“It is challenging especially in the first season when you think—this is so hard and I’m cold and wet and splashing everyone, I have blisters & bruises on various body parts and I ache! And you are absolutely horrified to be hitting other paddles because you haven’t got the timing, much less the technique. Then at some point you realize you are pretty well in sync most of the time and you haven’t drowned anybody with your splashing and the boat is moving through the waves and you are part of the engine moving this huge heavy monster. In fact the boat is gliding and you are alive and in a beautiful place.”

Boivin says he wants “to speak of connections between people and of the magnitude of their influence on one another. To whom do we owe the person we become? How do other beings collide with our own existence and ultimately, what shapes our identity? One by one, humans participate in the world, leaving behind a signature, a trace that someone else will find and make his own.

The first thing I thought when I held my baby in my arms was “now there is a possibility that when I die, this person will hold me and watch me die.” That had a very strong impact on me as a performer. Raising kids is a continual series of small (sometimes painful, sometimes joyful) details. But I get to practice my patience every day for 14 years! That skill is very helpful when you try to create anything from zero. I have these things about family and art. When I young in my own family I always thought there is no ART in here. Good art is in the quiet museums, nice cool-looking theatres, smoky cafés, or maybe eccentric crazy studios. Usually the places families go are noisy, crowded, sometime smelly, dirty, everyday life places. Since I have a family of my own I have to go to those places, far from the cool arts scene. But I started finding great art hiding in all of this ordinary, boring, everyday stuff.

“Here I am at 89, playing the Mozart oboe quartet on my harmonica. Living in the creative art — with no compromise! It feels great!” Harry Aoki

On Friday, May 6, 2011, at 6pm, a dinner and concert honouring Harry . . .

Did your family live or work in the Powell Street area before…

My own experience of any given Kodo concert will forever be coloured by the few days I spent at their home on Sado Island in the early eighties. As a fledgling taiko player I had travelled to Japan with other members of the newly-formed Katari Taiko to experience the birthplace of taiko and visit as many taiko groups as we could. The biggest thrill was being able to watch Kodo rehearse—sitting mere feet away on the polished wooden floor as they pounded the huge drums for hours at a time. It left my ears ringing and my enthusiasm for taiko stronger than ever. There was a focus and discipline in their rehearsals that North American groups lacked but there was also a sense of playfulness and fun that belied the stereotype of Japanese as soulless automatons.

Originally born in Sacramento in 1920, Jimmy Mirikitani was raised in Hiroshima, where he quickly showed a talent for painting. He returned to the US in 1938 to pursue his art, but ended up in the Tule Lake internment camp during the war . . .