An Empty Room

"Sakamoto takes seriously the imperative, 'find your own butoh,' and in so doing moves through and beyond his own practice to imagine a generative butoh available to individuals and communities as a kind of resistive cultural commons. An Empty Room is at once a major contribution to butoh scholarship as well as a model for a rigorous and rousing praxis on the page."—Rosemary Candelario, author of Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies

"Very few dancers since Hijikata Tatsumi have taken more fully to heart the dictum of butoh to critically examine your self, ethnicity, and even your own artistic practice than Michael Sakamoto. Sometimes treading in Hijikata's very footsteps, Sakamoto has delved into the complexity and created fictionality of his Japanese American identity. This journey is simultaneously an attempt at defining, critiquing, and empowering the dance form butoh so that it can continue to be at the center of our global attempts to negotiate the ever-present crises facing humanity, just as it was at the center of Hijikata's efforts to face the maelstrom of postwar Japan."—Bruce Baird, professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst