Click the Workshops or Performances links for Ayo's current programme.

Percussive Orchestration

Ayo describes his drumming classes thus: "It's percussive orchestration. We're talking about rhythm, intercommunication, call and response, questions and answers. We're talking about a formula, a model that's traditional and which is also evolving. Some of the African music is hundreds of years old and some of it has been developing over the last 40 years or so. In my performance I am able to touch the length and breadth of my culture. I was lucky because I was able to learn about so much of it at home, it was coming out of every orifice." (Extracted from Kindred Spirit magazine article, Spring 2000.)

Integration

Where there is also dancing in the workshop the dance will usually be accompanied by some of the drum rhythms that will have been learned earlier in the workshop, so that we can dance and drum together. The dancing is alive and sensual and, although it has structure, it is also freeing. We can connect with our own internal rhythms and bring them into the dance, and sometimes chanting will be involved. This way the dancing and the drumming, the voice, the whole body, the mind and the spirit are integrated into the rhythm.

Click the Workshops or Performances links for Ayo's current programme.