Time Keeps The Drummer

Fevered Sleep

A photo of a child performer sat in a box with headphones on playing a motion sensor drumkit. There is a red digital clock above them.
Winnie Yeung

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.

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.

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

Cast and Creatives

Performers: Dan Bershadsky, Fionn Farglow,Raiya Foster, Eva Lopes, Moth Mason, Rozalia Mautner, Matthew Moore (drummer), Millicent Naylor, Scott Parsons, Zaia Park, Lila Maria Sood, Woody Waters

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

Design: Bob Price

Music: Mariam Rezaei

Lighting: Hansjörg Schmidt

Tour Movement Director: Nathan Goodman

Original Movement Director: Ashley Jordan

Additional Choreography: Jimmy Adams, Ashley Jordan, Nathan Goodman

Chaperone: Bolaji Adeola-Badejo

Assistant to Chaperone: Emre Gunes

Production Manager: Sam Evans

Technical State Manager: Leigh Arthur

Stage Manager: Agatha Giannini

Lighting Programmer: Iris Farquharson

Costume Dyeing: Daisy Claisse

Costume Assistant: Juno Robinson Butler

Scenic Artists: Alice Friend, Noah Harvey

Marketing Consultant: Will Baldwin-Pask

PR: Storytelling PR

Graphic Design: Aimee Capstick


A Fevered Sleep Production.

Commissioned & Co-Produced by WestK.

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

Thanks to Yorkshire Dance and ArtsDepot for supporting R&D.

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.

  • A photo of a cohort of child performers dancing on stage with an adult drummer sat in the background with a motion sensor drumkit and headphones. There is also a projection of a panda in the background.
  • A photo of two child performers dressed as ghosts on a stage, wearing white sheets. A record player and stage smoke surrounds them.
  • A photo of a cohort of child performers dancing on stage with an adult drummer sat in the background with a motion sensor drumkit and headphones
  • A photo of the backs of audience members, with headphones on, watching child performers on stage.
  • A photo of a child performer with eyes closed and hands outstretched in front of them.
  • A photo of a stage with child performers across it, with a screen, props and light installations on stage with them

Trailer