The Deep Resonance of Watsonville Drummers

The powerful group drumming of taiko can tell stories and cultural traditions, and people feel it physically.

“Drumming is very low frequency,” said Ikuyo Conant, director of Watsonville Taiko Group. “So it really goes into your body. With Japanese drumming, you need to be able to shake sound—people’s mind and body—so it’s not just listening; the audience can feel it in their body."

Watsonville Taiko will perform Saturday at the Crocker Theater for Cabrillo College's fourth-annual Evening of World Theater and Dance. While taiko is a Japanese discipline and, therefore, a fitting choice for the World Theater and Dance night, it also has plenty of history right here on the Central Coast.

Taiko is an ancient art form fabled to have been created by the deity Ame no Uzume as a way to get the sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave, thereby bringing sunlight back to the world. Historical records place the first importation of the drums from China as early as 500 BC.

But the modern version of the physical, artful music actually came about fairly recently. Daihachi Oguchi is credited with establishing the form of taiko drumming performed by Watsonville Taiko. The modern version debuted in Japan in 1951 and differs from the traditional style—usually associated with Buddhism and rituals—in that it uses a whole ensemble of drums as opposed to just one or two. It's also more melodic.

While Conant enjoys the spiritual and ritual side of taiko, in some ways she has moved Watsonville Taiko's performances even farther from tradition.

“Taiko drumming is Japanese drumming, but my music is not really based on the Japanese music,” she said. “The Japanese is rather monotonous and simple, and people are more sophisticated here, so we need to have more rhythmic interventions.”

Watsonville Taiko was conceived and founded by the late Jim Hooker. Hooker, a lover of cultivating bonsai trees and Japanese culture in general, attended classes at the San Francisco Taiko Dojo. The San Francisco group, founded in 1968, was the first official taiko group in America.

The Watsonville group started 20 years ago; Conant joined just a few months in.

Now Conant has expanded Hooker's legacy to include two performance groups that hold about 40 shows annually as well as classes for seniors once a week in Santa Cruz and a youth curriculum.

“I think our area has a very, very nice community to support a lot of ethnic arts,” said Conant, whose stage name is The Valley between East and West. “We are very fortunate to have a good audience. I think that’s why we’ve been together for 20 years.”

The Saturday performance will feature the entire taiko ensemble in all its reverberating glory, as well as a narration by Conant, a simultaneous slideshow and performances by a tae kwon do group from Scotts Valley.

“There are many ways to interpret taiko drumming because it has elements of music, elements of martial arts and elements of movement—some of them like dance, some like martial arts and some spiritual,” Conant said.

This spiritualism, the more supernatural aspect of drumming, is something she’s very interested in, and in some ways brings her philosophy of taiko full circle.

"In a lot of societies drummers have been looked to as shamans,” she said. “At the start of many societies they used percussion to communicate with supernatural powers.”

Saturday, Conant hopes to share the spiritual aspect and express the culture of taiko with the audience.

“I hope I can shake the theater with my students," she said

Tickets are $15, $12 for students and seniors and can be purchased online at or at the door. The show starts at 8 p.m. at Cabrillo’s Crocker Theater.