Copyright by Angela Kristine Ahlgren 2011
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Copyright by Angela Kristine Ahlgren 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Angela Kristine Ahlgren certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko Committee: ______________________________________ Jill Dolan, Co-Supervisor ______________________________________ Charlotte Canning, Co-Supervisor ______________________________________ Joni L. Jones ______________________________________ Deborah Paredez ______________________________________ Deborah Wong Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko by Angela Kristine Ahlgren, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2011 Dedication To those who play, teach, and love taiko, Ganbatte! Acknowledgments I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to each person whose insight, labor, and goodwill contributed to this dissertation. To my advisor, Jill Dolan, I offer the deepest thanks for supporting my work with great care, enthusiasm, and wisdom. I am also grateful to my co-advisor Charlotte Canning for her generosity and sense of humor in the face of bureaucratic hurdles. I want to thank each member of my committee, Deborah Paredez, Omi Osun Olomo/Joni L. Jones, and Deborah Wong, for the time they spent reading and responding to my work, and for all their inspiring scholarship, teaching, and mentoring throughout this process. My teachers, colleagues, and friends in the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas have been and continue to be an inspiring community of scholars and artists. Josephine Lee at the University of Minnesota has also been a generous mentor, whose encouragement fueled this project in its early stages. Many thanks to the taiko players I interviewed without whose time, insights, and spectacular performances this dissertation could not have been written: Yurika Chiba, PJ Hirabayashi, Roy Hirabayashi, Franco Imperial, Meg Suzuki, Wisa Uemura, Gregg Amundson, Jeff Ellsworth, Rachel Gorton, Susie Kuniyoshi, Heewon Lee, Rick Shiomi, Iris Shiraishi, Jennifer Weir, Al Zdrazil, Eileen Kage, Leslie Komori, Kristy Oshiro, Tiffany Tamaribuchi, and Toyomi Yoshida. Thanks also to Don Eitel and the Mu Performing Arts staff, and to Wisa Uemura of San Jose Taiko for helping me with organizational aspects of my research. I would also like to thank Karen Falkenstrom and Rome Hamner of Odaiko Sonora for their hospitality and goodwill. I am also indebted to v Sojin Kim, Jane Nakasako, and the Japanese American National Museum staff for assistance with accessing the museum’s archives. I owe a special thanks to Rick Shiomi, Iris Shiraishi, and Jennifer Weir for their tireless dedication to Mu Daiko, and for their mentorship as taiko players, artists, and exemplary human beings. To Rachel Gorton, I am also grateful for our years of playing taiko together as blond taiko Dopplegangers. Were it not for the many performances, recitals, rehearsals, potlucks, and road trips with Mu Daiko members, students, and community, I am sure this work would not have been written at all. Members of Austin Taiko and UT Gindaiko made it possible for me to continue playing taiko in Austin, Texas, and the North American Taiko Conference has provided the resources, energy, and a site for all of us to continue meeting, learning, and playing together. Writing is not the solitary process it is often made out to be, thanks in large part to the writing group whose members have shaped and improved this project: Clare Croft, Tamara Smith, Jenny Kokai, Rebecca Hewett, Heather Barfield, Michelle Dvoskin, Shelley Manis, and Carrie Kaplan. A million thanks to Margaret Hanson, Michelle Dvoskin, Shelley Manis, and Patrick McKelvey for their eagle-eyed and last-minute proofreading. I am so deeply grateful to my wonderful family and friends for their support, encouragement, and love. My parents, Bruce and Marla Ahlgren, have always supported my intellectual pursuits with pride and encouragement. I am grateful for the humor and perspective that my sister Jill and brother Jon bring to my life. And for her love, support, and endless pancake breakfasts, I thank my grandmother, Aura Rachel Maki. Mary Katherine Stickel, Michelle Dvoskin, Ellen Glatman, Amanda Moulder, and Andee Scott vi deserve special thanks for their friendship and for the many meals of Tex-Mex and margaritas that got me through this process. There are not enough thanks in the world to offer Clare Croft for her intelligence, wit, love, and uncanny ability to understand when I need a good meal. She has read every word and talked through countless ideas with me, and the document is all the better for her labor and insights. To those listed here and countless others, yoroshiku onegaishimasu. vii Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko Publication No. __________ Angela Kristine Ahlgren, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisors: Jill Dolan and Charlotte Canning Taiko is a highly physical and theatrical form of ensemble drumming that was popularized in 1950s Japan and has been widely practiced in Japanese American and other Asian American communities since the late 1960s. Taiko’s visual and sonic largesse—outstretched limbs and thundering drums—contrasted with pervasive stereotypes of Asians as silent and passive. This dissertation uses ethnographic participant-observation, archival research, and performance analysis to examine how North American taiko performance produces and is produced by the shifting contours of racial, gender, and sexual identity and community. Taiko groups create, re-shape, and challenge familiar notions of Asia, America, and Asian America through their public performances and in their rehearsal processes. While sometimes implicated in Orientalist viii performance contexts, taiko players use performance strategically to commemorate Asian American history, to convey feelings of empowerment, and to invite feminist, anti-racist, and queer forms of spectatorship. This dissertation explores taiko’s roots in the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, its implications for 1990s multiculturalism, as well as its intersections with contemporary queer communities. My analysis focuses on three case study groups whose origins, philosophies, and geographic locations offer a diverse view of North American taiko and the Asian American/Canadian communities with which they are associated. Chapter One considers how San Jose Taiko’s early articulation of their identity as an Asian American taiko group continues to influence its practices and performances, particularly their taiko-dance piece, “Ei Ja Nai Ka?” and their national tours. Chapter Two examines how Minneapolis-based Mu Daiko negotiates its members’ diverse racial, ethnic, and gender identities within a Midwestern context that values multiculturalism. Chapter Three considers how the all-women’s group Jodaiko conveys Asian American lesbian identity and invites queer spectatorship through theatrical performance choices and its members’ everyday gender performances. My analysis extends from my ethnographic participant-observation, which includes personal interviews, attendance at workshops and performances, and spending time with performers; archival research in formal collections, groups’ internal documents, and my personal archive of taiko programs, posters, photographs, DVDs, and other ephemera; and performance analysis that is informed by my twelve years of experience as a taiko performer. ix Table of Contents Introduction: Performing at the Intersections of Identity: Taiko, History, and Representation ................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: San Jose Taiko’s Asian American Movements: Authenticity, History, and Representation ..................................................................... 57 Chapter Two: Mu Daiko’s Mixed Company: Multiculturalism, Whiteness, and Women................................................................... 105 Chapter Three: Jodaiko’s Butch Bodies: Taiko, Gender Performance, and Queer Spectatorship................................................. 156 Conclusion: Michigan Taiko, Anti-Asian Violence, and Performances of Hope .......... 196 Glossary...................................................................................................................... 205 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 207 Vita............................................................................................................................. 220 x Introduction North American Taiko, the Asian American Movement, and Performing at the Intersections of Identity My knees begin to ache slightly, as they always do during the long intro of “Journey to Toji Temple.” I squat over my feet, my right knee digging into the stage floor, my left one jutting slightly forward and out. My arms are extended out from my body, my hands rest on my bachi, which support the weight of my arms. It’s not good form to let the drum sticks bear my weight, but I struggle to stay balanced over my feet as Rick plays the slow crescendo on the set of shime-daiko behind me: Ten tsuku ten tsuku ten tsuku ten ten/ Ten tsuku ten tsuku ten tsuku