Michael Sakamoto - Interdisciplinary Artist

Los Angeles Times
August 3, 1999

Dance Review - "Glorious Day for an Unknown Woman"

by Lewis Segal, Dance Critic

(Michael) Sakamoto's "Glorious Day for an Unknown Woman," in the tiny, enclosed gallery at Espace DbD expressed its longing through poetic texts, its transformative energies through wistful role-playing and attempts at fusion with the magical images of motion pictures.

The final section of Sakamoto's "Cinema Trilogy," this 100-minute solo evoked the Tokyo, Paris and Hollywood sojourns of what the program booklet called "the great, obscure Japanese film narrator (benshi) and filmmaker Musei," by showing Sakamoto first in male Japanese attire, then in a Louise Brooks wig and evening gown, finally in flamboyant hippie drag, with the movement style adjusted to suggest, and dryly parody, each nation's body image.

A commanding performer with large, expressive hands, Sakamoto moved with the energy bursts of an actor rather than the more sustained impetus of a dancer, turning the three structurally identical sections into a dramatic tour de force.

However, the result suffered from his addiction to darkness - a darkness thematically pertinent and even immensely varied in its own way but so pervasive and near-absolute that just seeing the performance often proved a hopeless, butoh-esque struggle against physical impossibility.