2014-Ongoing
60 minutes
Written, choreographed, and performed by Michael Sakamoto
Soundscore by Christopher Jette
Video by Michael Sakamoto
Past performances:
Links Hall (Chicago, IL)
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA)
B-floor theater (Bangkok, Thailand)
Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica, CA)
Waterloo Center for the Arts (Waterloo, IA)
![](http://michaelsakamoto.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/blind-spot-Michael-Sakamoto-chamber-dance-Martin-Cohen-photographer-1024x684.jpg)
Combining film, video, and photography, dance, and theatrical performance, “blind spot” attempts to tell a story of looking without seeing, with ephemeral flashes of insight. Using his own history and perception-projection as a racialized, Asian American body practicing butoh, Michael speaks of self-contradiction, code switching, and embracing both socialized and subjective identity. Inspired by the Buddhist conception of impermanence and ontological questions of embodied truth in media-based art forms, “blind spot” is rooted in the belief that every moment is an instance of not knowing, simultaneously revealing our fear and desire, making life a circuitous, non-linear journey of mapping such “blind spots.”
Artist statement: The fear of not seeing is the same as that of not knowing. From implosive desire, we give primacy to sight at the cost of vision. Within and without language-delineated, behavioral paradigms, we alternate between embracing our passion/obsession and holding ourselves at arm’s length in the third person. Our mediated image—dead to the world but with a life of its own—becomes both bulwark against and support for the tenuous, febrile cord connecting us to heredity and lineage in the ways we both speak and act.