Garifuna Drums & Dance

The drum is the center of Garifuna music. Without it, people here will tell you, there is no music at all. On this two-hour workshop you don’t watch someone else play it, you learn it yourself, sat behind a real Garifuna drum with a local teacher showing you how the rhythm is built.

You’ll meet the two drums that carry the sound: the primero, the smaller high-pitched drum that leads and accents the dancer, and the segunda, the deep bass drum that holds the beat steady underneath. Both are carved from a single hardwood trunk and headed with animal skin, the same way they’ve been made for generations. Once the rhythm is in your hands, you learn the movement that answers it, the hips-and-feet steps of punta and the swaying circle of hunguhungu.

This is the fuller counterpart to the Cultural Walk. Where the walk introduces Livingston, this one puts an instrument in your hands. Book both together as Garifuna Por Un Día and you get the history walk and this workshop in one half-day.