Fills Monkey

Formed in France in 2005 after drummers Yann Coste and Sébastien Rambaud met during a master class, Fills Monkey developed a stage project centered on drums, found-object percussion, mime and visual comedy. The duo comes from a live-music background — Yann Coste has notably played with Anaïs and No One Is Innocent — and turned the instrumental showcase into a rhythmic, almost wordless show built on gestures, onomatopoeia and physical play. Fills Monkey first tested this formula at drum-related events before creating Incredible Drum Show in 2010, an all-ages performance presented in France and at several festivals, notably Juste pour rire and Zoofest in 2012, then at the Festival Off d’Avignon in 2013. In 2018 they launched We Will Drum You, a new creation that retains the duo’s percussive and comic core while further developing staging, lighting and imagery. Since then Fills Monkey has continued this non-verbal musical theatre — between rhythmic performance, burlesque and instrumental precision — on stages of various sizes, up to the Bataclan in 2019.