So my connection came through! I get to play taiko for free once a week... as long as I lie and say that I'm in AKP.
They meet in Uji, which is about a 20 minute train ride from Kyoto -eki, at a Cultural center. They have quite a few drums- maybe 10 chu-daiko and equally as many shime! They warmed up playing drum-rolls on beta-chu and slowly speeding up.
Then we started with a song. I picked that on up pretty quickly. One of the women was really helpful. She showed me the patterns. It was cool! You play in groups of 3 on one drum and rotate out. You start with each person playing it through by themselves, then you switch with each pattern, then you all come together and play it on one drum at once. It was super fun. They work a lot more with vocalizations and have a much looser style than I'm used to.
After that song, we went into a miyake style song. I watched it as the senior members played it through a couple of times, then gave it a try. They taught the first portion last week, so I had to catch up a bit. I still don't have it down very well. That's alright though because they gave me written music for all of the songs we played. I'll be studying in my room (sorry person below me, you'll hear some banging coming from your ceiling).
Miyake is still a little awkward for me. I wish I had the mirrors in the barn to see if I'm doing it at all correctly.
Speaking of correctly... I did the same thing I always do with swing-ji. I reversed the hands. When the sensei came around he's like "Hantai!" and I couldn't figure out what I needed to do opposite. Then I realized my hands were backwards. Anthony gets the problem. It took me so long to get swing-ji right for Kappa Jam!
Anyway, back to the practice. After that song we played another beta-chu song. It was cool.
Kimiko, my new friend from Wellsley on AKP, and I had no clue what we were doing, but we gave it our best. It was super fun!
The last song we played was yatai. It's a little repetitive, but I really like yatai-style. It's a good core workout.
It was an interesting evening and it's reminded me how much I missed having taiko. Chatting with
Kimiko made me realize how fortunate I was to have such an established group back home. The Wellsley group is a lot like Claremont, they have a problem keeping the group alive. The person that had formal training graduated last year. They don't have many drums either. I hope for their sake the East Coast ITC plan goes through. She'd heard about Invitationals and was super jealous. I want to share all I know with her and I want to learn everything she knows as well. We're already comparing our versions of Matsuri. We've got plans to go early next Wednesday and make laundry-basket drums to play on together.
We asked if we could come early and just use their drums, but apparently the cultural center has a lot going on most days, so the noise is a limiting factor.
So there you have it. I've got taiko! Woot!
Oh! While I was waiting for the group at Kyoto-eki, this woman comes and sits next to me and starts talking to me in English. Her name was Misako. She was 63 years old and had taught herself English. She was really cute and friendly. Apparently she did this a lot because she had several notebooks filled with messages from people all over the world. Some of them were thank you messages, others just read "Misako, your English is excellent!" It was really random and really fun. She made me an origami crane. I'm going to hang it in my room.
That's all I've got for now.
Love until later,
Caitlin D.
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