Our performance for school before the holidays was a big success. Everyone liked it. We were pretty surprised at how good we did in such a short time. This is a lot of hard work but it is fun too, and the performing part is really cool.
On Tuesdays, our Taiko drumming day with Ms.Esther,, (we dance on Thursdays with Ms.Michele and Ms.Dulce), we start off each day with a Japanese greeting.
Ms.Gloria takes roll, and we put on our name tags. We chit chat about life, and taiko, while we are warming up our bodies for about 10 or 15 minutes. Then we set the drums up, line up the bachi (drum sticks) in matching pairs and get to our drums. Esther Sensei (teacher) makes sure that our kata (form of standing, and holding our bachi) is correct. We then do rhythm warm-up for a couple of minutes. Sensei asks for one volunteer to play what we learned last time. The students in taiko and dance have lots of courage, a good thing for someone learning about a different cultural art form, so we always have lots of volunteers. It usually takes two or three tries before someone gets it right, but occasionally someone nails it the first time! We then all play what we learned the week before and spend 20 minutes polishing that part before we move on to a new part. Then we have a break for snack and to talk some more. Esther Sensei tells us some interesting things about Japan (ever eat live Octopus?), and we can ask her questions. Then we go back to practice until it is time to put away the taiko and bachi until next week. The time goes way too fast.
On Thursday,we started a new dance called the "Japaneese Stick dance". After our warm-up, we reviewed the dance we performed before the holidays, "Feel The Sun". It feels great to know a dance now, and be able to dance it from beginning to end,and now add more feeling and try to jump higher or spin faster. The new dance has long sticks, which we hit together to make sounds.We are evening doing tricks with the sticks, like doing cartwheels still holding on to the stick, or jumping over the sticks.
Sometimes we meet with Esther Sensei and Michele and Dulce at the same time to run our pieces from top to bottom. We will be performing at the District picnic on March 6th. We will perform for the students at school in March too but we aren’t sure which day yet.
We are really excited that we will have a field trip to go to Matsuri, the Japanese Festival at Heritage Square on February 27, 2010. We get to see Martial arts, classical arts like dance by beautiful girls and women in Kimono and Shi Shi Mai (Lion Dancing), eat Japanese food, learn how to fold Origami, and write our names in Japanese, and see Esther Sensei’s ASU - Taiko Stage. They have a guest star, Takeuchi-san, from Japan that Sensei started a taiko group in Japan with 20 years ago. We will get to see All AZ Taiko Team; 20-30 taiko players performing together, plus Sensei’s professional group, Fushicho Daiko, her children’s group, Kemushi Daiko (Caterpillar Drummers), and all of the student groups from her dojo (taiko studio), and a group from Tucson. We hope we get to stay all day so we can see everything. There will even be a Candyman there on his own little stage making amazing candy in shapes you can choose while you watch (if you have the money to buy it – and the heart to eat it)!
