First up, it helps to have around a dozen performers and a variety of percussive devices. With that many players, there are plenty of permutations and combinations to draw on.
A couple of other instruments, in this case flutes and koto, provide light and shade in the performance, and a constant rearrangement of instruments on stage between and within numbers throughout a highly choreographed performance helps to provide visual variety. But, in the end, it’s all about drums, and the sheer pounding power of these instruments is something to experience. Two sets (fifty minutes and a little over an hour) finished with a standing ovation and, while the audience was left wanting more, it’s difficult to imagine the performers had much left after a show that was awe-inspiring in its athletic intensity.
Not that everything was flat out percussive pounding. There was, as previously intimated, light and shade provided by the flute-players and while the advance publicity played on the martial arts aspect of the performance, a couple of baton-twirling interludes provide a visual counterpoint in a performance that’s already visually exciting.
Given the current economic and financial circumstances, the ticket price (a tad under eighty dollars) and associated costs (motel $120, lunch and dinner on the day of the show, lunch on the way back, fuel costs etc.) could have been enough to talk us out of going. A ballpark figure of four hundred dollars isn’t exactly peanuts.
It’s not the sort of show you’d go back to see a couple of times on the current tour since I don’t think it would vary much from night to night. Given the fact that we’re talking a highly choreographed performance and the logistical complexity associated with rearranging the drums on stage from number to number that’s entirely understandable.
A quick check of the tour schedule reveals they’ve been on the road since the start of the year with a two week break in the middle of Europe, a two-week transition between Europe and Taiwan and a two weeks in transit between Taiwan and an Australian tour lasting till late August, so it’s unlikely that the show will have changed by the time they’re back in our big back yard (Townsville, 27 August, no venue details at the time of writing), presumably on their way home.
But when they’re back in the neighbourhood after that we’ll be taking a serious look at catching the performance again.