Resistance is a competitive nonprofit youth music organization. It’s similar to marching band, but indoors and only uses percussion and dance.
In the Catoosa High School gym, Resistance’s home base, staff members call out directions from the bleachers on how to look and sound clean and effective. More staff members deliver individualized instructions on the gym floor, covered with a screen-printed tarp, regarding technique and sound design.
Later that week, the group would travel to Dayton, Ohio, to the Winterguard International Percussion World Championships. Their show is called The Survivor Tree, after the American Elm that withstood the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Matt Barnes is Resistance’s executive director. For full disclosure, Barnes is married to the reporter of this story, and she used to volunteer with Resistance several years ago.
He said last year, Resistance had the idea of building the show around the 30th anniversary of the bombing. The group visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.
“A consultant that we were talking to at the time said, ‘You know, I’ve always been interested in telling the story through the lens of the Survivor Tree.’” Barnes said. “That really set us off on the journey of telling the story through the tree.”
Barnes said though Resistance’s members weren’t born when the bombing occurred, focusing on the universal themes the Survivor Tree represents made the tragedy salient to them.
“Even if you weren’t alive whenever the bombing happened, it’s easy to grasp the concept of a young, fledgling tree, the tragedy, hardship, and the resilience and perseverance that it takes to overcome something like that,” Barnes said.
Resistance members said those themes resonate. Nineteen-year-old marimba and guitar player Brayden Colvin said he hoped he could bring “a part of our culture” in Oklahoma to a national audience and reach people across the country who have experienced working through struggle.
“You can go through life and have something horrible happen to you, and then it’s like, ‘Well, life still goes on.’ You can either let that affect you, or you can grow past it. That’s really what a lot of this show means to me,” Colvin said. “You have to find a way to keep going.”
Thomas Hamilton, a 22-year-old bass drum player, said his performance is fueled by emulating the emotions of those affected by the bombing.
“[I’m] just trying to see or feel what those victims went through and trying to channel that through my performance,” Hamilton said. “That has helped me feel empathy; it’s helped a lot.”
Austin Butler plays drum set in the front ensemble. He’s 22, meaning it’s the last year he can march.
“To be honest, it felt like the perfect end-of-career moment,” Butler said. “It’s what I’ve been waiting on for the last three years of marching here. It’s a really meaningful show that isn’t just meaningful to me, but to my community too.”
Butler said the show’s themes are more universal than a single event, and that’s why members have found a way to relate to it.
“We all have some traumatic event that we’ve been through, some experience we’ve had where we felt like we may not come back from this, and now we’re here,” Butler said. “We’ve rebuilt, we’ve grown and become something better. So that’s kind of what the show represents to me, personally, is the regrowth.”
Before the final run-through of the show, Resistance members gather in a circle for one last rallying call before embarking on their trip to Ohio. One member shouts, “Resistance!” The others respond, at the top of their lungs, “R-I-P!”
The show begins with the front ensemble lightly tinkling individual sets of wind chimes behind their keyboards, lending to an ethereal, shimmering sound. The members stand, one by one, and begin a cascade of triplets on marimbas.
“It starts as a seed,” a voiceover says through the sound system. “A chance to become something so much greater. But growth is forced from struggle.”
A black tarp covers the floor. As the show progresses, members gradually peel back panels to eventually reveal a vibrant green design. At the back of the floor, there’s a small, black tree, representing the Survivor Tree immediately after the bomb. At the front stands a larger, green tree.
Members remove their jackets and hang them over the small black tree at the back of the floor. The music builds to a chaotic, cacophonous climax.
“Each storm, each moment of doubt, shapes our roots of growth,” the voiceover says.
By the final movement, members are marching rapidly across the floor with sticks and mallets and high and intense facial expressions. As the last note reverberates across the gym, the members stare resolutely into the audience, panting and sweating.
Barnes said though the group has competed with the show in Arkansas and Texas and would compete in Ohio, there is one intended audience.
“I think this story and this show is for us,” Barnes said. “It’s for the people of Oklahoma.”
He said the show provides an opportunity for an intergenerational conversation.
“I guess it’s beautiful, in a way, about a 30-year anniversary. There were people that were fully functioning adults — they had families, they had children, they had lives. There are people like me who were young whenever this happened. And then, the group of members that we’re teaching here and working with were not even born. You have this convergence of three different timelines,” Barnes said.
“And the beauty of an anniversary is that you can bring all these people together.”
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