Your commitment to celebrating cultural heritage and promoting unity through Nigerian drums is truly commendable. We are honoured to have had the opportunity to collaborate with the workshop. It has been inspiring and forthcoming. The quality of the programme reflects Canon's commitment to excellence and innovation. Thank you once again for your investment in our professional growth. We look forward to staying connected with the Canon community."
Drumming Up a New Generation: Canon Miraisha and the Guild of Theater Art Drummers
How a three-day workshop in Lagos turned young drummers into visual storytellers, and helped preserve Nigeria's percussion heritage for decades to come.
Nigeria has one of the richest percussion traditions in the world. Drums like the Saató, Gbedu, Iya Ilu, Sekere, Ekuw, and the Jangu from Korea are not just instruments. They carry history, ceremony, and identity. But for the Guild of Theater Art Drummers, the challenge was becoming clear: the drums existed, the knowledge existed, yet the tools to document and share that heritage with the world did not.
The Guild approached Kings and Queen Art Academy, a Lagos-based creative institution, with an idea. Their young members were already drummers. What if they also became photographers? What if the next generation of Nigerian percussionists could tell their own story through a lens, and preserve the instruments they had inherited in a form the world could see?
That conversation brought the vision to life. In partnership with Kings and Queen Art Academy and the Guild of Theater Art Drummers, Canon delivered a three-day photography workshop from 25 to 27 March 2026, training thirty young participants from largely underserved communities across Lagos. The workshop did not just teach photography. It built a bridge between tradition and creative skill, and it showed exactly what Canon Miraisha is designed to do.
The thirty participants arrived as drummers. Over three days, they became visual storytellers as well. The workshop was structured across both theoretical and practical learning, with classroom sessions covering the fundamentals of photography followed by hands-on shooting exercises in which participants photographed the Guild's drum collection directly.
That combination of classroom and studio made the learning concrete. Participants were not practising on abstract subjects. They were photographing instruments they knew intimately, capturing the Gbedu in all its ceremonial weight and the delicate form of the Sekere with a photographer's eye. The theory landed because the practice was personal.
The workshop was delivered by Tore Oriase, a Canon Certified Trainer who carries his own Miraisha story. Tore passed through the Canon Miraisha Programme himself, and the experience shaped his path into professional creative career. He returned to this workshop not just as a trainer but as proof of what the programme produces. The cycle of Miraisha is one of its most quiet and powerful features: alumni who once sat in the participant's chair now stand at the front of the room.
On 4 April 2026, the work produced during the workshop went on public display at the Artists Village, National Theatre, Lagos, in celebration of World Drummers Day. The exhibition brought together photographs taken by the participants during their practical sessions, each image a young drummer's interpretation of the instruments they had spent their lives playing.
The timing was deliberate. World Drummers Day is one the Guild's most significant annual event. By anchoring the exhibition to it, Canon Miraisha ensured that the programme's output was not contained within a training room. It became part of a cultural celebration, visible to the Guild's wider community and to the public attending the National Theatre.
The response from the Guild of Theater Art Drummers was direct. In their appreciation letter following the programme, they wrote:
Those words point to something specific. This workshop did not deliver photography skills in a vacuum. It delivered them in the context of cultural preservation, of documentation, of ensuring that instruments like the Iya Ilu and the Ekuw are seen and understood beyond the communities that play them.
For the thirty young participants, many of them from underserved communities, the workshop opened a creative path they had not previously had access to. They left with technical photography skills, with a body of work exhibited publicly, and with a connection to the Canon Miraisha community that continues beyond the three days they spent together.