Dynamic Taiko

8/11/19 San Francisco Taiko Dojo

Last weekend I was in Portland for a family event, which included attendance at a fantastic taiko concert that was part of Taiko Jam, a biannual conference. Included in the performance were San Francisco Taiko Dojo, Kinnara Taiko, Kenny Endo and Taiko Center of the Pacific, and a special performance by Kodo distinguished member Chieko Kojima. These performers are among the best of the best, and it was a privilege to see them.

Kinnara Taiko

Some of the most unusual and dynamic performances combined traditional taiko with innovative, contemporary elements and costumes. While the drummers and other percussionists are primarily musicians, almost all performers also seem to be gymnasts or acrobat artists in their movements, which are the most athletic of any musical performers I’ve seen. Cartwheels and tumbles are part of the percussion! It’s thrilling to feel and hear the thundering and see the sheer strength and energy they demonstrate as they pound away with thick, heavy drumsticks as if they were slender reeds.

 

During brief interludes while the stage is being reset, actors provide humorous vignettes to keep the audience entertained. A Kinnara Taiko frog-like character is at right.

I had a ball trying to capture some of that energy and movement in my sketches. (I’d like to smugly note here that while photography and video of the concert were strictly prohibited, sketching was not. 😉)

These San Francisco Taiko Daijo drummers were
not really hitting each other...I just decided to focus
on their figures and not spend time
drawing the drums!

San Francisco Taiko Daijo

Taiko Center of the Pacific

Chieko Kojima, in kimono, first danced improvisationally and eventually pounded on the large drum as a finale. To keep her long sleeves out of the way while drumming, she incorporated a dramatic scarf tying around her sleeves as part of the dance.

This performance by Taiko Center of the Pacific included traditional shamisen and Polynesian dance.

Taiko Center of the Pacific

Halloween Taiko

 

10/31/20 Mark and Kristen perform from their front yard (live video)

To my delight, I had two opportunities to sketch taiko on Halloween. As they did on both Labor Day and Fourth of July, my niece Kristen and her husband Mark performed for their neighbors from their front yard. It was already evening on the east coast where they live, so I had the challenge of sketching from live video that was mostly dark except where the drummers were spotlit.

That was challenging enough, but my afternoon of sketching taiko wasn’t over. On the west coast, my other niece, Alix (yes, I have two nieces who are taiko performers, and they aren’t even sisters) and San Jose Taiko (whom I was thrilled to sketch live a few years ago) also gave a performance – virtually. Each performer was videotaped while playing their part at home, then the pieces were put together into what must have been quite a synchronizing and editing challenge. (Performing music in the age of COVID is not for the faint of heart.) The result was an entertaining montage of video images that kept moving around on the screen. Every time I started to sketch a player, the image would suddenly jump to another part of the screen or be replaced by a different player! Challenging to say the least, but all the performers were costumed, which made it fun.

Alix is dressed as a s’more (thankfully, her graham cracker costume was easy to draw). My favorite was the hotdog, whose sign insisted he was a sandwich.

10/31/20 A hotdog and Alix (recorded video)

10/31/20 junior San Jose Taiko members (recorded video)

A Blast of Energy from San Jose Taiko

4/8/17 brush pen, colored pencils

My niece Alix is a member of San Jose Taiko, one of the most well-known and highly acclaimed professional American taiko groups. When I heard that SJT was giving a concert in the Seattle area, my siblings and I organized a family reunion around the concert date so that we could all attend. And I invited Kate along too, because I knew she was a big fan of taiko!

What a blast of energy those eight drummers produce! Their innovative percussion rhythms combined with dynamic choreography are spectacular. They also look like they are having so much fun that they infuse their performance with sheer joy.

I tried my best to capture the spirit of that energy with a brush pen, and I found that I had to use techniques I’ve been teaching myself by sketching small birds at our feeder. Like birds, taiko drummers repeat movements rapidly but rhythmically, so if you just wait a bit, the pose you started to sketch will appear again – maybe by the same drummer, or maybe by a different one.

The photos from my phone aren’t the best quality, but I hope they help to convey some of San Jose Taiko’s kinetic music!

Alix front and center!

Proud auntie and uncle!

A Bit of Obon Taiko

7/11/20 San Jose Taiko on Facebook Live

Many Buddhist communities honor their deceased ancestors during a summer Obon festival. When I was a kid, I participated by joining the folk dancing that took place in the closed-off street outside the temple where my family attended services. And of course, we all enjoyed the shaved ice, noodles, barbecued chicken on skewers and other treats that were sold in the food booths. I stopped dancing as an adult, but Greg and I always went to watch the dancing and especially to enjoy taiko drum performances by Seattle Buddhist Betsuin’s own taiko group (whom sketcher Cathy McAuliffe and I had fun sketching a few years ago).

This year, of course, Obon has been cancelled everywhere, but some communities are taking their Obon online. In San Jose, the Buddhist Betsuin festivities included performances by San Jose Taiko, my niece Alix’s group (whom I sketched live a few years ago when they were in town). The Facebook Live event included real-time video as well as a recording from a previous Obon.

The multi-camera views of the live performances made for a more sophisticated viewing experience – but not for sketching! As soon as I started to sketch a drummer, the video would switch to another camera! All that motion and energy are hard enough to capture from one view, let alone many. The stick figure gestures I managed to capture above were done during a pre-recorded segment that had been made with one video camera, so the angle didn’t change. Whew!

 The festivities of the temple that I attended will be online tomorrow. The experience won’t be nearly as fun as strolling through the street, chomping on shaved ice, feeling the rhythm of drumming, smelling chicken barbecuing, seeing the bright kimono colors on children. But I guess it will have to do.

Tina’s Top 10 Memorable Sketches of 2017

1/21/17 Women's March

Per my annual tradition, shown here are my top 10 most memorable sketches of the year. As before, these are not necessarily my “best” or “favorite” sketches; they are ones that evoke the strongest memories. Although 99 percent of the fun of sketching is in the act of sketching (and not the sketch that results from it), I also derive much pleasure from thumbing through my sketchbooks and remembering the events and circumstances surrounding the sketch. (Click the title of the sketch to go to the original post and full-size images.)

Here are links to my most memorable sketches of 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013.

Jan. 21, Seattle’s Women’s March (above): Typically, I am not a politically active person. But Trump’s election stirred me as has no other political event in recent history. Despite much trepidation about joining what was expected to be a crowd of more than 100,000, I participated in Seattle’s Women’s March. And while I never felt unsafe during our peaceful event, sketching as I walked made me feel “normal” while doing something that was 100 percent outside my comfort zone.

4/8/17 San Jose Taiko

April 8, San Jose Taiko concert (left): When I heard that San Jose Taiko, a highly acclaimed professional taiko group, would be performing in the Seattle area, I was thrilled! My niece Alix is a member, and I hadn’t seen her perform in many years.

5/10/17 Manarola

May 10, Manarola, Italy (left): Of the Cinque Terre’s “five lands,” Manarola is one of the most picturesque. The scene I sketched is one that appears on many postcards and in guidebooks of Italy. Although I had first seen it in 2006, I wasn’t sketching yet then. It felt both intimidating and fulfilling to finally sketch it.

5/12/17 Lake Como

May 12, Lake Como, Italy (left): Two days after that memorable sketch in Manarola, I had a personal breakthrough when I sketched Lake Como from Varenna using colored pencils. This landscape sketch is of the type that I thought wasn’t possible on location with colored pencils because of their time-consuming nature. I was ecstatic to have found a way to do it in an hour.

July 26, Cloud Gate, Chicago (below): Although it wasn’t a scheduled symposium event at that point, many sketchers ended up wandering over to Millennium Park on the first day of the symposium to sketch “the Bean” (officially named Cloud Gate). I was happily reunited at the park with many sketchers I had met at previous symposiums. The most memorable meeting was with Joan Tavolott, whom I have known for years through our blogs but had not met in person until that day at the Bean.

7/26/17 "The Bean"

8/1/17 Michigan Avenue

Aug. 1, Michigan Avenue, Chicago (left): By the time I sketched this view from Michigan Avenue of my favorite Chicago building, the metallic blue Two Prudential, the symposium was over, and I was getting ready to leave town that afternoon. When I look at this sketch now, it seems to hold all my wonderful memories of the symposium as well as the excitement of a beautiful city that I want to return to again and again.

8/21/17 Total solar eclipse

Aug. 21, total solar eclipse, Oregon (right): Two years of planning culminated in about 10 seconds of solar eclipse totality for my family!

9/5/17 Smokey sky

Sept. 5, sun behind smoke-filled sky: A record number of wildfires have taken and endangered lives up and down the Pacific Coast this year. Smoke and ash from Central Washington filled the air around the Puget Sound area for many days. It was eerie to sketch an orange sun at 8:21 a.m. as if it were sunset – and to be able to look at it directly with my naked eyes, just as I did during the eclipse totality only weeks before.

10/28/17 Maples at Northgate

Oct. 28, maple trees at Northgate (right): Although some regions can count on gorgeous fall color each year, the Pacific Northwest is not one of them. All the conditions must have been right this year, though, because we had a particularly phenomenal autumn for color. I sketched trees whenever I could. This afternoon at Northgate was especially fun because Greg came with me, and he walked up and down the street with his camera as I sketched.

11/11/17 King Street Station

Nov. 11, King Street Station: Urban Sketchers celebrated its 10^th anniversary this year, culminating in a worldwide, 24-hour sketchcrawl Nov. 11. USk Seattle had record-breaking attendance, including our founder, Gabi Campanario, at King Street Station.

Sunny L.A.

7/22/14 Platinum Carbon and mixed green inks, watercolor,
Canson XL 140 lb. paper (Marina del Rey)

Visiting family in Los Angeles for a few days, we enjoyed a variety of highly sketchable sights, events and activities – the whimsical canals of Venice and the beach, a spectacular international taiko concert, Huntington Library’s spacious gardens, Castle Green in Old Pasadena, the architecturally amazing Walt Disney Concert Hall, scenic Marina del Rey and lots and lots of palm trees. While I wouldn’t necessarily want to make L.A. my home, I have to say that it is an urban sketcher’s nirvana: predictable and reliable warm sunshine every day. Every day! Nearly all year ‘round!

A few highlights from our sunny vacation: If you’ve never been to the real Venice, walking along the canals of L.A.’s Venice will give you a tiny hint. Instead of large hotels and merchant ships as in Italy, however, the west coast Venice is lined with incredibly expensive cottages. My beach sketch, done in about five minutes, is notable only in that it was painted with Pacific Ocean water in my waterbrush.

Huntington Library is not just a place to do research; it’s also an art museum, conservatory and vast collection of gardens. Although we were there all afternoon, we barely skimmed the surface. My favorite was the Chinese Garden, which was reminiscent of the Lan Su Chinese Garden we saw in Portland a couple of months ago.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, is an architectural marvel of curved lines. Not a single right angle or flat plane can be seen anywhere, and the matte stainless steel finish gleams elegantly (not jarringly as you might expect) against the blue sky. I was instantly intimidated about sketching a building like that, but with only 10 minutes available before we were to start our tour of the interior, I didn’t have time to dawdle. I just focused on trying to capture all those crazy curves and the building’s scale.

7/19/14 Pilot Iroshizuku Ku-jaku ink, Sailor pen (Taiko drummers)

Attending a performance of Taiko Nation, several of the world’s leading taiko groups sharing one stage, was a highlight of the weekend. I forgot to bring my clip-on book light that I’ve used previously in dark performance halls, so I decided to wing it. Sketching in the near-darkness, I didn’t bother to put on my glasses or even look at the paper. I filled several sketchbook pages just keeping my pen moving to the magical rhythm of the drums.

We had a little time to kill before our flight home yesterday, so we took a leisurely walk along the water at Marina del Rey. One of my earliest and fondest memories as an outdoor urban sketcher is of the same marina two years ago (my first summer as an urban sketcher). Brunching at a marina restaurant, I had snuck away to sketch the many pelicans preening on the docks. We didn’t see any pelicans this time, but the sketch I made there yesterday turned out to be my favorite sketch of our trip. Boats, water, palm trees, a cool marine breeze, sunshine, blue sky: quintessential L.A. at its best.

Except for the watercolors that took a little longer, most of these sketches were done in about 10 minutes each. (See more photos in my Los Angeles Flickr album.)

7/18/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown, Diamine Grey, De Atramentis
Moss Green and Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuyu-kusa inks (Palm trees)

7/19/14 Platinum Carbon, mixed green and Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuyu-kusa inks,
Caran d'Ache Museum water-soluble colored pencils (Venice canal and bridge)

7/19/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown, Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyu-syogun and DeAtramentis
Moss Green inks, Zig markers, Pacific Ocean water (Venice Beach)

7/20/14 Platinum Carbon, Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyu-syogun and mixed green inks, watercolor (Huntington Library Chinese Garden)

7/20/14 Diamine Chocolate Brown and mixed green inks, Museum
water-soluble colored pencils (Huntington Library Japanese Garden)

7/20/14 Diamine Grey and Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuyu-kusa inks, Museum
water-soluble colored pencils (Castle Green in Old Pasadena)

7/21/14 Museum water-soluble colored pencils, Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyu-syogun, Tsuyu-kusa and Diamine Chocolate Brown inks (Walt Disney Concert Hall)

7/22/14 Platinum Carbon, DeAtramentis Moss Green
and Diamine Grey inks, Museum water-soluble colored pencil
(Palms sketched from our hotel room.) 

7/22/14 Pilot Iroshizuku Ku-jaku ink,
Sailor pen, Museum water-soluble
colored pencil (Just killing time at LAX before
our flight home.)

Sketching in Venice.

Enjoying the sunshine at Marina del Rey.

Huntington Library conservatory

Washington, DC, Part 1: Family

 

3/28/26 National Mall, Washington, DC. A kite-flying festival was one of many events associated with the annual cherry blossom festival.

With members scattered on both coasts, my family tries to reunite annually. It helps to have an event to gather around (we especially like eclipses). This year the event was a taiko festival associated with Washington, DC,’s annual cherry blossom festival. Since I had never visited the DC area before, it was also an opportunity to sketch sights that were all new to me.

On stage in the shadow of the Washington Monument, the all-afternoon Sakura Taiko Festival was organized and led by my nephew-in-law, Mark Rooney. A challenging factor was that the event was the same day and location as the No Kings march and the peak of the cherry blossom bloom around the Tidal Basin. Lots and lots of people everywhere! Another challenge was that the temperature was in the low 40s with bitter wind most of the day. 

The taiko drumming could be heard from a long distance, adding a festive flair to other general cherry blossom festival goings-on all around. (Since I had opportunities to sketch the Tidal Basin cherry blossoms twice, I’ll put those sketches in a separate post.)

In addition to instructor and leader Mark, his wife Kristen and my other niece (and Kristen’s cousin) Alix are also taiko performers. The two cousins practice on opposites sides of the country, so it was especially fun to see Kristen and Alix perform together on the same stage for the first time. 

The highlight for my family was a performance by Kristen and Mark that was a tribute to my mom (Kristen’s grandmother). Called "Waiting for Spring," the performance included my mother’s haiku poetry. I got a little teary thinking about how proud and happy she would have been to see that performance (and I’d like to think she did from somewhere).

On another day, we visited the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism together. The memorial honors Japanese Americans who served in the US military during World War II. The 100th infantry battalion and 442nd regimental combat team, fighting in Europe, became the most highly decorated army unit for its size and length of service in American military history. (Ironically, many of these servicemen had family members who were incarcerated by the US government while they served). It also acknowledges the injustice of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent being incarcerated for the war’s duration.

Ten markers surrounding the memorial indicate the names of the 10 concentration camps and the number of citizens who were held at each. My parents and both brothers were incarcerated first at Tule Lake and then Minidoka. Since the two markers happened to be next to each other, this spot was ideal for a family portrait.

A highlight for me was collaborating with my grand-niece Kaila at the memorial. Now three-and-a-half, Kaila had taken interest as I sketched the memorial’s central crane sculpture, and I invited her to participate.

3/30/26 Collaborative work by Kaila and Tina

3 1/2-year-old Kaila hard at work

Finally, we all got to meet two furry members of the Koyama family, Roxie and Mugicha (whom I had sketched previously from a photo).

4/1/26 Mugicha and Roxie