Rhythm Alliances is an exercise of attunement to the varied dispositions of rhythm—energizing, contrasting, haunting, recurring, turbulent, and imagined. Far more than a static exhibition, it is a celebration of energies and experimental forms. Since experiencing rhythm-making is also an invitation for time-travel, the acts in this edition assemble a communal score of creation, resistance, and alliance-building. Involving over 50 artists and collectives, musicians, choreographers, filmmakers and cultural organizers, the festival programme will continue its pluriversal journey across freely accessible venues in Colombo.

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The ninth edition of Colomboscope draws on a range of vocabularies embodying rhythms of remembrance, dissent, and renewal. From the noise of a global order where hyperconsumption and war are rife, how may sonic counter-currents transmit the ingredients of struggles today, make paradoxical realities audible, echo in the lifeways of migrant belonging, and resonate shared dreaming? Across live experiences and exhibited works we will also explore the role of listening in producing relationships of reciprocity and engage with the ways in which acoustic leakages and vocal atmospheres compose new public territories that refute borderlines, data harvesting, and oppressive systems.

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The visual identity for Rhythm Alliances developed by FOLD Media Collective centres on a radiating waveform motif, evoking the pulse of a drumbeat, the ripples of vibration, and the cyclical breath of oral tradition. Its dynamic, undulating form visually echoes the festival’s approach toward rhythm as a force of connection, memory, and resistance. The graphic design distils rhythm into form—a minimal yet potent signal of energy, collectivity, and sonic transmission.

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Inviting the frequencies and percussive knowledge from ritualistic drumming in Sri Lanka, Nyabinghi ‘groundations’ in Rastafari tradition to broader Asian cosmologies and Pan-African notions of world-making through vibrations upon the drum head. Drumming signals rupture, freedom and release; cosmic dramas of birth, clash and decline. The drum as a powerful communication tool was forbidden on the plantation, as Amiri Baraka reminds us when recounting histories of Black music. In multiple regions of Sri Lanka, healing rites, ceremonies, processions and exorcisms are performed through a primacy of drumming.

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The drum is thereby presented as pulsating guardian and emissary, channelling complex beat structures and polyphonous environments, in use to ward off apparitions, devil spirits and to invoke divine forces and seasonal festivities. In Sinhalese cultures of the South, these rites and rituals are conducted by healers with experienced drummers and dancers to heal physical and psychological ailments as well as animate folk legend. The parai mela, mridangam, and thavil drumming traditions of Northern Sri Lanka propel communal communication and sonic knowledge building at sacred sites and temple festivals dating back to the Sangam period, connecting the island’s living cultures to ancient Southern India.

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Colomboscope holds inquiries such as, how do the reverberations of sound carry across generations? How may repressed and minor rhythms be revived and recalled? We attend to orature—citing Indigenous storytelling as modes of calling the world into being, pre-linguistic acts such as humming, the swell of rumour, revolutionary chants, incantations of exorcism, and the curse of a Yakshini queen scripted into the island’s mythic tableau. In privileging the aural imaginary over master chronicles, expressivity carried from birth to the end of a life-cycle—lullaby to lament—auditory and choreographic acts have shaped the arc of communal existence.

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Musical grammar has consistently elaborated on written language codes, through inventive approaches to notation, harmonics, and ‘keeping time’. Artists’ scores prompt modes of reading and hearing expansively to launch into improvisation as a charting of the unknown. Such sonority challenges technological scribes and the digital virtuosity of cloud servers. Instead, the differential tonalities, accents, and markings remain both intuitive and counter-intuitive—as forms of embodied knowing that rekindle lifelines, and creative capacity prone to rest, breakdowns, and dreaming. In commencement, festival curator Hajra Haider Karrar draws inspiration from the 'song of the circling spirit' that stems from Nigerian-British poet and novelist Ben Okri’s, Songs of Enchantment. This evocative notion enables a clarity of vision beyond chaos toward new horizons, recognizing the importance of 're-dreaming' rhythms and trajectories that have the potential of charting alternative courses for the self and others. By reuniting human existence with the elements and beyond, this celebration of rhythms is a reassertion of interdependencies that enable being and becoming.

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Following the steps of the ancestors, with the descendants in mind, sonic vocabularies manifest the world into being by acknowledging and naming it. Their reverberations function as social compasses to process the spectrum of emotions and the ever shifting social, political, and environmental conditions—a collective channeling of happiness and grief, trauma and triumph, longing and union. Across the planet, rhythm structures are conceived as offerings toward and in resonance with the elements—the sun, moon, seasons of harvest, rainfall and tidal currents. The dancing body produces alterity— a realm where stories are exchanged, rules are renewed, and we encounter one another  momentarily, on a more equitable earth.