The San Diego Repertory Theatre is downtown San Diego's resident professional theatre -celebrating year-round on our three stages and in their art galleries the diversity and creativity of their community. As the resident and managing company of the Lyceum Theatre, they produce and host over 300 events and performances a year.
Their mission is informed by a commitment to artistic virtuosity, partnerships with singular artists and their inquisitive neighbors, and lively conversations about their role as citizens in the bi-national region they call home. They choose provocative works of theatre to inspire their audiences and artists to build the communication bridges needed to understand who they are today, and who they might become.
The company was founded in 1976 by Sam Woodhouse and D.W. Jacobs.
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The 1,463-seat theater first operated as a vaudeville house, then as a movie palace and now as a place to showcase live performances.
Spreckels has hosted world renowned soloists; top theatrical productions; star attractions; first run films; touring acts; international companies for music, theatre, and dance: celebrated comics; and more.
Spreckels Theatre was designated a National Historic Site in 1973.
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The internationally-acclaimed, Tony Award-winning Old Globe is one of the most renowned regional theatres in the country, and has stood as San Diego's flagship arts institution for over 75 years.
The Old Globe produces a year-round season of 15 plays and musicals on its three stages, including its highly-regarded Shakespeare festival. The Globe has become a gathering place for leading theatre artists from around the world, such as Tom Stoppard, Daniel Sullivan, and Chita Rivera, among many others. Numerous Broadway-bound premieres and revivals, such as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Full Monty, and Damn Yankees have been developed at The Old Globe and have gone on to enjoy highly successful runs in New York and at regional theatres across the country.
The Old Globe is at the forefront of the nation's leading performing arts organizations, setting a standard for excellence in American Theatre.
The mission of The Old Globe is to preserve, strengthen, and advance American theatre by: Creating theatrical experiences of the highest professional standards; Producing and presenting works of exceptional merit, designed to reach current and future audiences; Ensuring diversity and balance in programming; Providing an environment for the growth and education of theatre professionals, audiences and the community at large.
Location:
Old Globe Theatre
1363 Old Globe Way
San Diego, CA 92101
For more information:
Phone: (619) 234-5623
or
Visit: theoldglobe.org
or
Email:
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Balboa Theatre:
Built in 1924, the historic Balboa Theatre was an elegant vaudeville and movie palace in the heart of downtown San Diego. At the time it was a state-of-the-art building that included six storefronts along Fourth Avenue, with 34 offices on the floors above.
The Balboa Theatre has been closed for over twenty years. After numerous efforts to privately renovate and reopen the Theatre, the commitment was made in 2002 to retain the historic Balboa Theatre as a public asset with the City's Redevelopment Agency funding its renovation and restoration and reopening the Theatre as a community performing arts center to be managed and operated by San Diego Theatres.
Upcoming events include Brazilian guitar, Russian ballet, and Chinese circus acts.
San Diego Civic Theatre:
The 2,967 seat San Diego Civic Theatre is the region's largest and greatest attended performing arts venue. The Civic Theatre is owned by the City of San Diego and is managed and operated by San Diego Theatres on behalf of the community.
Opened in January 1965, the Civic Theatre has hosted the world's finest talents in the fields of opera, classical music, dance, comedians, contemporary music, and Broadway. Additionally, it has served as a community gathering place for inaugurations, governmental addresses, religious services, political activities, lectures, educational presentations, and corporate meetings.
Upcoming events include opera and ballet.
For shows and tickets at either venue, see:
SDcivic.org
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Internationally popular, Taiko drumming is a relatively new performance tradition that employs traditional Japanese instruments in new and dramatic ways. Jazz drummer Daihachi Oguchi is credited with creating Kumi-daiko style of Taiko in 1951. The sound is exuberantly loud with complex rhythms and dramatic choreographed moves by performers which meld music with angular and precision movement (amplified in effect by black headbands), evoking a martial arts esthetic. |
Taiko: an emergent tradition
Taiko is used to describe the music made with Japanese drums known as Taiko. In Japanese, the word Taiko is used to describe any sort of percussion instrument that is most precisely "wide", because Taiko literally translates into "wide or fat drum". What most people in America refer to as Taiko is actually a relatively new art form known as Kumi-daiko, which is a performance consisting of multiple Taiko drums.
The use of Taiko drums in Japan dates back further than 1,400 years and its origins are most likely rooted in Chinese and Korean traditions. The exact history of Taiko drumming in Japan is unknown, but the oldest evidence of Taiko in Japan is a clay figure, dating back to the 6th or 7th century, that is shown beating a Taiko drum.
Taiko was originally used for various reasons. From the Heian era until the 14th century, Taiko was used on battlefields to intimidate enemies, as well as to give commands, motivate, and coordinate soldiers by setting a marching pace. It was also used off the battlefield; in the Edo period, Taiko drums were used for signals such as hunters beginning their hunt, fire alarms, sumo announcements, and storm warnings. Japanese people also felt that the drum had spiritual powers, calling the Taiko sound the voice of Buddha and using the drums to call to the gods during harvest time.
As Buddhism and Shinto beliefs became more prevalent, only holy men were allowed to play the Taiko drums for ceremonious reasons and occasions, and practices like these still continue today. In Japanese history, Taiko drums were played singularly and only with permission of priests. Indeed even in artistic uses of the Taiko, as in accompanying Japanese theater arts like Noh or Kabuki, the Taiko drum was played singularly. The modern group Taiko ensembles, which many people associate Taiko with today, is known as Kumi-daiko and came later in history.
Daihachi Oguchi is credited with creating the Kumi-daiko style of Taiko in 1951 post-WWII Japan. Having a background in Jazz music, Oguchi found a traditional Taiko composition and decided to rearrange it, breaking away from many Taiko traditions by using multiple Taiko drums that had different sounds and multiple, simple rhythms, and were played by non-professional musicians. The new composition was played for the Osuwa Shrine, and Oguchi's style of Taiko quickly became popular in Japan and then around the world. This style of Taiko is still very popular today and Westerners typically associate it with the sounds and performances of Taiko drumming.
Taiko Instruments
Taiko are considered sacred instruments that are created from the earth. Daiko is the word for taiko drums when used in a compound word. There are two types of taiko drums that have many varieties: byou-daiko (drums are carved from a single log, with heads stretched and tacked to the body, and thus cannot be tuned) and shime-daiko (drums with two heads that are sewn over steel rings and laced to the body with a rope or cord. A second rope is wound around the laces of the head ropes, and the drum can be tuned by adjusting the second rope.) In taiko groups, the shime is often used to keep the basic rhythm and establish time, but it can be a solo instrument as well.
Bachi - As a general rule, taiko drums are struck with sticks called bachi. Bachi come in many shapes and sizes and are made from many different types of material.
Types of Byou-daiko:
Nagado-daiko - This is the most common taiko drum used in Kumi-daiko. They are often called Miya-daiko. They have a characteristically deep and reverberating sound. These drums come in different sizes: ko-daiko (roughly 1 to 1.5 feet in diameter), chu-daiko (roughly 1.6 to 2.8 feet in diameter), and odaiko (from 2.9 to 6 feet or more in diameter).
Odaiko - The biggest of the Nagado-daiko, these drums are played horizontally on stands, often by two people at once. Odaiko can sometimes reach huge proportions and weigh over 3 tons, although these drums are used more for temples than for Kumi-daiko.
Hira-daiko - It tends to be a small drum but can reach odaiko proportions. It is popular for taiko groups to buy a very large sized hira-daiko for less than a nagado-daiko drum of the same size. They have a deep sound much like the nagado-daiko, but because of the slimmer body, the sound diminishes much faster.
Types of Shime-daiko:
Wadaiko - These drums are used for classical Japanese music. They have relatively lightweight bodies and thin heads, often with thin patches of deer skin in the middle of the heads.
Tsukeshime-daiko - These drums are used for folk music and Kumi-daiko. They are much heavier and thicker type of wadaiko, and can be tuned to a very high pitch.
Oke-daiko - They are carved from multiple pieces that are fit together. Also, they are larger than nagado-daiko - often 6 feet long with a 3 foot diameter. Like odaiko, oke-daiko are played horizontally on a stand. Short-bodied styles of oke-daiko are becoming popular. They are usually played using slat-like bamboo bachi causing the drum to produce a loud, flat sound.
By Ian Williams
Photos by Berwyn Husmann
Group Pictured: Naruwan Taiko
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Joomla!
Extensions
The Joomla! content management system lets you create webpages of various types using extensions. There are 5 basic types of extensions: components, modules, templates, languages, and plugins. Your website includes the extensions you need to create a basic website in English, but thousands of additional extensions of all types are available. The Joomla! Extensions Directory is the largest directory of Joomla extensions.
Components
Components are larger extensions that produce the major content for your site. Each component has one or more "views" that control how content is displayed. In the Joomla administrator there are additional extensions such as Menus, Redirection, and the extension managers.
Modules
Modules are small blocks of content that can be displayed in positions on a web page. The menus on this site are displayed in modules. The core of Joomla! includes 24 separate modules ranging from login to search to random images. Each module has a name that starts mod_ but when it displays it has a title. In the descriptions in this section, the titles are the same as the names.
Content Modules
Content modules display article and other information from the content component.
User Modules
User modules interact with the user system, allowing users to login, show who is logged-in, and showing the most recently registered users.
Display Modules
These modules display information from components other than content and user. These include weblinks, news feeds and the media manager.
Utility Modules
Utility modules provide useful functionality such as search, syndication and statistics.
Navigation Modules
Navigation modules help your visitors move through your site and find what they need.
Menus provide your site with structure and help your visitors navigate your site. Although they are all based on the same menu module, the variety of ways menus are used in the sample data show how flexible this module is.
A menu can range from extremely simple (for example the top menu or the menu for the Australian Parks sample site) to extremely complex (for example the About Joomla! menu with its many levels). They can also be used for other types of presentation such as the site map linked from the "This Site" menu.
Breadcrumbs provide users with information about where they are in a site.
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