The Singing Drum

the long version

The Singing Drum tells the story of an object, an object of meaning and power. The object, in this beautifully sensitive story of dispossession, is a drum - a drum made for ceremonial use by the artist-shamans of an Indigenous American community. Many such communities fragmented during colonisation and pillage of North America and sublimely resonant in Scott-Mitchell's telling. The drum is the unseen protagonist of the tale, everseeking to guide humans as they wander, mostly unconscious, in contemporary capitalist American society towards a penultimate moment - uncovering the truth of the drum's purpose, and the fate of its makers.