Portland Taiko – Oregon Lost & Found

Something was going to inspire me to finally write in this blog again after months of making excuses to myself.

I’ve just come back from Portland Taiko’s culminating show of the season, Oregon Lost & Found. I often catch myself overusing the word “awesome” (my California upbringing, maybe?), but Portland Taiko is, in the true sense of the word, awesome. Sometimes tears well up in my eyes when I see a really good live performance, not for any particular nameable emotion, but just because I feel so swept off my feet I feel like I’m somehow inside the performance. This was one of those times.

This show featured Ann Ishimaru and Zack Semke, founding Portland Taiko members who had left the group but is back to perform for the 15th anniversary season. They’d left before I was introduced to the group, so I wasn’t familiar with them before. According to the program notes “a past PT favorite,” they did an impressive duet using five drums between the two of them.

In general, the show was full of clever conceits, some I’d seen them do before, others I hadn’t. Relatively new performing member Keiko Araki, whose day job is as a violinist for the Oregon Symphony, continues to lend her string skills in addition to her taiko-playing, which is an interesting and welcome addition to the Portland Taiko repertoire. Michelle Fujii and Toru Watanabe have apparently been doing a lot of sharing of their dance background with the others, as there were even more choreography and visuals than usual. Guest artist Rick Bartow, a Native American artist, did a painting on stage. There was storytelling and acting. There were costumes and props. There was singing. There was humor. They made instruments of phone books, a tire, bamboo, and paper. Yes, plain pieces of paper — which for me, being a lover of musicals, reminded me a bit of Gene Kelly tap-dancing with a newspaper in Summer Stock.

All this might seem gimmicky if it weren’t so perfectly executed, with the rare combination of wild-abandon earnestness and confident gracefulness. Above all, what really comes through and makes them extraordinary is personality. The major innovation in the history of contemporary taiko is when jazz drummer Daihachi Oguchi decided that it would be a good idea to combine multiple taiko drums to form an ensemble. Portland Taiko really embraces this seemingly basic concept when they write and perform pieces that force the players to act as a team, giving us wonderful rhythms that syncopate, start, stop, merge, complement, divide, give, and take, each part doing something different but contributing to the whole to create a single song.

People who know me well know that I like rhythm, and I also like the loud, exuberant, and big. Portland Taiko emanates energy and joy. I feel so grateful to have become acquainted with you — thank you so much, Portland Taiko!

Check them out on their website: http://www.portlandtaiko.org/