Warrior Ethos: Drumming Narratives of Interculturality

Performing together, Japanese Canadian taiko artist Kage (Eileen) performing on taiko and African-American, Music Research Strategist and percussionist Marshall Trammell explore emergent, collaborative narratives in sound utilizing the unique acoustics of inner architecture of the performance space and our idiosyncratic approaches to new and ancient instruments.

This event is presented as part of the 16th annual Heart of the City Festival, which ran from October 30 to November 10, 2019.

Eileen Kage 

In the 1980's as a mixed race queer youth and settler of Japanese ancestry on the Coast Salish Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples, Kage embraced the art of taiko. Taiko was a way to be engaged in the Japanese Canadian community in a creative and empowered way where negative stereotypes of Asians were rampant.  The taiko community consisted primarily of Asian North Americans who were inspired by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.  Since the 1980's Kage has co-founded several taiko and music groups including Sawagi Taiko, Uzume Taiko, LOUD and continues to collaborate artistically with other artist/activists including musicians, movement artists and writers. Their on-going projects include working with Onibana Taiko (trio made of taiko veterans focusing on communing with ancestors through feminist punk aesthetics performing kick-ass taiko), exploring the ceremonial roots of taiko and pushing the boundaries of the taiko form.

Marshall Trammell 

Marshall Trammell is the experimental percussionist and critical ethnographer known as Music Research Strategies (MRS). The identity of this arts engagement platform began as a critical ethnographic framework bridging obsessions with strategic, or compositional, improvising strategies, organizational improvisation and psychology, and street-level, social justice, international organizing. MRS navigates the global economy as a touring musician performing-research and -political education nationally and internationally through a battery of modular, social science-based systems producing several works for fellowships, residencies, festivals, and investigations. Trammell will undertake a collaboration and exchange with ProArts Executive Director Natalia Mount in a closed, speculative session process pledge work on a larger scale (local vs. global) to galvanize a movement.

MRS organizational strategy mimics scholarship embedded in indigenous technologies in professional development pedagogy (guild) and simultaneous multi-dimensionality (cognitive embodiment/Dr. Anku) to serve as an interlocutor of new language development of Warrior Ethos amongst Warrior Ecologies from the Pacific Northwest, the San Francisco Bay Area, Mexico City, the Southwest, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. A recent Intercultural Leadership Institute fellowship, residencies with East Side Arts Alliance, Prelinger Library, Off Lomas, Southern Exposure, Museum of Human Achievement, and Charlotte Street Foundation, and future engagements in 2019 and 2020 at Rhizome DC, Western Front (Vancouver, BC) and Rauschenberg (Florida), have yielded a transformation of Trammell’s 30+ year, vernacular practice. Trammell is known for participation in such music project as Black Spirituals (Sige), In Defense of Memory, Mutual Aid Project and collaborations with Saul Williams, David Murray, Dohee Lee, Dylan Carlson, Pauline Oliveros, Raven Chacon, Laura Ortman, Aaron Turner, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Hafez Modirzadeh, Genny Lim and others for 30 years.

Trammell is affiliated with East Side Arts Alliance, and a member of Solidarity Research Center.