Press
Selected Quotes
Reviews
Features
Features
Contemporary Magazine, Winter 2007
Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2004 (Donna Perlmutter)
LA Weekly, March 18, 2004 (Sara Wolf)
Santa Fe New Mexican, November 28, 2003
LA Weekly, July 12, 2002 (Peter Frank)
LA Weekly
March 19, 2004
Dance Pick of the Week
By Sara Wolf
A big fish primarily in local waters, Sakamoto, like (Shen) Wei, is both dancer and visual artist and produces work grounded in Eastern aesthetics. Like Wei, Michael Sakamoto has also chosen to use Stravinsky's one piano/two pianist version for The Rite of Spring, etc. - but comparisons and coincidences end there. Sakamoto's gift for physical nuance (the result of more than a decade's worth of training in the nihilistic Japanese dance form butoh) lends a quiet, evocative grandeur to the maelstrom of performance elements and nutty script of his Rite, in which an actor, monk, clown and free spirit roam across a vast, emotional terrain - much like the haunting, inescapably passionate music that it takes as its impetus.