The COVID carnival: Coping and recovering from the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic

Masamba Samba School is an Irish community music collective, working with disadvantaged communities through percussion and dance. This report looks at how an Irish community music project, Masamba Samba School, reacted to the demands of COVID-19 across a number of arenas ‐ rehearsal, performance, teaching and research. By casting the virus as an uninvited stakeholder in our projects, we began to investigate what the ‘needs’ of the virus were, and whether we could accommodate them and still deliver meaningful work with our clients. Masamba Samba School’s story is somewhat unique in that it continued to operate throughout the lockdowns, first by concentrating on online and offline activities, and then by slowly moving back into the ‘in-person’ teaching space. This article begins with a brief description of how our projects operated pre-COVID-19 and then describes the immediate response to the pandemic (largely a shut-down), recounting how COVID-19 affected school operations in different ways, detailing the practical steps Masamba Samba School took to resume the teaching and research arms of its work and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these strategies. The final section speculates about the future for the organization and whether Masamba Samba School can return to the way it was.