Drum Up brings participatory percussion to Rainforest World Music Festival 2026

Drum Up brought participatory percussion to the Rainforest World Music Festival 2026 with an interview and performance showcase at the festival media center in Casuarina Hall at Damai Beach Resort, then landed in the main concert program at 6:55 PM on Day 1 in the Drum Call slot. For a festival built around global performers, local traditions, and immersive cultural programming, the Philippines-based ensemble offered something a standard set cannot: a chance for the audience to become part of the rhythm instead of just watching it.

Led by Neil Cervantes, Drum Up has built its identity around drum-circle energy, where the boundary between stage and crowd gets deliberately blurred. The group’s online materials place it in Tagum City, Philippines, and describe the project as one initiated by Cervantes to promote the healing effect of drumming. That framing fit neatly with the festival’s 29th edition, which ran June 26-28, 2026 at the Sarawak Cultural Village near Mount Santubong in Kuching, Sarawak, under the theme Regenerations: Roots & Rhythms.

The appeal of Drum Up at Rainforest World Music Festival was not just musical polish. The ensemble’s pitch is participation, and that matters in a setting where percussion can move from performance to shared experience in a single cue. The group’s approach blends indigenous percussion traditions with global rhythms and contemporary ideas, giving it a bridge function that goes beyond entertainment. In practice, that means no two appearances land exactly the same way, because audience energy helps shape the result in real time.

That participatory angle also helped explain why Drum Up belonged on a lineup that stretched far beyond a single concert block. The festival’s March 13 press release said the 2026 edition featured more than 200 performers from 12 countries and more than 50 workshops, cultural demonstrations, and intimate mini sessions. Early Bird ticketing reflected the scale of the event, with adult one-day passes listed at RM235 and three-day passes at RM635 during the March 13 to March 31 sales window.

Drum Up’s spot in both the media-center showcase and the Day 1 concert program made the ensemble more than a side attraction. In a festival built to regenerate roots and rhythms, it gave Rainforest World Music Festival a very specific kind of pulse: collective, hands-on, and impossible to separate from the people standing in front of the drums.