Thinking back. Looking forward.

Time Keeps The Drummer, photo by Winnie Yeung

This blog post was written as a conversation on WhatsApp between David and Sam. Across the country, and across time zones, as 2025 drew to an end.

David: We’re going to talk about time. But first I wanted to ask you you about place. Where are you and what can you see? And when you think back over this year, what do you remember?

Sam: I’m out walking gently in Hastings where I live. I’m walking down towards the sea. Depleted trees and buildings line the road and the architecture frames the sea so that it appears to rise up like a wall as you approach it.

I remember opening the doors of the theatre in Hong Kong where we were making Time Keeps The Drummer and seeing our pristine white set sat in that huge space for the first time.

David: There were ghosts there. There was light.

I remember scrambling along a dry stream bed sticking small stickers on rocks that we were choosing for the show. Because we wanted something unfathomably ancient on stage alongside those children.

Sam: I remember 12 pairs of black shoes all lined up on squares of white paper with the children’s names on.

David: How has it been? To meet these children, in Hong Kong, in London, in Nottingham.

Sam: Each time is like a slow teasing out of who they really are. You meet them as a company and they build relationships with each other and us. And alongside this unfurling we stand beside them as individuals working out their energies and their joys and the things they are trying not to show.

David: All their energies. All their internal weather. Their speed settings. Their rhythms. Their ways of being in time.

We’re here now sending these messages, as the year ends, approaching that arbitrary break in time where this thing we call 2025 turns over into a new thing called 2026 (there’s a dog asleep next to me as I’m writing this. She’s twitching and dreaming. Away from me somewhere in her own realm of dog time and dream time. Time for her isn’t measured in seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years.).

What else do you remember?

Sam: I remember the dark spaces and the faces in the shadows back stage. I remember the still golden threads of the shimmer monster crouching in the corner waiting for its moment. I remember upturned expectant faces, behind the wall, barely containing their excited shifting bodies

David: Children in time. Real. Time.

It’s been a dark year, hasn’t it? What’s giving you hope?

Sam: Spaces where people are brought together. Community, connection, laughter, protest, joy in the presence of other humans.

David: When Time Keeps The Drummer is in performance, everything is improvised. I guess we’ve developed this new way of directing a show like that; a show in which structure, content, light and music are all improvised, and which is also performed by children. We’ve tried to develop new ways to direct so that we don’t need to fix the show in time. Because we didn’t want to fix those children in time. I watch it from the audience’s point of view and you’re backstage with the performers. I’ve never seen it back there; it’s their realm and yours, not mine. But I imagine it’s a space much like the one you’ve just described: a space of community and connection and laughter and protest and joy.

What’s it like to be there for those 5 hours as the show slowly unfolds?

Sam: it’s exhilarating and exhausting. There’s all these points of static electricity. Between you and me between me and the children between me and the movement director. Through the fuzzy images on the backstage monitor, through the slits in the golden curtain, the divide between onstage and offstage. In the slightly muted responses coming to us from the audience, rising up and over the vast wall of the set. We’re all back there listening and watching and reacting. Trying to stay quiet, trying to stay calm, monitoring the cast in their varying states of flux. Directing them and boosting them as they wait to go onstage, catching them to offer praise as they join the backstage realm again. It feels like 5 hours of experimental baking, stirring and adding and waiting, things growing and fizzing and surprising.

Men & Girls Dance, photo by Matthew Andrews

David: It sounds beautiful and a bit wild.

I love the analogy of “experimental baking”!

When else have you ever felt like that? In all the other projects we’ve done, have you felt those points of static electricity before? What do you remember from deeper back…?

I remember all the times we’ve taken the performers from Men & Girls Dance out for a walk. The force field around them as they walk together in public, “here we are and if you’re looking at us and wondering who we are, we’re here to tell you that we’re here together”.

The power in just being seen together like that.

Sam: At the start of On Ageing when the 7 child performers walk out one by one and present themselves to the audience. Standing and looking out. Here we are. This is us. Are you ready? The straightforwardness of 7 young humans in an exchange with an audience of adults.

In Sheep Pig Goat, in a warehouse in Peckham, when the pig - Marigold I think her name was- was talking with the bass clarinet. She was listening and feeling the vibrations of those deep tones, her incredible expressive mobile snout circling the air before responding. The silence in the room as everyone observing understood her intelligence, and her agency, and in that very moment some of us witnessed the sentience of non human animals, perhaps for the first time.

David: Men & Girls Dance again, at the end of the show, another line of humans in front of an audience, all breathless from dancing and play-fighting, that climax of exhilarating joy that they always manage to find.

I remember sitting in a meeting, and you saying that we’d keep doing Men & Girls Dance until it wasn’t necessary any more.

We’re still keeping going.

It’s Fevered Sleep’s 30th birthday next year. What are you looking forward to?

Sam: I’m looking forward to making more versions of Time Keeps The Drummer, to taking it to new towns and cities, taking it out of the UK again, collaborating with many more children and seeing them bring it to life in their unique ways.

I’m so looking forward to putting in motion our vision for the future: of only (almost only) making work with non professional children and young people. In particular I can’t wait to revisit some of our older projects. The ones which feel even more prescient viewed through the lens of a child.

David: And to finally release our film of We Are Not Finished. It’s taken a long, long time. That’s the power of a title, right there.

Sam! 30 years! 30 YEARS!

And there’s still so much more to discover and so much more to say.

We are not finished.

(I’m in Madrid. The rain has turned the pavements grey and slick but as I look up I see flowering plants spilling over all the balconies, and a single shaft of sunlight breaking through the scudding-grey-cloud sky).

Fevered Sleep17 December 2025featured--our-blog