Saturday evening my two boys and I went to see Watsonville Taiko perform at the Cabrillo College theater, just down the street from us. It was the Watsonville Taiko's 20th Anniversary performance, entitled "Valley of East and West". There was choral singing as well (West) which was lovely, but we came for the drums. This was an awesome performance. Unfortunately there was no intermission which made it really difficult for the boys and we ended up leaving a little early. I could listen to this drumming all day and night, but watching the performance along with the sound, mmm. I'm happy we went, though I had to let go of my desire to stay, no matter how they were feeling. I want to take them to move events like this, after all, and didn't want it to become a torture session.
Here's a description of Taiko from Wikipedia:
Taiko (太鼓) means "drum" in Japanese (etymologically "great" or "wide drum"). Outside Japan, the word is often used to refer to any of the various Japanese drums (和太鼓, "wa-daiko", "Japanese drum", in Japanese) and to the relatively recent art-form of ensemble taiko drumming (sometimes called more specifically, "kumi-daiko" (組太鼓)). The performances can last between 5 and 25 minutes and typically follow a jo-ha-kyū (beginning, middle, end/rapid, sudden, urgent, and emergency) structure, which means the performance will speed up significantly towards the grand finale.
The approach to the theater has a number of lovely sculptures which we enjoyed. Along with the moon. And the pretty sky.
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| waiting and waiting for it all to begin. and then waiting and waiting for it to end...:) |
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