The present text has as its main objective, expand Ko Murobushi’s reflections, beyond the confines of the dance, for consider the specific conditions in which artistic practices can become critical practices of singling out. For this reason, the concept of “ascesis” as a way to make visible the space between art and life, and its critical power against the principle of identity schemes, and as a potency to create other forms of singularization. This is not intended to exclude the relevance of Ko’s contributions to dance, but expand them to the debate on the subjectivation processes and their effects on other fields.

The approach that I’m interested in developing, tries to think the work of Ko as part of a discussion which is not limited to dance but to the relationship between all artistic practice with critical singling out processes. It seems to me that this approach allows not only limited to the personality of Ko as “master” or “butoh dancer”, but expand his reflections on dialogue with a critical debate about the problem of the body and its relationship with the structures of domination that pass through it, and how artistic practices become forms of resistance against these red forms of domination.

Spasm — It’s a chasm. And every body is a lacerated body. (Spasmodic) experience which is a trial, is to unfold, and is to be crushed. It is also to be on the edge of separation and snapping apart. First comes a fissure. The fissure must be the starting point. It is as if it were an unexpected constellation. Spasm is the advent of my inner star which can never be reached. It is a sudden but meaningless explosion.The body may try to touch it again and again. And the body will spasmodically try to touch “it”: that which distant, immediate, ephemeral, and momentary. Spasm digresses. It is a deviation. It does not exist anywhere. It is impossible to catch and possess the zero degree of the sense of pain, the zero degree of the sense of touch and sight. “It” as the hidden form is a laceration which comes from the outer part of the depth of the body.

Ko Murobushi, spasmodic 1979

The identity is a phantasmagoria, produced by the relationship with power devices. The paradox of identity is that at the same time that produces an illusion of intimacy and oneness, it is also collective and massifying. The identity functions as the panopticon mechanism, shown by Foucault, where the “I” appears to be own, and refuses his social and multiple character. The “I”, as principle of identity (or law of identification) is the result of power devices that normalize the identity in a dominant representation scheme, is this legal, educational, or in this case, aesthetic.

A cartography of power, in the philosophical direction of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, aims to show blind spots, the lines of flight, and the places of resistance to the regime of identities of the structures of domination.

In the text: Spasmodic (supra.) Ko gives an account of a life experience of flesh where the apparent unit splits to make way for an experience of another body. But this experience is not exempt from shocks and rales of agony. The experience that Murobushi realizes has nothing to do with the metaphor, or any other rhetorical figure, Ko agonizes when he writes, dance, think, dying for a border, a boundary that adjoins the abyss is revealed.

In this experience of the non-place in the permanent wandering the principle of identity collapses as a carnal experience, it is worth reiterating, experience that Ko realizes is not a literary experience, this experience is not only discursive, contrary to this, I think both: his dance and his writing, account for a same experience of crisis, commotion, in where the identity become into another, as forces that the apparent unity of the “I” clog. Multiple otherness whose inrush ago collapse all apparent stability in the world. For this reason his thoughts and his scenic work allow us to think in a critical gap between art and life, as a crack that allows the outbreak of the order of the standardized identities that operate as folding of the power of subjectivation.

Murobushi’s Butoh is far from being a form of “meditation” or attempt to reach some kind of “harmony”, the work of Murobushi is focused on being an asceticism of the flesh that aims deal with the machinic flows and build from them, for this reason it is fundamental the stray and orphanhood as forms of fracturing all subject to a stable and standardized identity to submit the carnal body sensitivity to the regime of capitalist productivity.

The ascesis, for Foucault, are practices where individuals are responsible for the process of singling out, resisting the inertia of identities production devices, dealing with the otherness of the forces, and the relationship with the others in political sense. If the work of Ko is understood as a form of asceticism, for me, is to the extent that is more a critical position, from the sensitive experience of the body, and not only speculative reflection. While the meaning of ascetic practices has been overcoding by a religious sense, for Foucault and other philosophers such as Didier Eribon, asceticism is a practice of resistance, not confined to philosophical speculation, but to reinvent the sensitive relationship of the body with the world.

We are the place of struggle where we will be pulling to event.

The first repeat, it will become repeat of “oh!  it is the first experience”

It is not dance anymore. It was not aimed identification to be dance.

With the body that was cracked, to give crack to dancing body and to open to the think that has no identity.

It comes as a event that as encounter that is unknown and intercourse, the place without place, as first time, instant, ephemeral,

And vanish with pointing the top of experience and intercourse, its strength and that repetition of the thing of no identity.

Ko Murobushi, journal 1998, Ko Murobushi Archive