Directors: Dawn Mikkelson, Keri Pickett
Finding Her Beat is a joyfully upbeat documentary about a group of contemporary female Taiko performers. Taiko, the legendary art of athletic playing on a variety of special drums, dates back centuries. In Japan it’s traditionally a male preserve. But now women in both South Asia and North America have come forward and started creating art forms based on Taiko.
Dawn Mikkelson and Keri Pickett, the film’s directors, focus on the preparations for a big event, HERbeat, where Taiko enthusiasts from both sides of the world – most of them amateurs – will come together in St Paul’s, Minnesota in the February of 2020. If the date rings a bell, it’s because, yes, it was when news of the Covid outbreak in China started to register in North America. Over and above the excitable jitters as players, singers and dancers rehearse, is the growing anxiety that their for-one-night-only performance will be threatened.
We know it successfully comes off: the film begins with highlights from the triumphant concert, in particular, the exhilarating drumming on the largest of the instruments – great gongs suspended at head height which drummers play, standing on podiums, their back to the audience. They pick up great drum sticks and begin a rhythmic beat, gradually weaving in other rhythms. It is a miracle of strength and balletic beauty, as the they dance in front of the drums, landing epic blows, before gracefully retracting their sticks to begin again. One of Japan’s famous female Taiko performers, Tiffany Tamaribuchi, arrives in America to perform alongside adoring amateurs. She is surprisingly modest, clearly happy to be part of this inclusive gathering.
It’s the brainchild of Jennifer Weir and her wife, Megan Chao-Smith in Minnesota, and the film focuses on their warmth and hospitality as guests start arriving in snow-bound St Paul’s. Their intention is to celebrate Taiko as an art form accessible to women, or rather, to people of any gender. As the guests work together over three weeks of rehearsal, they share their stories. Individuals talk of growing up feeling lonely and marginalised, some because they felt they didn’t fit in as Asians in America, some because they did not fit conventional gender norms. All speak enthusiastically of the empowerment of Taiko. Weir meanwhile is designing the show on the spot and the documentary captures both the initial exhilaration of meeting and beginning rehearsals and pockets of time where it wanes. But energy is rekindled, especially in the presence of international Taiko stars. Amazing Japanese performer, Kaoli Asano has the compelling energy of a rock star, yet admits she was a sickly child when, forty years before, she first started playing Taiko. She speaks of the strength and power she discovered in the art. One of the instrumentalists says taking up Taiko made her feel reborn, of feeling reborn. Chieko, had to defy her parents who advocated the traditional route for female happiness. Founding the group, Kodo, she says cheerfully, was an act of revenge on male domination.
The pandemic provides an unanticipated shape to the story. HERbeat, after its huge success, turns out to be the second-to-last show performed at the theatre before everything shuts down. But the beat goes on – in the closing credits we see a glimpse of another international Taiko gathering, this time in Tokyo in 2022.
Finding Her Beat is released on 14 February.
