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By Michael kolawole
Oluwafemi Akinseye Oke has a penchant for curating festivals that merge his Yoruba culture with other countries. His recently curated African drumming and storytelling performance at Sheffield Chinese Lunar New Year, shared via his Instagram page, offers a compelling blend of African music, dance, and cultural storytelling. What unfolds on stage is an intentional coming together of sound, memory, and history.
From the opening sequence, the tone is clear: this is a space held with care. The lighting is gentle, the staging is uncluttered, and the performers enter without fanfare.
There’s a rhythm to the whole setup. Not just in the music, but in the pauses, in the flow of speech, in the way the audience participates in the performance. Oke’s years of experience in event production come through in the details: nothing feels accidental, nothing overstated.
What’s especially striking is how Oke treats performance as a dialogue between the performers and the audience, between the past and the present, between Sheffield and West Africa. His background in shaping platforms for emerging talent is reflected here: each performer is given space to breathe and be heard, yet the production moves with a shared pulse. Whether through the drumming patterns or the spoken interludes, there’s a steady emphasis on collective experience.
The trust between Oke and his audience is visible. “We are all performing together tonight,” says the lead drummer, Ajide Adeyemi, instructing the audience to clap their hands to the rhythm of the drums. The audiences do as instructed, gleefully clapping and smiling during the performance. The environment has been designed to feel open and respectful. His commitment to “safe, joyful spaces” is embedded in the atmosphere.
You can tell that Oke doesn’t see African music and dance as something to be exhibited behind glass or confined to traditional instruments and motifs. Instead, he presents it as something living, complex, shifting, and full of contemporary relevance. In one section of the performance, sporting a dashiki and white trainers, Bola Akanbi, the Sakara drummer, switches between drumming to dancing the Bata dance. His drumming and improvised dancing are supported by a tight band and a responsive audience. It’s this blend of traditional forms alongside fresh interpretations that gives the event its drive.
This performance, which isn’t star-driven but culture-driven, serves as a statement of intent for Sound Café UK, the live African music platform Oke launched in April 2024.
First introduced as a pop-up event and later scaled into a full production, Sound Café was created to spotlight artists, both new and seasoned, and to build connections across communities through curated showcases. The performance on Instagram feels like a live draft of that mission: fluid, unpolished in the best way, and full of energy drawn from community interaction.
This is also where Oke’s broader curatorial work becomes important. His involvement in large-scale cultural events like Sheffield’s Chinese Lunar New Year Celebration and smaller gatherings like Welcoming Cultures or An Evening of Worship with Adedoyin Oseni shows a consistent pattern: he brings different communities into focus without reducing them to stereotypes. That same approach is present here. The performance doesn’t explain itself, doesn’t slow down to educate. Rather, it shows, invites, and moves forward.
In terms of execution, the performance is tight without being rigid. Transitions between acts are smooth, sound levels are well-managed, and the pacing is just right. There’s room for improvisation, but nothing drags. That balance speaks to Oke’s deep logistical understanding, not only of the stage but of people: how they listen, how they respond, how they gather.
What really gives the performance its importance, however, is its cultural clarity. Even though the event takes place in Sheffield, it never feels like it’s adjusting itself to fit into a Western audience’s frame of reference. The music, dance, and aesthetic choices remain essentially African but never in a nostalgic way.
The performance also pushes against the idea that cultural programming has to be grand to be meaningful. There are no elaborate props, no over-produced sound arrangement. Instead, it is the focus on audience interactions: their clapping, their voices, their movements, their expressions. It feels like a performance that could travel, not because it’s built for export, but because it speaks clearly to anyone willing to listen.
In many ways, this performance is not a conclusion but a beginning. It’s the first chapter in a longer public experiment about how African diasporic identity can be expressed through live music and theatre in the UK. Sound Café, still in its early months, seems poised to become a vital part of Sheffield’s cultural scene. And perhaps beyond.
