7 SEPTEMBER 1985, Page 30

Music

The Drummers of Kodo (Queen Elizabeth Hall till 15 September)

Japanese heartbeat

Duncan Fallowell

he Kodo show from Japan is very picturesque and frantic — even hysterical when compared to the sobriety of an English audience arranged in polite rows before the stage. The applause is as sincere and welcoming as if Martians were being paraded before an appreciative Queen Victoria at Windsor. The English are doing what they love to do, looking voyeuristical- ly at an alien culture, drawing the kind of sustenance from it we feel no longer able to draw from our own. A theory of the British Empire can be built on this one idea: empire as pursuit of Dionysus. An un- acknowledged erotic charge heats the audi- ence's curiosity and is in some cases the essential reason for it. This curiosity is sexual in the broadest sense of men and women being drawn to something which seems closer than they are to what Law- rence might have called blood conscious- ness.

There is a little decorous flute-playing. There is some highly strung playing of the shamisen. This is the classical Japanese lute, with the famous plink-plonk sound which to Western ears has become the symbol of 'weird' oriental music and often therefore the object of derision and parody. And there is a hypnotic dance from a girl in a beautifully curved straw hat which hides her face and exposes the nape of her neck. The flowing movement of her hands against the black set increasingly claims the attention as slowly she crosses the stage from right to left, then vanishes.

But the show is basically drums, and the variety of entertainment elicited from this principle over an hour and three quarters is considerable. Especially brilliant in its colour range is the opening piece, `Monochrome', composed in 1976. The huge taiko drums, beaten by sweating players and featured widely in the adver- tisements, bring the show to its climax. The name Kodo means 'heartbeat' and the sound of the largest taiko drum is said to resemble the mother's heartbeat as experi- enced by the child in the womb. Kodo also means 'Children of the Drum' and the players say that they hope to beat the drum with the simplicity of the child.

They perform, however, with the strength and concentration of fully grown men. The drumming is fierce. The dancing girl is a dreamy, vagrant interloper in this world of stylised male aggression. The performers, like figures in a Mishima fantasy, are muscular and not yellow- skinned but gold, perfect drumming- machines and, in the final sequence, naked but for the fundoshi — this is the tradition- al undergarment for the Japanese man, a strip of white cotton about six feet long and one foot wide which is tied to form a pouch at the front and drawn up tightly between the buttocks at the back. This is the minimum item of dress in Japan, with the exception perhaps of the dress of the Chiba fishermen near Tokyo who until very recently worked naked apart from a wisp of rice straw tied tightly round the fore- skin. Maybe the resurgence of traditional- ism in Japan in recent years will re- establish this quaint item of modesty. Kodo themselves are an aspect of this resurgence. It is not enough just to beat the drum. One must also live the life. Their appearance and intensity, into which no smile must intrude, suggest an utter de- dication to physical and drumming perfec- tion which in turn suggests a hard monkish life without too much distraction from women and children. The ten Kodo players live, according to their publicity, 'in a tight-knit spartan community on the Japanese island of Sado, and dedicate their lives to keeping the ancient folk art of Japanese drumming alive. Rigorous in the extreme, their daily existence begins with a 12-mile run before settling down to the long hours of practice.'

Although they draw their inspiration from the past and all the instruments, dances and designs are traditional, these are the raw material for original composi- tions. Despite what one might suppose, Kodo was founded only in 1971 and is not a samurai survival but a new form of enter- tainment based on the old arts of the village. The taiko drum was itself the symbol of the rural community. It is said that in ancient Japan the village limits were determined by the area within which its taiko drum could be heard. This probably worked quite well on flat terrain, but 10 hilly country — and Japan is mostly upland — the effect of amplified reverberations must have led to much argument with neighbouring settlements. Kodo manage to be both ascetic and Dionysiac, controlled and abandoned at the same time, which is often said to be the ideal life. There are fascistic dangers here too: unsmiling ceremony as expression of unbending, even hard-boiled life attitude. Nowhere in British culture is there such an outlet for the Dionysiac prowling within us. On the contrary, it is deliberately repressed, not just by customs which all cultures need, but by specific laws gov- erning drinking, sex, public and private behaviour of a usually innocuous kind- This repression was quite useful in the Past for winning wars and empires, in which the accumulated Dionysiac energy could be unleashed. But such wars are impossible for us now. The British Empire ended circa 1960, although the Dionysiac outflow con- tinued for a while and, locked within the island, produced the phenomenon of `Swinging England'. Pop/rock music re- mains our only form of Dionysiac expres- sion and this explains why we are pre- eminent at it. Otherwise this energy ex- presses itself in erratic and horrible out- bursts like the one at the Brussels football match. The British will be obliged to loosen their corset to allow a more natural fluctuation of the elemental force. Aboli- tion of the licensing laws would be an intelligent first step. So far the only Diony- siac event in the British calendar is the Notting Hill carnival. Its extraordinarily rapid development demonstrates the need for controlled expressions of abandon in our culture. The British are, however, still a long way from adopting, for example, the Japanese Buttock-Showing Festival on 15 April when the young men of Shiga walk through the streets with the backs of their kimonos rucked right up to expose their bright red fundoshi.