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)

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.