| |
Reviews
/ Press Releases
Jammin' -- Japanese style
by Erin Auerbach. April 15, 2005 - The Press Enterprise.
DANCE REVIEW; Rei Aoo's bold moves meet
the test of taiko
by Lewis Segal. Aug 30, 2004 - Los Angeles Times.
One With the Drum by Rip Rense. April 23,
2004 - Los Angeles Times.
The Press-Enterprise
(April 15, 2005)
Jammin' -- Japanese style
The powerful sounds of taiko drumming combine the spiritual with
endurance
By: By ERIN AUERBACH / The Press-Enterprise
Tom Kurai compares the evolution of taiko drumming to karate.
"You don't just think of martial arts as part of Japanese
culture because everyone does it now," he said during a telephone
interview.
Satori Daiko, Kurai's group from the Taiko Center of Los Angeles,
and UC Riverside's Senryu Daiko will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday
at the University Theater on the UCR campus. The RCC Tap Ensemble
and Schurr High School Drumline will participate in the performance
as well.
The Taiko Center of Los Angeles and UC Riverside's Senryu Daiko
will perform Saturday at UCR'sUniversity Theatre.
Taiko means more than a big drum. It also denotes the art form,
which began as a means to communicate and draw boundaries in ancient
Japan. Its depth reaches into mythological, religious and secular
traditions across several cultures.
Now it's international entertainment.
In its contemporary form, Kumi Daiko, or drum ensembles, can have
five to 20 members melding movement and percussion.
Born in Japan and raised in Los Angeles from age 5, Kurai is a
seventh-generation Zen Buddhist priest in Montebello. He works with
a number of programs, teaching six classes a week, including taiko
for credit at UCR and directing the Taiko Center in Los Angeles,
as well as using it to work with patients at Patton State
Hospital in San Bernardino.
He encourages his students to become one with the beat.
"I don't use taiko to convert people," he said. "It's
part of me. It's part of my teaching. I have about 120 students
and none practice Zen Buddhism, but they understand the philosophy.
... It feels good. It's good exercise."
He teaches students to play unconsciously, as if the drumming
and dance is an extension of who they are.
"What you're expressing is your spirit in the 'ki,' (life
energy), a shout releasing energy from diaphragm to signal, cue
and motivate and timing,' Kurai said. "This shout is called
the kakegoe."
With 30 years experience in taiko, Kurai writes most of the Satori
Daiko's music. He said his students also compose and arrange pieces.
Senryu Daiko is the independent taiko club on the UCR campus,
founded in 1998, the same year Kurai began teaching there. The group
will sponsor next year's 11th annual intercollegiate taiko concert
at UCR for the first time.
"As far as I know, UCR is the only university where a student
can take a taiko ensemble class (for credit) and learn to play taiko,"
Kurai said.
Denise Donovan teaches dance at RCC and the University of Redlands.
She studied taiko with Kurai when she was a student at UCR and performs
with Satori Daiko.
She founded and directs the RCC Tap Ensemble and will dance and
play "Hibiki" with them, a piece that Miki Dun choreographed.
"The heartbeat of tap and taiko is rhythm, so why not combine
the two?" Donavan said during a telephone interview.
She's also heading the second number, "Oni" (meaning
"demon"), a piece of modern improvisation with six to
10 dancers.
"It's just the whole experience, that you can feel it so
much in your body ... you just become one with the drum," she
said. "Every time I do it, I can't get enough."
DANCE REVIEW; Rei Aoo's bold
moves meet the test of taiko; [HOME EDITION]
Lewis Segal. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.:
Aug 30, 2004. pg. E.5
Full Text (334 words)
(Copyright (c) 2004 Los Angeles Times) The biggest challenge facing
choreographer Rei Aoo in "Creation," Saturday at the John
Anson Ford Amphitheatre, involved matching the overwhelming force
of traditional Japanese drumming, performed live by the Satori Daiko
ensemble of L.A.Much of the time, Aoo met that test resourcefully,
reflecting the music's varied textures and assaultive power in ensemble
sequences boasting inventive spatial configurations along with high-impact
movement innovations.You could argue that Aoo is an abstractionist
and that her dances never deeply embodied their title-premises --
"Moisture," "Thunder," "Evolution,"
etc. But the boldness, energy and risk of her best sequences kept
you watching even when the components didn't link up conceptually.Whether
rolling and slithering from the theater's hill- side steps to the
forestage, jumping into unexpected falls or convulsing rhythmically
on the floor, her large women's corps gave this nine- part suite
enough distinction as movement thea- ter to offset its regrettable
descents into formula ballet virtuosity and other disappointments.The
lapses included an uneventful, quasi-gladiatorial male quartet,
a technically overambitious pas de deux and the downright bizarre
costumes for the final third of the piece: beige unisex body stockings
accented with green knee, shoulder and elbow pads -- plus glittery
Cleopatra-style headdresses.Despite such distractions, Aoo's locally
based Dance Pla- net company and guests always managed to inspire
a more primal attack from the Satori Dai- ko instrumentalists than
had been evident earlier in the program when more than three dozen
drums created a differ- ent kind of spectacle in a set titled "Japanese
American Rhythms."Led by the Rev. Tom Kurai, the musicians
provided a skillful, entertaining survey of Japanese folk idioms,
along with a few tame forays into contemporary taiko and hands-across-the-sea
collaboration.But only with Aoo did the music (composed by Kurai)
venture beyond displays of expertise into the throbbing intensity
that makes the finest Asian percussion so awesome.Guests in Kurai's
half of the evening included the Sanmi Ensemble, the Village Arts
Dance group and woodwind specialist Francis Wong.Credit: Times Staff
Writer
Article: One
with the drum
Copyright: 2004, Los Angeles Times
Publication: Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-et-rense23apr23,1,7410438.story
STYLE & CULTURE
One with the drum
by Rip Rense Special to The Times April 23, 2004
Rev. TOM KURAI doesn't make a lot of noise about his work, but he
makes a lot of noise in his work. The soft-spoken, genial abbot
of the Sozenji Zen Buddhist Temple in Montebello ministers with
a drum. He spreads the rhythmic word.
The roly-poly, the svelte, the young, the elderly, the insecure,
the developmentally disabled, the deaf, the blind, even the limbless
— when Kurai sees them, he sees only … taiko drum players.
"Whether you are a normal person or you have a disability,
everyone has ki [chi in Chinese]," he said. "The students
respond, they smile, they sing, they move their body. Their brain
is working. That is a lot."
Kurai is one of the premier virtuosos of the taiko — fat Japanese
drums of various sizes struck with large, thick sticks — and
master of traditional Japanese percussion in the United States.
If you haven't heard of him, you might have heard him — most
recently thundering away during the battle sequences of "The
Last Samurai." All in all, he's not something you might expect
from the follower of a religion associated with concentration and
silence. And yet Zen principle applies.
"It's through the doing," Kurai explained. "You really
forget your self. The activity and the person become one. There
is no separation. So the doing becomes the person. That's the practice."
Rev. Tom, as he's known, is also founder of the Taiko Center of
Los Angeles, a school that caters not to steel-muscled demon drummers
in breechcloths but to … anyone. His TCLA brainchild, Satori
Daiko — composed almost entirely of women, including mothers
and daughters — is one of the hot taiko bands in town, having
performed at the Japan America Theater in Los Angeles and Sado Island
in Japan (where the famed taiko group Kodo holds an annual Earth
celebration) and this August debuting on the Ford Theater subscription
in tandem with Rei Aoo's Dance Planet. (Kurai, also a taiko composer
and innovator, loves to combine the drums with everything from Javanese
gamelan to tap-dancing.)
But these are just a few beats in his overall rhythm.
In any given week, the peripatetic priest might be at UC Riverside
teaching the country's only for-credit taiko class, delighting fifth-graders
at Mountain View Elementary in Tujunga, playing a noon concert at
idyllic Pepperdine University in Malibu, letting sunbaked students
at Calabasas High School try their hands at baci (sticks), pounding
away at Otis College of Art and Design in Westchester, teaching
psychiatric patients at Patton State Hospital, holding TCLA classes
at Sozenji Temple — while tending to the full-time demands
of running the temple. His vanful of drums essentially lives on
the freeway. Does he sleep?
"Four or five hours a night," Kurai said with a chuckle,
spreading peanut butter on toast for a quick breakfast at home in
Monterey Park. "I always wanted to play the drums, as far back
as I can remember. I was always banging on things and tapping to
music on the radio. I would play with my chopsticks — my hashi."
And get scolded?
"At the dinner table, yes," he laughed. "I always
had drumming in me."
*
A universally accessible experience
Now he tries to instill it in others — any others. Think taiko
and you tend to think of men hitting enormous drums with force and
discipline — but this is equal-opportunity drumming. Rev. Tom,
whose approach is inspired by the gentle movements of Japanese folkloric
dance, stressing a fluidity of motion, vowed to teach anyone, "even
if they had one arm." To his amazement, it came to that when
he was an artist in residence at Widney High School for severely
disabled students, near downtown.
"It turns out that I actually went to a place where some people
had no arms or no limbs," he said. "At first I was very
challenged…. A person doesn't necessarily have to physically
pick up the tools to perform, but to be affected by the sound of
the taiko is a benefit as well. Some children were quadriplegic
and couldn't even hold a stick, yet they would get close to the
drum and feel the vibration. And there were also deaf and blind
children. They smiled, and they moved their bodies. The effect of
the drum, especially one that is not synthetic … strikes a
very primal chord in people and has a healing effect."
Healing is the goal among the staff at Patton State Hospital in
San Bernardino, where Kurai instructs the criminally insane. On
one recent morning he led a group of inmates in meditation and Japanese
drum terminology and then spent the better part of an hour trying
to teach a simple four-beat pattern. When the students finally mastered
the beat, there was a spontaneous eruption of joy and pride.
"What matters is that there is some social aspect," said
Patton Assistant Chief of Operations Kevin Garland. "Just to
have patients come together, sit together, and do an activity together.
It is incredibly successful in their self-esteem and their ability
to think beyond themselves. What Tom does that makes this so incredibly
successful is the idea of having a thought — one common thought
— and turning it into a physical activity."
Strangely enough, the 56-year-old Kurai never set out to be a drummer
or a priest. He was a hobbyist taiko player in the '70s (jamming
to Cream and Jimi Hendrix), joining L.A.'s seminal taiko group,
Kinnara, at Senshin Temple downtown, but his bio is all over the
map: an American kid who grew up in predominantly Latino Boyle Heights
in the '50s and '60s, watching Captain Kangaroo and collecting comics,
graduating from Garfield High; a Japanese kid who spent his first
five years in the Mie Prefecture of Japan; a veteran of the U.S.
Army, drafted during the Vietnam War and serving his tour in Germany;
a divorced father of one who returned to Japan at age 31 to study
his heritage and find himself; a onetime architecture student; holder
of a degree in park administration from Cal Poly Pomona; executive
with Sharp and Fuji Film; director of the Japanese American National
Museum; longtime Japanese American community activist; Zen priest
who completed rigorous ascetic training at Sojiji Monastery in Yokohama,
Japan. And along the way, drumming, always drumming.
He was drafted by the Sozenji congregation to take over the temple
following the 1986 death of his father, who had founded it in 1971.
At first Kurai took "normal jobs" to supplement his meager
temple income, but the drum always beckoned, and as students flooded
in, he was finally able to merge his musical calling with his spiritual
career.
"The philosophical aspect is my background as a Zen priest,"
said Kurai. "When you play taiko, you're not a person here
drumming on a drum, but you're expressing your true self through
the medium of the taiko. So the sound of the taiko is not the sound
of the taiko but actually yourself. It's you. So you're sharing
your spirit with others by playing the taiko. This represents the
unity between the self and the taiko and the sound and also the
listener. There is no separation between all of those units. This
is how I think, and this is how I try to teach."
*
Information about Satori Daiko performances is at http://www.taikocenter.com
.
If you want other stories on this topic, search
the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
Article: Drumming
Up A New Tradition: Japanese American Taiko in North America
Copyright: 2005, Folk Works
Publication: Folk Works
|
|
