about
Michael Sakamoto creates interdisciplinary performances in butoh-based dance theater and contemporary theater as well as photography, installation, and media art. Drawing on influences as diverse as the dark, visceral physicality of butoh, the weighted presence and minimalism of Zen, and pop culture from around the globe, his works express a subversive yet benevolent multiculturalism caught within an absurdist east/west dialectic.
Since 1998, Michael has performed and exhibited his works in Europe, Mexico, and throughout the USA. From 1994-2000, he was also a featured soloist in the Rachel Rosenthal Company.
Michael is also a longtime arts administrator, consultant, and grantwriter. From 2000-2007, he was Program Coordinator at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA, one of the leading international artist residency centers worldwide. Michael has consulted on arts marketing and sat on grant panels for numerous institutions, including the Japanese-American Cultural and Community Center, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Durfee Foundation, Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department, and others.
grants / awards
Meet the Composer - Commissioning Music USA
The James Irvine Foundation/DanceUSA – California Dancemaker Grant
California Community Foundation – Visual Arts Fellowship
Asian Cultural Council - Religion and Humanities Fellowship
UC Institute for Research in the Arts - Collaboration Grant
Pacific Rim Research Program
Durfee Foundation – ARC Grant (2x)
Japan Foundation – Arts and Cultures Award
Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department – Artist-in-Residence (2x)
residencies
Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University
Djerassi Resident Artists Foundation
Centre d’art Marnay art center (CAMAC), France
Watts Towers Arts Center
Los Angeles Theatre Center
artist statement
My work addresses the subconscious through disturbing, iconic, yet highly emotional imagery as well as concrete details, often via fictional characters fully contextualized within history, culture and language. I attempt to present an attraction to both passionate intellectual discourse and wistful, surreal experience, lying between mythically pop, collagist subversion and haunting, surreal dreamscapes. I attempt to create complex structures common in western contemporary performance art and dance theater and filter them through a raw, primal, improvisational movement of traditional butoh.
Working in exhibition and public spaces, my interdisciplinary works attempt to subvert mainstream intellectual notions of authenticity, knowledge and culture via fictionalized environments and visceral imagery. For over a decade, I have created numerous works in both performance and visual art that revel in, question and , hopefully, subvert many of our deeply-held beliefs based in pop culture and media, such as cinema, television, music and advertising, peering into the "soul" of given socio-cultural constructs.
My work is also multicultural and international without an overt political agenda. I have created over a dozen performances caught in an absurdist, dialectic purgatory between East and West.