Kodo Earth Celebration 2009 - Part 1

We returned from Sado Island, where the Kodo drummers live, learn, practice and hold their annual three-day Earth Celebration, on Tuesday evening.  We woke up at 3:30 AM Monday morning, drove for 2.5 hours to Naoetsu port in Niigata, where we got on the 7:00 ferry for the 2 hour and 40 minute boat ride to Sado Island.  It was very similar to our experiences two years ago at Earth Celebration, and just like two years ago, we nearly ran out of money by the end of the two days and were concerned about whether we would actually make it back to Kanazawa. 

Obviously, we did, but not without a bit of financial stress. Now we are back and as you might expect, I have loads of experiences and lessons learned that I hope to share with you.  But in an unexpected turn of events, (well, partially unexpected) I will be returning to Michigan with my daughter on September 2nd, only a couple weeks away.  As you can imagine, I will be rather busy packing up my things, figuring out the best way to send almost thirty (!) taiko drums and preparing for a job that will start only six days after I get back.

In the hopes that I will have time to write more entries about Earth Celebration in the next couple weeks, I have titled this one "Part 1".  Hopefully, parts 2, 3, 4 ... will follow in the not too distant future.  At any rate, it will probably help if I keep the entries brief.

Workshop - Taiko Experience with Shin-chan-sensei

I'll start by talking about the workshop I took with my daughter.  It was called "Taiko Experience with Shin-chan-sensei" and it was intended for people and young children with little or no taiko experience.  It was kind of a hands-on, get familiar with taiko drums sort of lesson.  "Shin-chan-sensei" is Shin'ichi Sogo, a 10-year veteran stage member of Kodo, who now works behind the scenes at the Sado Island Taiko Center.

The Taiko Center is a beautiful wooden structure up in the hills of Sado with a high ceiling, and a huge picture window looking out to the sea of Japan. 

There is a nice balcony also with a view like this:

 There are also two beautiful, very unique Odaiko there.  They are both made from the same 600 year old Keyaki tree.  The tree, from somewhere in Niigata prefecture, was on the verge of falling down, so it was given to Kodo to make these beautiful drums.  The trunk was left in a more natural shape than the usual Odaiko.  Even the Stand was made from limbs from the tree.

They decided this one sort of looks like a potato, so they nicknamed it "Yamaimo-kun", which they translated in some of their newsletters as "Spuddy".

The other drum only has a skin on one side of it.  At first glance, one is inclined to think it is from the bottom of the tree, where the roots are, but it is actually made from the section of trunk where the branches ... well ... branch out. 

If you look at the drum from the other side, there is a part that looks like a pig's snout.  Appropriately, they nicknamed this drum "Butabana-chan", which is sort of like "piggy snout".  Here is the drum from the front, with me doing my best imitation:

Well, I was going to be brief, and I've just spent too much time writing about the Taiko Center.  Let's move on to the workshop.

Shin-chan-sensei was a very friendly guy, made lots of silly jokes and Karen (my daughter) seemed to like him immediately.  I think you can tell from this picture (taken after the workshop) that Karen had a good time:

My wife just looked over my shoulder and commented on how young Shin-chan sensei looks, which reminded me of something that he said at the workshop.  How old do you think he is?  My wife said he looks like he is in his 30s.  Actually, he will be 52 this year.  He told us this after he played a powerful, Odaiko solo.  He said, "People who play taiko actually get younger."  I certainly would have to agree with him.  I definitely feel younger and more healthy than I did two years ago and there are a lot of people who play taiko at Asano in their 50s, 60s and even 70s.  Just from watching them play taiko, you'd never guess that they were that old.

As I mentioned, the workshop was geared towards people with little or no taiko experience, so what we actually did in the 60 minutes was quite simple, but it was also very good.  He began by just telling us about the two big drums, playing Yamaimo-kun for a demonstration, and then he handed out sticks and let us play whatever drums we wanted to, which were in the room, for about 5 minutes or so.  Everyone got a chance to play the big drums if they wanted to. 

After that we all lined up behind the Oke Taiko set up in a big circle and he gave us simple instructions on how to hit the drum.  Raise your arm up, keeping your elbow, wrist and drum stick pointing in a straight line, to about a 45 degree angle, then just let the weight of the stick and your arm fall down to the drum.  That's it.  Raise up your arm, let it fall.  Just let gravity do the work.  (We actually had similar instruction from Jige sensei a couple weeks ago). 

Following this 60 second lesson on how to hit the drums, we began to play some "games".  He would say, "Let's play 3 notes, then stop". Don don don, we played.  "Okay, how about 5 notes, then stop."  Don don don don don.  "49 notes" ... and so on.  Another game, moved around the circle, playing three notes, or four notes on each drum and stopping when we got back to where we started.  The we played a sort of copy-cat game.  He would play a one or two measure phrase, then we would imitate it. After doing this for awhile, he invited a couple workshop participants to come up and lead the exercise, so we imitated whatever they did.  Finally, he taught us a very short song, which we learned fairly quickly and then played all together.

Throughout the workshop, he continued to make silly jokes, the type that teenagers would role their eyes at if it were uttered by their parents, and he reminded us at every opportunity to keep smiling.  He said smiling was the most important think.  When you smile, your playing is easy for the audience to listen to. At the beginning of the workshop, when we played the first few notes on the drums, he immediately said, "You all look so scary.  Are you nervous?  You have to relax, smile."  I think that was his main objective for the workshop: to get the participants relaxed and enjoying themselves.  That's why we didn't do anything very complicated, that's why he kept making silly jokes and that's why he kept reminding us to smile. 

Karen was smiling the whole time and afterwards she told me many times how much fun it was. 

Keep smiling, everyone. 

Stay tuned for Part 2...