleagues or they think they have no musical ear, no rhythm. I say, yeah, yeah, because I know, firstly, everyone can do it and, secondly, it is so much fun everyone will want to join in."
Samba, of course, is very egalitarian music. "It is great if you have an executive on a pair of shakers and a junior employee on the big drum!" says McFarlane. Síle Loughrey reinforces the point, if not so gleefully. "It was very good to have managers and ordinary staff all playing together and people who would normally never talk getting to know each other." With a bang.
Dave McFarlane has an open day on October 1st at the Sugar Club, Dublin. Call 087-6359400, www.teamsamba.com