About Time Keeps The Drummer

All you have to do is hang out with a three-year-old to have a different way of thinking about time.
Jenny Odell – Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

This is special… Fevered Sleep’s new production lets young people speak their minds… Young people’s hopes and fears for the future are expressed in a raw, compelling performance
The Stage, about We Are Not Finished at The Place, 2021

EARLY BIRD OFFER: limited tickets available – book now to save!

Time Keeps The Drummer is a durational show for family and adult audiences, performed by 10 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 – full of wild abandon and limitless possibility.

This brand new show was commissioned by WestK inHong Kong, premiering there in April 2025, and is now embarking on a UK tour. For each show, a new cast of children is recruited from the local area, making each 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. At moments, it feels like a theatrical show; at others, it’s a dynamic 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. The ceaseless beat of the drums, heard exclusively through headphones, represents the relentless passage 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.

Audiences must book an entry time so that they'll get priority entry to the space if it's at capacity. Because there may be queues at various points, the entry times are there to ensure you get the best experience possible, rather than restrict you to a specific time. You're welcome to come and go as you please throughout the piece.

Cast and Creatives

Direction, choreography, design, sound design: Sam Butler & David Harradine

Music: Mariam Rezaei

Original movement direction: Ashley Jordan

Design: Bob Price

Lighting: Hansjörg Schmidt

Production management: Sam Evans

A Fevered Sleep Production.

Commissioned & Co-Produced by WestK.

Co-commissioned and presented by The Place, ArtsDepot, FABRIC, Cambridge Junction.

Thanks to: Yorkshire Dance and ArtsDepot for supporting R&D & Origination of work.

About Fevered Sleep

Established in London, UK in 1996 by artistic directors Samantha Butler and David Harradine, Fevered Sleep makes experimental work in theatre and dance, film, installation, print and digital art.

All our projects are made through processes of collaboration, participation and co-creation. We’ve worked with performers, designers, artists, scientists, doctors, teachers, vets, philosophers, social workers, all sorts of other adults and many, many children. We see our creative process as a kind of research: a way to investigate and reimagine the complex and extremely challenging world in which we live. We're committed to social and environmental justice, to radical politics, to the rights of the non-human, to advocacy and to change.

Our work draws attention to the marginalised, the unseen and the overlooked, by inventing new kinds of spaces that bring people together to share their experiences of things that matter. We’re trying to make the world a more caring, curious, compassionate place, one unlikely art project at a time.