What is the Valencia Taiko Experience?
You come for a week of Japanese drumming in the mountains of Valencia. Every day you play, you practise and you discover what happens when you really pay attention to this spectacular drum art. You stay in a beautiful accommodation in the middle of the wild nature, while the well-oiled VTE team takes care of a carefree stay. You come for the taiko and for a week you are right in the middle of it. TAIKO. ALL IN.
More than drumming
In the mountains, a day holds more than drumming alone. Together we make sure that what needs to be done gets done. Free time, good food, drinks, sleep and a dip in the pool belong to it as well. Because in rest, what you have learned settles in best! For Erwin the same attention applies there: everything in service of the art!
“During VTE I create conditions in which you can really play and listen and really explore what you do not yet know. You can feel that experience on several levels and then take it home as a deeper experience.”
VTE gives you the time to truly immerse yourself in taiko playing. You work on, among other things, movement, technique, sound and ensemble playing. Often precisely with simple material, so you are not busy memorising complicated phrases but can feel what is happening in your playing. From there there is room to go further at every level. Whether you are playing taiko for the first time, are advanced or even a professional musician: you always work from where you are.
What the Valencia Taiko Experience is not
The Valencia Taiko Experience is not a Japan week. We do not make Japanese food, you do not have to wear Japanese clothing and you do not have to learn or speak Japanese. We do not pretend we are in Japan for a week. Of course we have respect for the origin of taiko drumming, but we do not offer a programme about Japanese culture in a broad sense. You come to Valencia to immerse yourself in the craft of taiko for a week.
To make this your own, you do not have to behave like a Japanese person. In Japan too, not everyone plays the same way. You do not have to imitate anyone: you learn and discover how you can play freely, precisely out of your own uniqueness.