Time Keeps The Drummer

Information for Promoters

‘This again proves Fevered Sleep are one of the most exciting companies working in the UK. Truly

exquisite work - socially engaged, beautifully crafted, radical, articulate, intelligent.’

Time Keeps The Drummer is a 5-hour durational performance for family and adult audiences, performed by 12 children and a single adult percussionist. It explores time from children’s point of view: time as play, time as experimentation, time as repetition. It invites everyone in the audience - children and adults alike - to slow down, to linger, and to rest, engaging with the show on their own terms. Audience members are free to come and go as they please throughout the duration of the piece.

Through improvised movement, text, projection, music and lighting, each performance unfolds as an unrepeatable experience, directed live and shaped in real-time. Sometimes it looks like a show, sometimes it’s more like a live gallery installation. The percussionist plays a motion capture drum kit through the entire performance, improvising the ceaseless beat of clock time. Audience members can choose to wear headphones and listen to these invisible drums, or to remove them and experience the world created by the young performers - the world of children’s time, free of the ticking clock.

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. Like all our work, the show is a protest: a protest against the intolerable time pressure that capitalism places on everyone; telling us that in order to be good we have to be productive and efficient and quick. Against this, we’ve created 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.

Time Keeps The Drummer was commissioned by WestK in Hong Kong, premiering there as part of the Funfest festival in 2025. Since then it’s been recreated with The Place (London, UK), nottdance festival (Nottingham, UK) and Brighton Festival (UK). For each iteration, we work with 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.

We’re currently planning further UK and international iterations, and we’re looking for bold and visionary partners who’d like to work with us to make new versions of the show.

Show Information

Venue type: Technically equipped theatre space

Running time: 5hrs

Audience age guidance: 7+

Cast Size:13 (12 local children + 1 adult percussionist)

Fevered Sleep project team on tour: 8 (2 artistic directors, movement director, production manager, stage manager, lighting programmer, percussionist, producer)

Local project team: 4 (2 chaperones, workshop facilitator, backstage assistant)

Themes: Time, rest, duration, childhood, capitalism, play

Time Keeps The Drummer is a two-week residency in which Fevered Sleep recreates the show with a cast of 12 locally recruited children.

Full details on the recruitment and rehearsal process; technical specifications for the performance space and production requirements; and a full cost breakdown for host partners can be found via the links below.

Creative Team

Direction, choreography, design, costume, film: Sam Butler & David Harradine

Movement Director: Nathan Goodman

Design: Bob Price

Music: Mariam Rezaei

Lighting: Hansjörg Schmidt