Rudimentary

For the past few weeks we've been working on basic drills. We've got some time to breathe and focus on stuff like kata and sticking, and it's been really good. I love drills. I love it when they make you all tired and sweaty. Tonight I pulled out my drum practice book and worked on some rudiment stuff. Worked on left-handed doko dons, my favorite counting drill, paradiddles, pataflaflas and getting my left hand to play an egg-shaker. I've been concentrating on my left so much, when I played with my right it sounded wimpy. It was daylight when I first crawled into the chasm to practice, and when I looked up later, it was completely dark.

I feel like I'm entering a new phase in my taiko education. Up to this point it's been all about learn-learn-learn. I sucked up everything anyone could teach me, always wanting more. But now I think it's more about learning how to learn. How can I explain that? I think it's one thing to seek out others to teach you, but at some point you have to take what you already know and expand on it yourself. You have to seek out new things and teach yourself what they are and how to play it and how to interpret it to suit you and to use it as a way to express your own artistic goals. I don't know if I'm at that lofty place yet, but I'm learning it. Breaking away from Emeryville, while liberating and a little scary, has sent me down a new and exciting path. Playing with Maze is a challenge. There's the material, which is different and hard, and I don't get the sort of learning curve I would have gotten at E-ville. Over there, you would go over the same piece of material week after week, learning what the sticking is, and where your arm should be and where you should be looking and how to stand--you did that until it hurt. But with Maze, those things are more given, and we plow through things. They don't leave me behind when I don't get it, which is wonderful and comforting, but I guess the level and expectation is different. Learning how to learn.

I think my new challenge is to figure out how to contribute more. It's less, do it this way, and more, how do you think we should do this? I need to have answers. Need to figure out what I think is interesting. I'm trying though. I think that Janet gives me nudges in the right direction. She doesn't tell me outright, but I think she opens up opportunities for me to come into my own. Maybe she's not even doing it intentionally. But she gave me my own taiko class and the opportunity to be a leader and to develop my own sense of direction. She has never told me how I ought to run the class or what material I should cover or anything. I have to figure that out on my own. And she so generously gave me that drum to finish and put a head on. That was a saga in itself, but now she's given me the opportunity to put heads on her other drums. It's not exploitation or anything--it's something I want to do--first because I need to start to repay the kindness of her giving me my own drum (which is my own concept, not hers--the only string she attached was that "Maze could maybe play the drum"), but also because I'm finding that I love working with my hands and figuring out how to make equipment and stuff. I made my own down stand a month ago. I remember when she was teaching at E-ville, she'd play her own drums and didn't want the beginners to play on them (because they tend to pound the hell out of them). But now, I get to put new heads on her drums. That's kind of an honor, I think.

This is something new for me to think about and work on. How do I move from being a student to being my own person? It's a new chapter-- a good one too.