Band encourages children to use their imagination

The Imagination Movers’ band lineup is rock solid, but there’s always room for another drummer. Or several hundred.

Families who head to the nTelos Wireless Pavilion for Saturday afternoon’s “In a Big Warehouse” national tour concert may head home wanting to create music and other fun for themselves. If that happens, expect the Movers to be going home feeling pretty happy as well.

“It’s such an opportunity to look at a plain paint bucket and flip it over and play it as a drum,” Scott Durbin said. “There are no bad ideas when you’re brainstorming.”

Durbin, better known to Imagination Movers fans as Mover Scott, wants kids to learn. But it’s even more important to him that they learn how to learn by nurturing the thinking skills that can guide them for the rest of their lives.

“I had taught for ten years, and in my teaching career, there was this gradual decline in the creativity of the kids,” said Durbin.

He taught fourth, fifth and sixth grades in a Louisiana parish that decided to maximize instruction time by eliminating recess — “that teaching time of recess and the kids having to entertain themselves. To encourage that creative thought, that analytical thought, to help solve problems outside the classroom.”

Durbin realized that his students were growing up in a heavily literal cultural environment in which “everything has such an emphasis on the visual,” he said. And missing the chance to indulge in imaginative play early in life could take a toll on their creative thinking skills later, he said.

His example: a humble stick. Picked up in a park or back yard during a child’s free time, it can become a magic wand, a drumstick or a conductor’s baton.

“It could be anything,” Durbin said. “But today, kids go outside, and it’s — a stick. You could see the pangs of that loss in the kids I taught.”

So, in 2003, Durbin decided to try to counteract the troubling trends he saw by creating a live-action program for a New Orleans public television station. He envisioned a show that would encourage children to use their own imaginations, “allowing for experience and creating experience instead of watching everything,” he said.

He also saw a need during his teaching years for more positive male role models, so he turned to some longtime friends — Rich Collins, a journalist; Dave Poche, an architect; and Scott “Smitty” Smith, a firefighter.

“I went to high school with Smitty,” Durbin said. “We all knew each other.”

The four friends, three of whom are fathers now, also lamented the lack of live people in the animation-filled children’s programming they’d seen. The television show idea took root during the evenings after the musicians tucked in their own kids and teamed up to trade ideas for songs.

All four rockers are fans of the 1980s Scottish band Big Country, so if seeing the Movers’ “In a Big Warehouse” CD title brought to mind the skirling guitars of “In a Big Country” off the megahit “The Crossing” album, you’ve noticed a sentimental reference.

“It’s one of the threads that kind of united us,” Durbin said of the music. “We were all huge Big Country fans. I think each of us has a vinyl [record] of ‘The Crossing’ on his wall at home.

“It supersedes this whole project. We were friends before, and we’ll be friends after.”

Parents who grew up listening to the Beastie Boys and Madness might be pleasantly surprised to hear the Movers’ punk, new wave and funk creations. And the men’s longtime friendships give the Imagination Movers more street cred with kids, who can be quick to spot fakes.

“There’s a sincerity. They know we’re for real,” Durbin said.

Viewers liked what they saw in the band’s early music video projects, and the Movers soon picked up a following.

Soon after, Disney came calling. The Movers recorded a CD, “Juice Box Heroes,” for Disney, and they started working on a half-hour program for the Playhouse Disney preschool programming block in 2006. The Movers picked up a Daytime Emmy Award in 2009 for best original song in the children’s show/animation category.

Success hasn’t jaded the Movers — and Hurricane Katrina didn’t wash their dreams away. After the 2005 disaster ravaged their hometown, their friendships grew stronger as they tried to put their flooded homes back together and Smith logged long, exhausting days as a first responder.

Of the friends’ initial quest to get the Movers their own show, Durbin said, “there was an integrity that transcended television. We were tenacious. We really believed in it.”

And the lesson he’d like to see kids take away from the Movers’ own experiences?

“You don’t have to look at your surroundings and see a perimeter you can’t walk past,” Durbin said. “I can think big. I can reach high.”

Durbin took that message to heart himself.

“Everybody asks: Would I go back to teaching?” Durbin said. “I think of it as my classroom’s a little bigger now.”