Drumming Up Success

Rick Shiomi is sitting straight-backed in a metal chair in the basement of a Northeast Minneapolis office building. The fifty-nine-year-old speaks softly and purposefully, as if his mind’s velocity is programmed for peak performance: even-keeled, focused, and pragmatic. When excited, he does not raise his voice. He is self-confident, serene, welcoming. Shiomi is the artistic director of Mu Performing Arts, one of the country’s premier Asian-American theater companies. He is, in other words, a very busy man.

In 1990, Shiomi, who is a third-generation Japanese Canadian, visited Minneapolis to speak to colleges about Asian-American theater. It was then that he met his future wife, Martha Johnson, a theater professor at Augsburg College and an authority on Japanese Noh theater. After traveling between Minneapolis and Canada for almost two years, Shiomi settled here, drawn by the vital theater scene and the love of his life.

In 1992, Johnson and Shiomi, along with Korea-born University of Minnesota student Dong-Il Lee, founded Theater Mu, an organization devoted to Asian-American theater. The word mu (pronounced “moo”) has multiple meanings. The company uses the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese ideogram for the shaman/ artist/warrior who connects the heavens to the earth through the tree of life.

Starting an Asian-American theater company in the Midwest was a risky venture. Five years earlier, the Asian-American playwright Philip Kan Gotanda received a McKnight fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center, but left after completing the first half of his fellowship, pointing out that there were no Asian-American actors in town to do his plays or other Asian- American theater artists with whom to share ideas.

Nevertheless, Mu got off to an auspicious start, debuting at the Southern Theater with scenes from David Henry Hwang’s FOB. (Hwang is now considered the preeminent Asian-American dramatist in the United States.) Also in that first season, Lee wrote and directed scenes from his work-in-progress Mask Dance: Journey Within. Community reaction was positive, so the threesome continued to nurture their fledgling company.

A year after Mu was formed, Shiomi stepped into his current position and has been the face of the Midwest’s foremost Pan-Asian–American theater ever since. In addition to producing three full-length shows a year, the organization also presents an annual Mu Daiko concert. Daiko (also spelled “taiko”) means “drum” in Japanese. Daiko is a contemporary version of an ancient percussive art form that uses complex rhythms, dynamic choreography, and tremendous athleticism to create a performance unlike anything Western culture has produced. Watch Shiomi bang on an enormous drum, and it’s clear that this outwardly composed man possesses almost superhuman strength and endurance—qualities that come in handy in his line of work.

By 1997, he was choreographing and teaching daiko to Mu devotees. Currently, the Mu Daiko ensemble is comprised of twelve members, all of whom trained with Shiomi. “We are [now] equal parts theater and daiko,” he says. “That makes us unique in North America and kind of in the world to do both at this level of intensity.” Last year, the organization changed its name from Theater Mu to Mu Performing Arts to reflect its dual roles. This month, Mu and St. Paul’s SteppingStone Theatre for Youth Development are producing the world premiere of Shiomi’s Journey of the Drum: A Taiko Fable. Set in ancient Japan, the play focuses on a young girl’s secret desire to play daiko, which was traditionally a men’s-only activity. (Mu’s real-life daiko group is almost entirely women.)