Join us for a workshop-led performance with BuYi Band that explores how music carries memory, place, and lived experience. Drawing on personal stories and folk traditions from Northwest China, particularly the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the band traces how everyday life – poetry, food, migration, and routine – shapes their creative practice.
Born out of cross-regional movement and cultural encounter, the session follows sound as a way of understanding identity: not as something fixed, but as something continually formed across land, language, and repetition. Through live performance, guided listening, and conversation, BuYi Band unpacks how folk melodies, poetic texts, and contemporary arrangements give voice to experiences of displacement, endurance, and belonging.
Combining performance with discussion, the workshop invites audiences to reflect on how music expresses ideas of ‘home’, how migration is felt through rhythm and sound, and how ordinary moments – place names, daily rituals, fragments of speech – are transformed into cultural and creative material.
Advanced booking is required for this event. No prior musical knowledge is required; the emphasis is on listening, sharing, and exchange.
Xiaoxing Huang is a UK-based cultural producer and founder of Akai Live, a platform for live music promotion and artist development focused on cross-cultural exchange and community-based practices. Trained as a scientist with a PhD in Physiology from the University of Manchester, she brings a research-driven, interdisciplinary approach to her work.
A long-standing engagement with independent and grassroots rock scenes shapes her exploration of how sound, access, and participation intersect under conditions of structural precarity. Through Akai Live, Huang develops projects that support artists while foregrounding place, resilience, and cultural exchange, positioning live music as both an artistic form and a social practice that fosters listening, encounter, and shared experience.
BuYi Band was formed in 1995 in Ningxia, Northwest China. For over three decades, they have embodied the spirit of rock through sincerity and a grounded, unadorned approach. Rooted in the landscapes and everyday life of Northwest China, their songs draw on folk traditions, poetry, and lived experience to express love for home, family, lovers, life, and nature. BuYi focuses on the ordinary, using music to carry memory, affection, and resilience. After more than 30 years on the road, their work continues to radiate calm yet powerful optimism, offering a worldview shaped by endurance, openness, and generosity of spirit.