Événement

The Emperor's Nightingale & the Swarthmore Taiko Drummers

Swarthmore is one of a handful of colleges on the East Coast offering instruction and performance opportunities in taiko, a post-World War II Japanese art form defined by Kim Arrow, an associate professor of dance, "as the perfect marriage of music and drumming, of theater and dance." In moving around and among oversized, two- to three-foot-wide drums on a stage, players dance in choreographed rhythms -- the role of dance being to expand all that goes into the motion of striking the drum and recoiling from the hit, then striking again, and so forth. "In order to move correctly, you have to hit the drum correctly," says Arrow, who teaches Swarthmore's repertory class in taiko and directs the performance-oriented Swarthmore taiko group. "In order to hit the drum correctly, you have to move correctly.

And all of a sudden, you're dancing."

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The Emperor of China has a little brown nightingale that comes to sing to him every morning and evening. The Emperor loves the song. Then, in celebration of his birthday, a great feast is held. Many Kings and Nobles from around the lands bring him gifts. One of the gifts is a mechanical nightingale gilded in gold and jewels (quite dazzling) and, when wound, would sing like the real bird. Eventually, the Emperor lost interest in the real bird, all plain and simple, and only wanted to hear the mechanical bird. The little nightingale felt sad and neglected and flew away.

The Emperor didn't even notice at first that the little nightingale was gone, since all he had to do whenever he wanted to hear the 'nightingale's' song was wind the mechanical bird, and the bejeweled bird would sing for him. Until one day when the mechanical bird stopped singing. It broke, and no one in the land seemed able to fix it. The Emperor became sad, depressed, and ill so that the people thought he would surely die.

Word went out across the land, and the nightingale who once sang for the Emperor heard the news and returned to the palace, sang once again for the Emperor, who recovered, lived, and learned from the return of the little, plain, brown nightingale and his music.