News

2008

The year of big events!

This year we decided to do something massive - a National Taiko Festival with all the groups from New Zealand, + two professional drummers from Japan!

It was quite a mission - grant applications, information packs, invitations, organization of two concerts and school tours...but we pulled it all together and by the time the beginning of March came around we were ready! It was a fabulous weekend, an amazing opportunity to meet other taiko enthusiasts from around the country and start forming a network among the NZ taiko groups. The Saturday night concert was a brilliant display of the wide range of styles and songs we have in our own little corner of the world. Then a massive finale with 50 drummers on stage at once!

But the most awesome thing was having two professional drummers - Riichi Yamauchi and Kenji Furutate join us for the festival. They wowed us all in their Friday night concert and blew us away with their unbelievable energy, presence and skill. They really made the festival something truly special. After the weekend we travelled up to Auckland with Riichi and Kenji to perform for Music in the Parks at Highwic house. We were so tired but managed to put on a great performance.

We travelled down to Gisborne for ANZAC weekend to join the civic band in concert and hold some workshops for the public. It was a fun weekend, with some beach jamming and a great concert. And we joined in the fun at Tirau Wow with a couple of fun workshops.

After the rush of TaikoFestival had died down, we decided to set a new challenge and produce a full-scale concert as part of the Ignition Fringe Festival. We tapped into the talents of the group to present a show featuring Japanese dances, instrumentals, songs, and lots of drumming. We added in a couple of firedancers to the mix and had a blast!

The rest of the year went by in a blur with Paeroa Jazz Festival, the Great Race and many other fantastic events and before we knew it 2009 had arrived.

2007

In the hot, hot summer we headed to Waiheke Island for CultureFest where we slept in a massive teepee and opened for Nathan Haines.

A year of firsts, we played for the first time at Rev120 Cycle race drumming at the start line to send the cyclists off with a boost.

We discovered the Tauwhare Sculpture park to be one of the coolest venues ever with a stage on the lake filled quarry complete with lilypads and frogs and outstanding acoustics.

We played for Hamilton's huge hot air balloon festival Balloons Over Waikato which was an awesome combination of noise and light.

We ran a workshop in Raglan and then had the workshop participants perform with us at a concert in the evening followed by dinner at Vinnie's. Yum.

This was also a year of returnees and visiting teachers. Michelle and Yurika both returned to the group after 2 year breaks and we had Kevin Man of Sydney's TaikOz and Toshiaki Kono from Japan visit us to teach.

This year marked our expansion into instruments other than just big drums including fue (flute), kane (gong), chappa (cymbals) and katsugioke (slung drum). Kevin and Kono gave us good grounding on the "how-to" of these instruments and taught us songs which utilize them and which we added to our repertoire as quickly as we could master them.

2006

We started this year off with the Hamilton Gardens Summer Festival again. This time we played for the opening of a new building called a Chinosserie alongside traditional Chinese musicians and an opera singer as well as the Mardi Gras opening and the Right Bank Arts Festival.

March saw us drumming for the fight against cancer at the Relay for Life. We only had to play for half an hour but the participating teams were required to have people walking constantly for the whole weekend. Hopefully our drumming helped the walkers keep up the pace.

Later that same day we shot over to a fruit orchard in Katikati for the Littleweed Festival where we opened the main stage accompanied by some determined dancers who somehow managed to boogie along to our beats.

Two of our members Mami and Paul got married under the trees at the University and we provided some pre and post ceremony entertainment before tucking in to the organic, roast beef from Paul's family farm. Yum.

In September we headed up to Auckland for a unique evening organized by drummer Fraser Bruce. Sort of an impromptu percussion festival, the evening featured AK Samba, Haere Mai Taiko, some marimba and of course African drumming. Unfortunately the venue was a community hall and noise control was called but it was still a fabulous night of mingled ethnic drumming.

We had an interesting evening at the Wintec Catering School when they prepared a Japanese Banquet. After performing we were treated to a delicious curry cooked by the students. Some of us partook of the wine provided and when we were asked to do an encore found out that drumming whilst slightly tiddly is quite a lot of fun.

2005

We started the year with a bang at the Hamilton Gardens Summer Festival. Scheduled to play in the Japanese garden we lugged our drums in to find all the flat space was filled with jostling fans so we repaired to the piazza - a larger space. It was an intimate performance with the crowd surrounding us completely and the energy was incredible. The audience loved us and we loved them back!

The Boxing Day Tsunami sparked fundraiser concerts all over the world and Wai Taiko helped the cause by playing at two Auckland ones - Butterfly Creek and Waitakare City concert in the stadium.

We decided that after building our reputation for 5 years that we might be successful in getting funding for drums from Japan so we applied to Sky City and the University of Waikato for assistance and were granted enough to buy 3 drums. After 5 years of playing on wine barrel taiko it was very exciting to play on Japanese instruments.

These drums travelled with us to Whangarei where we played for the local A&P show in December. Here we found hot sun, digger competitions, show jumping, an ABBA tribute band featuring Jacqui Clarke as Agnetha and the rockin' Puha Banditos acoustic street-band roaming around the food and clothing stalls playing with cool-dude style.

2004

We began this year with a high profile performance at the premiere of The Last Samurai in New Plymouth. We started by playing on a balcony above the red carpet while the VIP's entered the theatre and then we moved down to Pukekura Park where there was a party atmosphere. Right on the final beat of our last song fireworks exploded from the top of the building directly behind us. Pure delight.

In March Lianne got married and Wai Taiko called the guests from dinner to the site of the ceremony under the oak trees with some jungle drumming.

We reunited with Many Hands for the Miss Asia competition at the Aotea Centre in Auckland. As well as reliving some of the Taikollaboration pieces some tricky, precision drumming while ladies moved from here to there was required.

This was the first year of the Gallagher Great Race and the University asked us to play on the banks of the river to add to the festive atmosphere.

Instead of the yearly Christmas performance for ourselves, this year we decided to have a formal anniversary concert in the Gallagher Concert Chamber of the WEL Energy Academy of Performing Arts. Showcasing our favourite pieces and starring Ami Takeuchi, our live-in coach (at the time), we also featured the Serious Muffin Ukelele Ensemble as guest artists. It was an epic and memorable night.

2003

As we developed as a group we found our reputation was growing also. We kicked off the year by playing at the Big Day Out on the lilypad stage alongside 'sumo wrestling' and 'naked karaoke' (?!) Needless to say, we raised the tone of the area dramatically, and had an awesome time.

We were happy to welcome back Lianne after a 2 year break and once again we performed as part of the local talent at the Hamilton Gardens Summer Festival. We were seen around the University a lot, including opening for an ethnic fusion band called Many Hands as part of the Orientation week concerts. Their mix of instruments (tabla, djembe, guitar, double bass, drumkit, bagpipes and cook island drums!) were amazing and their music was fantastic. They loved us too and we teamed up to present a concert together 'Taikollaboration' with performances in Hamilton and in Auckland. It was a new challenge for us to blend in with a band, and we came up with an interesting mix and some cool dance moves to add to the chorus. Taiko - a go go !

We met up with them again at the end of the year when we played for Auckland Festival and enjoyed grooving along at their shows :

This year we were also lucky to connect with visiting taiko groups. We went to the Rotorua Arts Festival to watch the Beppu women's taiko group. Later we met Takane Midare Bayashi and did some workshops together as well as heading back to Rotorua to join forces with IPC's taiko group from Palmerston North and the Haeremai soran dance group in Auckland to do some performances all together.

After a busy year, Lianne and I were rewarded with Service to Culture awards at the University Blues Ceremony. Then we finished off the year with a lovely, low-key end of year performance and BBQ at the uni.

2002

2002 was a bumper year for Wai Taiko. We did 31 performances in one year!

We started what became a annual tradition, drumming at the Right Bank Arts Festival as part of the Hamilton Gardens Summer Festival, and also enjoyed playing in the Indigo festival early in the year. Performing at Founders theatre with all the other cultural groups, we helped represent the colourful variety of Hamilton's ethnic make up.

In the middle of the year we had our first collaboration with fire dancers as part of the Flaming Fringe Festival. Drumming in the dark in a band rotunda down by the river, with fire dancers swirling around us...and in the middle of the performance the rotunda lights flashed on to show us off. Pure drama.

Our favourite performance of the year was definitely Rhythm in the Square in Auckland - a fantastic event in Aotea Square organized by Fraser Bruce of the Rhythm Centre. Different drumming groups demonstrated percussion styles from all over the world, and our favourites were the Burundi group who used sticks like us and jumped around a lot! Afterwards we all had a massive drum-circle jam which was incredible!

2001

By 2001, Wai Taiko had already developed from being a casual 'have a go' cultural group into a busy performance group. We soon made a name for ourselves (as those noisy drummers!) and appeared at lots of uni events around campus - Orientation, International Day and Open day, and were able to drum up a crowd wherever we went. We also got involved in some of the events around the city such as the Festival of Asia and really enjoyed being part of the Outside the Square performances in Garden Place.

Near the end of the year we were joined by Ami Takeuchi, from Tachibana High School (where Lianne and Michelle learnt taiko) in Japan. She came over for a short English exchange and we were lucky to have her coaching us while she was in New Zealand. She was the leader of the taiko group in her senior year and was preparing to join a professional taiko group back in Japan so was a wealth of information as well as a true inspiration to us. In honour of her presence we planned a formal end of year concert to showcase our new songs including Shobu which Ami had written for us.

2000

Having obsessively discussed taiko, visited the only established group we could find in New Zealand (IPC in Palmerston North), convinced Barry Stephenson to make wine barrel drums, come up with a name, applied for funding to WEL Energy, approached the University of Waikato's East Asian Studies for support and purchased three shime drums from Miyamoto in Tokyo, Lianne and Michelle kicked off our first practice on the steps of EAS in March. Wai Taiko was born.

After a baby performance for O-week and a call for people to join we had an influx of keen beans and we soon got into a routine, practicing twice a week.

Our first ever bona-fide performance was at the St Andrew's Church Fair where we found out that not everyone is a fan of loud noise. The performance was generally successful though and when we got a call to travel to Auckland for the inaugural Japan Day we jumped at the chance. They must have liked us because to this day we perform at Japan Day which has grown massively and welcomes up to 10,000 visitors each year.

To celebrate our achievements and to show our friends and families what we had been up to we organized a Christmas concert.