The TAIKOPROJECT group visited the Rio Hondo campus on Thursday Feb. 20 at the L-Tower Breezeway to a crowd of 30 or so people with more people trickling in as time passed by. The group were the first performance of a string of shows and kicked off the lineup of said shows.
In the 2000’s a group of drummers in Los Angeles founded the TAIKOPROJECT, aiming to blend together its ancient Japanese play style with an American style of taiko along with other genres. TAIKOPROJECT consists of 17 members, however only five of them had attended the event and performed. One of the members, Doug Sakamoto, spent most of the time speaking with the crowd, the other member speaking was Liz Au.
When researching the ensemble of drummers, the group has previously played with Japanese J-Pop group, Atarashii Gakko! at Coachella last year and provided even more energy to their already killer set. However, only five members of the 17 had performed.
The event wasn’t the first time the ensamble had played for the campus as they had previously played for the college sometime in 2021. However, they had stated that they were playing on a “large field of grass” located at the lawn of the lower-quad and were glad to be playing at a better venue setup and hoped to play at the newly built venue sometime in the near future.
The set consisted of four songs that mashed together choreography with its vast variety of instruments such as bamboo flutes, cymbals and of course taiko drums. A song that was played during the short set aimed to capture the style of fast paced beats found within hip-hop and blended it in together with the taiko drumming pattern.
Near the end of the group’s set, they invited a small handful of the crowd to come up onto the stage and learn how to play taiko. Teaching them moves like the don, a forceful strike in the center of the drum, also teaching the volunteers correct timing to hit the drums together as a group.
Once the volunteers had left the stage, Au jokingly said “So we have our [new] Rio Hondo Taiko Club!” When the event wrapped up, many of the volunteers that went up said that playing the taiko had given them some sort of rush and if there ever was an official taiko club on campus, they would sign up for it.
TAIKOPROJECT thanked everyone for coming out to see them and encouraged the audience to attend their 25th anniversary show on July 19 which will be featuring a much larger group than there was at the campus event.