Global Percussion & Dance in Nottingham - Building creative and cultural communities

Bringing a community project to a close is never an easy job. New connections and friendships always form and participants thoroughly enjoy learning new creative skills and delving into exciting and rich music and dance cultures from all over the world. Our projects are designed with not only high quality participatory arts activities at their core, but also key built-in factors to support communities with increasing feelings of loneliness, isolation, depression and anxiety; particularly during the Corona virus pandemic. It was also fantastic to welcome children and families into our workshops.

(See gallery and video links below to view images and clips of our workshops and events)

Our project, Drum and Dance - Cultural Communities in Nottingham, has been one of our most enjoyable and engaging projects to see unfold and engage with new communities. Our partner organisations in the project have been highly supportive in helping us to achieve and surpass our desired outcomes. We’ve enjoyed rich programmes of percussion and dance workshops for children and adults, and of course, in true BeatFeet style, we’ve enjoyed some of our most wonderful performances!

Our Middle Eastern Percussion Module, which took place between January and March 2022, was delivered on Zoom. This allowed us to assemble a core group of 25 drummers from across the UK and also internationally. We finalised our learning with an in-person workshop mid-March, which concluded our whole project.

It’s thanks to our world class teachers and fantastic students that we’ve been able to embed so much cultural teaching, learning, sharing and passion into our project.

Feedback and input from our students guided the development and delivery of this project, and our next community-based global percussion and dance project will build on the positive legacy of achievements and celebrations. We hope to add more genres of global percussion and dance to our next community programme, with even more opportunities to deepen knowledge and understanding of the traditional and popular music and dance from many cultures. We’ll look forward to more celebration events, where participants can showcase their new skills. A festival of global music and dance would be ideal for this…watch this space!

Thanks to all teachers for sharing their knowledge, skills, culture and passion with our groups of students:

Middle Eastern Percussion - Asif Qureshi

Middle Eastern Dance - Tatiana Woolley

Dhol Percussion - Nachda Sansaar & Hit the Dhol

Bhangra Dance - Vijay mehay & Nachda Sansaar

West African Dance - Jokeh Sillah

West African Percussion - Iya Sako & Jude Winwood (BeatFeet)

Thanks to our partners (Click on each link below to visit their websites):

Nottingham Music Hub

Nottingham Playhouse

Brazilian Cultural Centre

The Vine Community Centre

Nottingham City Council

Hindu Temple Nottingham

Djanogly City Academy

Bilborough College

Judith Winwood