Over the holidays, our friend Dean Read, the national sales director for RedDot, loaned us his copy of Young@Heart, an outstanding British-produced documentary about a singing group of old folks from Massachusetts who inspire audiences by rocking out on young songs. Formed by its musical director, Bob Cilman, in 1982, the group originally sang lots of old standards, but has steadily gotten younger with its music over the years. In their concerts today, they perform numbers by the likes of the Talking Heads, The Clash, and Coldplay. The film deservedly got a lot of attention when it was released in 2008.
The gamechanger in this narrative is Bob Cilman, who initiated the productive game that has given such huge gifts to its players. (And they to it.) The improvisation in Young@Heart points the way for anyone looking to initiate productive games in their own lives, or their own lines of work:
“Location, location, location” has become “Community, community, community.” In the Industrial Age, location was everything. It was important to be physically adjacent to the highway. In the Networked World, everyone has access to the highway. One day you’re a couple of kids from China wearing Houston Rockets jerseys and lip-syncing hip-hop, the next day you’re stars. So the question is, what do you build? Cilman laid the foundation for a worldwide community by simply giving elderly people around Northampton, Massachusetts, something worthwhile and important to do. Little by little, this community interfaced with larger communities–the Northampton Arts Council where Cilman became the director in 1989, Talkng Heads fans, David Byrne, the music and film communities. Young@Heart has performed with Cambodian choirs, hip-hop dancers, and, in a revue entitled Flaming Saddles, a gay men’s chorus. Their location did not did not matter nearly as much as the remarkable community they built there.
Design games, not outcomes. In the Industrial Age, games were often designed by reverse-engineering outcomes. Doing this in the Networked World is just plain idiotic. Why narrow the window of opportunity to a single outcome when networks offer so many possibilities for positive outcomes? Commitment to a good game opens the window of opportunity to many different positive outcomes. Let’s imagine that instead of committing to the ‘rockin’ seniors’ game, Bob Cilman had instead reversed engineered a game to achieve a particular outcome: Let’s say that outcome was meeting one of his heroes, David Byrne of the Talking Heads. The narrative may have resulted in Bob Cilman meeting David Byrne, true, because Bob Cilman is a determined guy, and he probably could have made that happen. But look at all the other positive things–the tours of Europe, the albums, the DVD, the music videos, the donations, the film at Sundance, the enduring friendships–that never would have transpired if they’d locked into a single outcome. In fact, since it’s almost a certainty that none of the seniors had any personal interest in meeting David Byrne, the game probably would have lost energy and commitment from its players early on.
A theme is the glue of the game. Cilman identified a theme, ‘music as the spirit of youth,’ that has fueled the Young@Heart game for 26 years. When you have identified a compelling theme to underpin your game, communities organize, ideas become action, decisions become easy, crises become manageable. When, in the course of making the documentary, several tragedies befell the group, they never lost their determination to carry on. The spirit of youth is resilient in the face of tragedy.
Commit to the moment. No one is more in the moment than a 93 year old woman performing The Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go?. No one is more aware than a group of seniors belting out James Brown’s I Feel Good that tomorrow is not promised to us. (I feel good now. Tomorrow? Who knows?) What’s promised us is now. The Young@Heart singers are in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Many are feeble. Some are near death. But all of them are as alive as a human being can be when they’re pouring everything they’ve got into a song.
Do what you love. Breakthrough could happen in a day. It might take a lifetime. Bob Cilman and his senior singers were playing this game for a long time before world outside Northampton took notice. There is absolutely no way of knowing. The first quality of a productive game is that you love playing along. Love the process and the product will come.
Bob Cilman has made a difference in people’s lives. His journey has been rewarding and fun. It all came about because he never deviated from the game, or from his reasons for initiating it. In an interview on the web site PopSyndicate, Cilman says, “We’re not there to make people feel good, we’re there to make people work on something that will make other people feel like – Wow! I’ve been inspired by what you do, that’s a whole different process.”
Tags: Bob Cilman, Coldplay, Community, David Byrne, Games, Massachusetts, Music, Narrative, Outcomes, Productive Game, Seniors, Sundance, Talking Heads, The Clash, Themes, Young@Heart
I saw this film a week ago. It’s called “I Feel Good” here. And I agree with Cilman’s quote that you found, about doing something that makes other people feel good…and then letting what happens to you happen. There were some touching moments but to me, the part you share in the YouTube clip is the one that tugged hardest at me…with the convicts and prison personnel visibly connecting to the group. Later, when they pay a musical tribute to Bob Salvini, you can see the emotion in the convicts’ faces. And the words seem to hit home as well. Both the audience and the performers became fully invested in each other at that point. And the film captured it perfectly. Maybe it’s the Catholic in me that makes me think that you only receive the greatest gifts through personal sacrifice…but that’s what seems to happen in that prison scene, right before our eyes.