About

Home
About Watsonville Taiko
News
Classes
Media Gallery
Events Calendar
Contact

Watsonville Taiko
Watsonville Taiko, founded by Jim Hooker in September 1991, is a Taiko drumming community of performers and supporters. Ikuyo Conant, artistic director since 1992, set the group’s goal to strive through exploration of Taiko to develop an art that combines drumming with folklore, mythology and symbolism. Taiko as folk art is emphasized because it places value on joining with others to keep traditions alive. Important values and social meanings are found in the context of full participation and understanding of cultural traditions. By working together, the group learns that each person is valued as an important member of the community.

Artistic vision of Watsonville Taiko and Shinsei Daiko
Taiko performances are often constructed with pieces that stand-alone. Each composition has its own story or expression. However, when we look at the performance as a whole, those pieces rarely create a sense of an overall story. There are performances that create continuity in their presentations; however, because they are presentations of cultural segments or from a specific tradition, it is hard to feel the performance as a whole has communicated a greater unified story that is imbued with a profound sense of that which is uniquely Japanese.

We are interested in presenting deep cultural elements with Taiko drumming. Visual story telling with Taiko has within its dynamics a way to reach deep hidden emotional understandings of one's sense of self. The combination of different disciplines adds more for expressing the social and cultural as well as reaching further the deeper emotional core of each individual participant, whether as a performer or member of the audience. In fact, the sense of being just part of the audience, separate from the performance evaporates as the individual is caught up in the sights, sounds, smells and energy of an all-encompassing performance.

It is our goal to take one step at a time to make this artistic vision come true.

Purpose
The specific purpose of WTG is to study, learn and preserve the art of traditional and modern styles of Taiko drumming, and in conjunction with these:

Study other aspects of Japanese culture that may be relevant to the study of the art of Taiko drumming, including, but not limited to, the study of Japanese folklore, music, dance and history.

Educate the public by performing in concerts, by conducting workshops and classes and by developing literature and multimedia to be used by the general public to learn more about taiko and other traditional arts of Japan.

Mission
The mission of the Watsonville Taiko Group is to foster the evolving cultural expression and traditions of taiko drumming through performances and public education.

Goals
Our goal is to create a self-sufficient performance art community that uses taiko drumming as a springboard for a wider cultural and aesthetic understanding of Japanese music, myth, folk lore, dance and theater.

Shinsei Daiko, or Celestial Drumming, was founded in 1997 by Ikuyo Conant to create a youth performing group within Watsonville Taiko. The group focuses on wider cultural and aesthetic understanding of Japanese music, myth, folklore, dance and theater to define and integrate the essence of these art forms into the practice of Taiko. The members study not only musical skills, but also elements of martial art to understand the nature of Japanese drumming.

123

123

123