A Journey Through Time: Into the World of the Drum

A Journey Through Time: Into the World of the Drum｜NCPA Art Salon · Art Enlightenment

21 July 2023｜NCPA, Beijing

The first music of humankind may have been nothing more than a stone being struck. Co-presented by the National Centre for the Performing Arts and Yaoshi Culture · Cha Productions as part of the "World Inside the Drum" series, this salon took children aged three and above, with their families, back along the path of human musical civilisation. We began by inventing music in a primitive world, searched for instruments across ancient cultures, and traced the history of percussion in a masterclass. Finally, each family built its own instruments from sand, stones and shells. Together they became the "Sand, Stone & Shell Orchestra" and gave a real performance inside the theatre.

I led the most hands-on stop of the journey. First, I showed how the most ordinary things could become instruments: shells strung together become a wind chime that sings when the air moves, and nutshells threaded on a cord become a bracelet that keeps rhythm with every shake of the wrist. Then the children and their parents made their own. The grown-ups pierced and threaded, the children chose shells, matched colours and tested each sound, and every table became a small workshop. No two families made the same chime or bracelet, and each one belonged only to them.

That day, Beijing was under a rainstorm warning, yet every family came. At sign-in, each child drew a self-portrait, a small stamp in the passport for the journey ahead. By the end, dozens of children stood in a row, holding up the shell wind chimes they had just made, nutshell bracelets rustling on their wrists. I thought then that art enlightenment is perhaps not about telling children what art is, but about placing a shell in their hands and letting them discover that they could always make sound of their own.