Thursday September 3 | doors at 7:30pm | performance at 8:00pm
$15 ADVANCE tickets | $20 DAY OF SHOW | $10 STUDENT tickets with ID | always pay what you can
Ken Ueno and Michael Sakamoto perform solo along with a new improvisational sound and movement duet
Ken Ueno and Michael Sakamoto perform an improvisational sound and movement duet, blending extended vocal techniques, electro-acoustic instrumentation, butoh and street dance movement, and other interdisciplinary performance elements. Sakamoto also performs “asymm (abridged)”, featuring remixed scenes from his evening-length, semi-autobiographical dance theater work, “asymm”. Inspired by butoh and hip-hop’s roots in social resistance, Japanese American history, and the intercultural and activist legacy of composer-musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, “asymm” blends dance, text, media visuals, and an electronic music score in the search for meaning in the gestures and sounds of everyday life.
Ken Ueno
A Rome Prize and Berlin Prize recipient, Ken Ueno (上野 ケン) is a composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar whose work explores the expressive possibilities of the human voice, experimental performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration. His music has been championed by leading performers, ensembles, and festivals worldwide, including the Hilliard Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, the Arditti String Quartet, and MaerzMusik. As a vocalist, he is recognized for pioneering extended vocal techniques, particularly his innovative use of the megaphone, and has performed his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, and the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, collaborating with artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ikue Mori, Du Yun, DJ Sniff, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Karen Yu, Viola Yip, and Wukir Suryadi of Senyawa. Ueno is Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Oxford Handbook, The Drama Review (TDR), Palgrave Macmillan, and Wiley & Sons, while his monograph recordings have been released by BMOP Sound and New Focus Recordings.
Michael Sakamoto
Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary artist in dance, theater, performance, media, photography and sound. His choreographic and narrative performances, media works, and photo essays engage cultural dialogue and sustainability across geography and language. Michael has been presented in venues worldwide in 16 countries, including REDCAT, Duke Arts, Vancouver International Dance Festival, Tokyo International Butoh Festival, Dance Center of Columbia College-Chicago, TACTFest Osaka, Audio Art-Krakow, Gøteborg Art Sounds, Modlin Center for the Arts, and many others. Michael’s scholarship has been published in numerous journals across disciplines, and his book monograph, An Empty Room: Imagining Butoh and the Social Body in Crisis (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), was shortlisted for the de la Torre Bueno Prize for best first book in dance studies.