Marshall Middle School Concert
Monday, February 22, 2010 at 07:42AM Raion Taiko
Marshall Middle School Concert, February 20, 2010
"Matsuri"
お疲れ様でした！Wow! What a weekend! What a week, for that matter. Saturday, Raion Taiko held our first major concert (almost 2 hours long) at Marshall Middle School, in Marshall, MI. That's quite an accomplishment considering that we only just started practicing together last November.
We arrived in Marshall around 1 PM to unload and set up. Marshall Middle School has quite an old building, but it seems to be well taken care of, so it was very nice building, with a fairly impressive auditorium for a middle school.
The view from the stage. I wonder if we can fill up all the seats?
The reason for putting on this concert was as a fundraiser for some students who will be traveling to Japan in May. The more tickets they sold, the more money they raised for themselves. They had hoped to sell out the auditorium, which olds over 800 people. Unfortunately, since this was really our first major performance, we don't quite have the drawing power to sell that many tickets. Most people are still saying, "Raion Taiko? Who? What is taiko, anyway?" Hopefully our performance on Saturday began to answer some of those questions. In the end, however, we were only able to bring in somewhere around 150 (?) people.
Whether it was 100 people or 800 people, our goal was to give them an enjoyable evening. Based on the reaction at the end of the show, I believe we accomplished that. We had hardly finished playing the final note and there were calls from the audience for "One more! One more!" I can't tell you how happy that made us feel. Although there are many parts of our performance where we wish we could have played better, we our pleased that the audience enjoyed themselves. We had a good time, too.
The Encore - "Kaga Mushi Okuri"
We were all fairly exhausted after a big performance like this. Here is what our day was like:
9 - 10:30 taiko class at our Novi studio
11:00 leave for Marshall
12:45 arrive at Marshall Middle School and unload truck
1:15 場ミリ - marking stage locations for drums
"Move it just a little more to the right." Doing "Bamiri" before the run-through.
3:30 - 5:15 Rehearsal, program run-through
5:15 - 5:45 dinner
Backstage getting ready
6:30 - 8:30 Concert!
Miyake Taiko
9:00 Pack up
9:30 depart for studio
11:00 miss exit on freeway add an extra 30 min onto travel time
11:45 arrive at Novi studio and unload
12:30 AM Bedtime
After we finally got home, I said to Mayumi, "No wonder we're so tired, including the run-through, we actually played two full concerts today. But just think, groups like Yamato or Kodo have this kind of schedule nearly every day!" I think she may have been asleep before I finished what I was saying, though.
Great job everyone. Thank you to the members of Raion Taiko: Tom, Eileen and Larry; Thank you to our families who all helped us out in getting this show together and thank you to the staff and students in Marshall who hosted us. We all had a great time.
See you next year!
See the rest of the pictures from the concert in the photo gallery: