Time Keeps The Drummer

2023 - Present

This 5-hour performance invites you to experience time on your own terms. It’s a show that evolves throughout the day, offering an opportunity to slow down, to linger, and to rest.

Photos by Winnie Yeung, Visual Voices.
Time Keeps The Drummer, Hong Kong 2025.

Time Keeps The Drummer is a durational show for family and adult audiences, performed by 10-12 children and a single adult percussionist. It playfully invites you to slow down and experience time differently. To step into a space where time is fluid, joyful and chaotic. A space of wild abandon and limitless possibility.

This brand new show was commissioned by WestK in Hong Kong, premiering there in April 2025, and is now embarking on a UK tour. For each show, we recruit a new cast of children from the local area, who work with us to make a performance different from the last and unique to each venue.

Through improvised movement, text, projection, music and lighting, each performance unfolds as an unrepeatable experience, directed live and shaped in real-time. It sometimes looks like a show, sometimes it’s more like a live gallery installation.

Alongside soaring, evocative music by award-winning turntablist Mariam Rezaei, a single adult drummer plays a motion capture drum kit through the entire performance, improvising percussion in the air. Experienced only through the headphones provided, the drums are the ceaseless beat of clock time.

This 5-hour performance invites you to experience time on your own terms. It’s a show that evolves throughout the day, offering an opportunity to slow down, to linger, and to rest. Audiences are free to come and go as they please throughout the duration of the piece.