Odaiko New England Winter Extravaganza

December 2010

I tried not to go too nuts taking pictures, really. This is less than half of what I shot, and all of what's here needed extensive fixup to compensate for weird light levels and greenish color casts, not to mention blurring from people moving or wrong autofocus. The dojo really needs some better stage lighting! There's only so much that can be rescued in these situations...

Click each small picture for its larger version; use your browser's "back" control to navigate. For easy bulk-downloading, here is a linear list of the big pictures.


Mark orienting everyone on how the show will run

Shows of hands: each group, and how many people know Shin'en?

Basement room: everyone getting ready, last-minute practice runs, groups doing their taiso...

[What I didn't capture was our Rec Class group's two full run-throughs with kuchishowa and air-taiko, all crammed into the kitchen! We needed it...]


Mark gets everyone in a big circle, thunderous levels of kiai happen ...

We have a refreshingly packed house!

Senryu

Ryujin

Boston Matsuri, the Rec Class piece.

Since I'm in this, I couldn't shoot pictures so I left the 'cam running on two-second timelapse and figured I'd get what I'd get. These are smaller as they're effectively still frames from a movie file at a fixed zoom.

Changes to the piece were amusingly interleaved with our rehearsals, up to the very end. People contributed photographs of musical notation, kuchishowa, and whatever they could for at-home practice references. Here is what I cooked up in GarageBand on a Mac to try and help -- a representation [in stereo!] of how our entire piece would run, using the synthesized drum-kits in the software.


Boston Matsuri

Boston Matsuri end, and then the camera catches me returning to it to stop the movie take

Raku

Kashmir preliminaries, where the big surprise from Wesleyan is revealed

Kashmir

Shin'en
[Which I declined to try and join in on, as while I've played it in the past I don't quite remember the whole sequence of parts]

Various presentations, as this is also Mark's farewell show

Ensemble: Yui

Taiko After Dark

The big medley, with a few auxiliary instruments and a voice part

Medley

More presentations start, and the members are turned away doing something mysterious...

after which Mark meets numeous doppelgangers of himself.

More gifts: Sam Adams, picture mosaics...

The evening ends with an all-out Kokyo run, with some audience participation

Mostly-failed ONE group shot, as I didn't get into position soon enough

_H*   101216