Aki Sasamoto

mosquitos, climbing in fish tanks, bad girl attitude,

"let's go drink!! woo!!"

singing john lennon, hanging upside down while on a guy's shoulders

scripted flow association presentation much like alexandre singh's

a couple laugh out loud moments from the crowd.

physical acrobatics, climbing on her partner's shoulders, hanging upside down

the absurd, mixed with the familiar, mixed with the mundane

utilizes, exploits? her language barrier to absract and confuse, to stylize... sometimes makes me feel like i should be understanding as an honest opening up, but makes me fear that it's all an act, even the language difficulty.

That's something I've been realizing more and more as I've sat in Artist lecture visits. That it's all an act, and that actually, it needs to be. No magician would stand in front of a room full of people and proceed to reveal his secrets and methods bullet listed in an hour long powerpoint.

Of course, with Sasamoto, who is doing performance work, and presented a performance piece, that makes sense. But it's the detritus on the margins that attracts me. Perhaps I'm looking for kinks in the armour, a slip of the tongue or body posture that reveals that it's all an act. What act do I put on, what act SHOULD i be putting on. Can I be completely transparent but still interesting? powerful? meaningful? Can I be normal, and invisible, and be meaningful. Do I want to be weird? Can I choose to be weird?

Sasamoto is trying to be "weird". Perhaps it was a natural and organic process arriving to the structure and format of her performance pieces. But now that it's been structured and scripted, it's no longer weird. Now it's a structure, just like any other structure. How many times do I need to watch the second hand revolve around the face of a clock before I can feel confident that I don't have to stand there and see if something new is going to happen.

This makes me worry about "one-upmanship" in work like this. Now she has to be weirder. More props, less props, more acrobatics, more something, louder something.

I want to be quiet, invisible. I want my ideas to dwell in the blood, and whisper in the capillaries of the brain while you sleep.