Places, Images, Times & Transformations

Contemporary Taiko Performance in Japan II

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The group would continue to gain momentum both artistically and in terms of performance opportunities in the 1970s, but this came at a number of costs. Sukeroku Taiko went bankrupt once in the early 1970s, having expanded its performance schedule too aggressively. Meanwhile, founding members Ishizuka Yutaka and Onozato Ganei eventually decided to commit to the study of hōgaku, building upon the initial foundation provided in lessons by Kineya Sasazō. They received the hōgaku natori (performance names) Mochizuki Saburo and Tosha Kiyonari, respectively, and stopped performing regularly with Sukeroku Taiko. This chain of events led a split within the group: founding member Kobayashi Seido formed a new group, Ōedo Sukeroku Taiko, while Imaizumi Yukata, a young bon daiko champion who had joined the group shortly after its founding, formed a new version of Sukeroku Taiko (often differentiated from the previous group by using the variant name Sukeroku Daiko). Both group continue to perform to those day, allowing the Sukeroku style of contemporary taiko to grow from something used by a single group to a large style of performance that continues to evolve.

Contemporary Taiko on the Concert Stage: Ondekoza and Kodō

The professional activities of Sukeroku Taiko, combining festival and theatrical compositional and performance practices with assorted visual influences, helped to create a different style of taiko performance from that used by Ōsuwa Daiko, and together these two groups helped to push forward the burgeoning art form of contemporary taiko performance, demonstrating that an ensemble comprised entirely of taiko could be a viable form of entertainment. They paved the way for what would arguably become the most well known taiko ensembles not just in Japan but around the world: Ondekoza and Kodō. Ondekoza was founded in the early 1970s by Den Tagayasu, an academic who had been struck by the decline of regional performance traditions across Japan. A follower of the writings of Mao Zedong, who believed that farming communities were the source of a country’s artistic energy, Den felt inspired to change the degradation he saw in local arts he encountered when traveling across Japan. He invited students, artists, and scholars to an event on Sado Island, an island off the west cost of Honshū historically used as a prison for political exiles. At the event, Den proposed the creation of an artists’ village on Sado where people could learn about folk arts; to this end, they would create a taiko group—named Ondekoza after the ondeko (“demon drumming”) style of festival drumming on Sado—that would tour the world to raise funds and built awareness for this proposed retreat.

 

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