	Contact Abantu Arts

What do our workshops entail?

Africa has much to offer the world. The music, the dance, and the art of Africa are all full of vibrant and time-tested wisdom.
Abantu African Drum school focuses on the study of African Music and other unique art forms. Classes and workshops are offered in African Drumming and percussion or a regular basis. These classes reveal the beauty, depth and diversity of the cultures of Africa.

This 'school without permanent walls' travels to the town where you are in Devon, Cornwall, Somerste and all over UK.
Our curriculum-linked African arts workshops are intended NOT to create any more work for busy teachers.We aims to provide teachers with resources for all aspects of the global dimension in education.
Our workshops can be run in the classroom and require little prior organisation. Abantu Arts bring all the resources and materials we need.

Our African Culture workshops are wide-ranging and could involve drumming, mask making, performance, dancing, singing, geography, social studies, and multicultural arts. You can hire our team for the whole set of workshops or choose a tailored package to suit your needs.

African Arts Focus Events

This package combines four different art forms and activities in a one day or one week event. What do our workshops entail?

Please click here for more details

African Drum Workshops

We bring authentic African drums and percussion instruments to your school or group and lead students through a memorable experience of music, community, and the discovery that everyone has a rhythm to share. Emphasis is placed on learning how to play together through listening, cooperation, respecting, and working together as a team. We teach about the origins of the different instruments and how they are played in different parts of the world.

All drum workshops are custom-tailored to be age appropriate. We are equipped to work with pre-school all the way to university level. Workshops can be held as a one-off or as a series and generally last 45-60 minutes per session. Please click here for more details. What do our workshops entail?

We also run instrument making workshops from recycled material that can be played alongside the authentic African drums we bring.

African Dance Workshops

Our dance workshops are high-energy and fun for everyone. We use African drum music normally played to provide the rhythms for the dance, with the secret drum language prompting the dancers to follow the routines and steps from the beginning to the end.

In Africa, percussion and dance accompany all celebrations, festivals and events like rituals and rites of passage, such as coming of age, birth, courtship, marriage and death. The dance moves passed on from generation to generation are designed to reflect movements made during the act or events listed, and are still carried out today in African villages, towns and cities. Our dance workshopsare authentic and mirror the real thing in every way.

African Food and Cooking

Let Abantu Arts enable you to enjoy East Africa's culinary arts and its culture through hands-on experience in the kitchen. You will learn about herbs and spices as well as their substitutes should you not have the correct ingredients at home. Cooking styles and dishes will be demonstrated by an authentic African cookery expert and then recreated by you.

Mask Making Workshops

Masks and drums have always gone together in most African cultures, and mask making in Africa is a visual complement to the music. In addition to completing hands-on art projects, participants learn about the ways that masks have been used by different cultures in different time periods of Africa. These workshops require a minimum of 1 hour for simple mask making, and 2-10 hours for more complex designs.

African Storytelling Workshops

Storytelling has been a traditional means of communicating morals and histories for centuries within the majority of cultures all over Africa. Ancient writing traditions do exist on the African continent, but most Africans today, as in the past, are primarily oral peoples, and their art forms are oral rather than literary. The oral arts and stories of Africa are rich and varied, developing with the beginnings of African cultures, and they remain living traditions that continue to evolve and flourish today.

The story explains a cause, origin, or reason for something, and gives an 'etiological explanation' at the end. We will bring this most traditional art form to your classroom or group. We use instruments and various objects in our story telling sessions to make stories memorable for children. We give older students and teachers the opportunity to take part in role plays for the chance to act out aspects of the stories told. Smaller children can draw stories and learn songs too. Please click here to see examples of traditional African stories.

African Textiles and Cloth

We also offer African Tie and Dye and African Batik workshops. We look at a selection of African textiles before detailed instructions are given on how to produce your own piece of fabric, either based on a traditional or more modern individual design.

African Crafts and Toy Making

Hand-made crafts are an integral part of African culture, and incorporates decorative elements such as bead work, jewelery and clothing, artifacts used in ceremonies and rituals, as well as practical items like clay pots, sleeping mats and wooden head-rests which date back centuries. Using recycled material wherever available we will show participants how to make their own simple crafts and toys.

Bead and jewelery making work is one of the most impressive art traditions in Africa. Artists and jewelers carefully consider the materials, colours, textures, shapes, and sizes of the beads to choose those that compliment or contrast with one another. Jewelery is designed to create as much visual impact as possible. We bring our wide collection from different parts of Africa for study before participants begin to produce their own jewelery using materials provided by us.

After School Clubs

We can run after school or weekend projects and clubs for you in any of our listed African art forms. These after school projects can be an exciting enhancement of your music curriculum, frequently ending in performances. By working with pupil groups outside formal school hours, we can develop a relaxed working What do our workshops entail?

relationship with pupils, teachers and even parents, fostering collective learning and participation for all.

Special Teacher's Workshops

Abantu Arts can provide INSET Teacher training for both trainee teachers and qualified staff in African music and arts projects to enhance professional skills development, with a view for the teachers to go and use the knowledge acquired in their own classrooms.

Please visit our up to date costs and charges for our African workshops.

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