YOUR NUMBER ONE ENEMY feat. Jordan Rountree vs. Crystal Sasaki

Media page

Your Number One Enemy, an original radio art/new radio drama and performance hybrid piece written and directed by Jordan Rountree, featuring performance and dance by Jordan Rountree and Crystal Sasaki, as well as a lightbulb music installation and performance by Michael Vorfeld and composition and sound design by Olivia Oyama*. Rountree’s Pop Noh style is met by Sasaki’s form of Butoh, creating a radio-art-and-dance-drama that shifts between the points of view of two different characters over the course of a performance that lasts fifty minutes.

In Your Number One Enemy, an American woman of Japanese heritage is stranded in Tokyo as war breaks out between the US and Japan. She is forced to accept a job under duress as a radio broadcaster for a propaganda show, taking on the radio deejay persona of "Orphan Ann." Meanwhile, an American soldier paces his cabin in an enormous warship in perpetual night, listens to her broadcasts, and dreams of her. The action takes place in 1943 and 1944, in an apartment in Tokyo, Japan and on a battleship in an undisclosed location in the Pacific Ocean.

On this page, one can listen to the entirety of Rountree’s previous radio art dance-drama piece CHTHONIC ARCHIVE No.6: I Hear a New World , which, like Your Number One Enemy, features performances by Rountree and Sasaki. There are also photos of the dance-drama. While the recording and photos do not reflect the final sound and look of Your Number One Enemy, this documentation gives a sense of the shape of the next project, which is a formal continuation of I Hear a New World.

* possibly performing live pending scheduling

CHTHONIC ARCHIVE No.6: I Hear a New World Radio Art Piece

In I Hear a New World, a boy is secretly hired by his babysitter to translate the love letters she writes to, and receives from, her American boyfriend.

The action takes place in 1999 in Paris, France, during the house and techno revolution.

CHTHONIC ARCHIVE No.6: I Hear a New World premiered at Baert Gallery in Los Angeles June 28, 2025.

Concept, text, music, performance by Jordan Rountree

Performance and dance by Crystal Sasaki

Radio art co-production by Vladimir Kusijanovic