Two children dressed as ghosts in a cloud of smoke in front of a white wall covered with sheets of paper with handwritten letters
Image credit: Winnie Yeung

Theatre, Dance, Music & Visual Art collide: Time Keeps the Drummer at Brighton Festival

Family, Theatre

You’re invited to slow down and linger as you enter a world where theatre, dance, music and visual art collide for a performance unlike anything you've seen before, in the bold and ambitious Time Keeps the Drummer (8-10 May).

Created by award-winning performance company Fevered Sleep, the show explores time from the perspectives of children, animals and the planet: sometimes deeply philosophical, sometimes lost in the anarchy of play.

Sam Butler & David Harradine, Co-Artistic Directors, say:

“Time Keeps The Drummer was developed through a slow process of research and development focused on children’s experience of time, in particular how children inhabit time before adults teach them how to understand the clock.”

Read on to find out more about this unique show…

Watch the trailer for Time Keeps the Drummer

A young girl reaches her arm up to the ceiling. A man is sat in the wall behind her in a fluorescent frame playing a drum

Set the headphones aside to enter the world of children's time. Brighton Dome’s atmospheric Corn Exchange will become a space of wild abandon and limitless possibility: fluid, joyful and chaotic. Interweaving mesmerising choreography, stunning live lighting and bold new music, Time Keeps the Drummer invites you to step off the treadmill of work, school and life, and to slow down, rest and take time out instead. 

Sam & David say:

“Like all our work, the show is a protest: against intolerable time pressure telling us that in order to be good, we have to be productive and efficient and quick. We invite audiences to enter the world of children’s time: a world that insists on the value of playing more, doing less, taking time, and resting well. The show is a celebration of children’s embodied wisdom, and a reminder that we’d all be happier and healthier if we took more time to do what we want, when we want, for as long as we want.”

The camera points from the side of the audience, showing everyone wearing headphones that are lit up blue. The audience look towards the stage intently

Time Keeps the Drummer  features a cast of 12 non-professional children local to Brighton and a single adult percussionist. Each performance is completely improvised. The percussionist plays a motion-capture drum kit to create a continuous beat of clock time, which you can hear through headphones.

A group of children stand on stage. One of them wears fake glasses and is being projected live onto a screen also on the stage. Two of them are dressed as ghosts with sheets over their heads, and another is about to climb a ladder. They are all having fun.

Mesmerising and meditative, Time Keeps the Drummer is for the curious child, for families seeking out unusual things to do together, for people who love experimental contemporary performance. For anyone who just needs to slow down for a while. Each performance unfolds over 5 hours, and you can come and go throughout the performance, engaging on your own terms. 

A young girl sits in darkness lit by a fluorescent frame playing a motion capture drum with a digital countdown above her

Slow down, rest, step outside of time. Book now for Time Keeps the Drummer.

Image credits: Winnie Yeung, Sam Tariq, Benedict Johnson