01
As Ko Murobushi says, if there is a “thought of the outside” within the body, for the body, where does the Butoh dancer try to take that body?

Tatsumi Hijikata, who was inspired by Artaud, used to say that he would place a ladder inside his body and climb down the stairs. In my opinion, he clearly did not do that in order to dance, but in order not to dance. In order to keep digging in the body, one has to stop movement.  Because it is the only place where the convulsions that manage to reveal the edge of body can be produced. These convulsions exist within time, to dig a hole in it.

Whether healthy or sick, the body supposes immobility in birth, sleep, and the coming death. But for the living body, this assumption is impossible. Because the flesh which is clad in unconsciousness moves around indifferently.

How can we climb down the stairs of the body? The body cannot move even when it tries to. Is it an absurd obsession bestowed onto Ankoku Butoh without knowing by Zeami, that Butoh dancer from 600 years ago? Zeami used to move quickly. But he grew tired of it and put an end to his quick moving. That is how “Mugen Noh” was born.　

To be unmoving even within movement. Whether conscious or not, that obsession must have kept tormenting Ankoku Butoh. When I see the dance of Hijikata’s most outstanding disciple Ko Murobushi, I feel that even in his fierce movements, there is a clear aspiration to immobility. Because of that aspiration to immobility, the tormented body is drawn to another dimension. It is clear that in this case, this other dimension is within another dimension in history. One should not dance. One should not move.

Every single thing is a sign, a manifestation, and is born is within nature, but at the same time, the body points out the distortion in another nature. The fact that our body isinorganic, not an organism’s body, was already understood with Artaud. But I think that Ko Murobushi’s dance reveals to us a body full of “things from before birth,” of “the agony of things from before birth,” and this is the heart of his aspiration to immobility.

02
“Butoh is a dead body standing at the risk of its life” (Butoh est un cadavre qui se met debout à corps perdu). We must understand literally this thought from Hijikata. The dead body. In the beginning, there was the dead body. The dead body exists alongside the living body here and now. And the dead body was the body. To be a dead body, to become a dead body… The dead body is a double.

To play dead is not contradictory in this case; there is no relation between wreckage that is given from outside, what we call cultural form, because the dead body itself gave form to culture. From what he remembers, Murobushi was very good at playing dead when he was a child.

Murobushi met the body of a mummified priest (SOKUSHINBUTSU) on Yudono Mountain at Dewa Sanzan. It was the mummy of TETSUMONKAI. One day, TETSUMONKAI killed a man and escaped to a temple to become a priest. A prostitute fell in love with him and asked him to leave the mountain and stop being a priest. But he refused her offer, and instead, gave her his own penis that he cut off himself. His resolution did not waver. At the time, there were many earthquakes and epidemics all over Japan. In order to help people recover from these diseases, he hollowed his left eye and prayed to Buddha. Then he finally decided to become a SOKUSHINBUTSU by going through the fasting process of Mokujiki no Gyo. This SOKUSHINBUTSU we can see now is a mummy.

*Sokushinbutsu: Buddhist monks or priests who allegedly caused their own deaths in a way that resulted in their being mummified.

But the important thing is not who this Tetsumonkai was, but the fact that he gave Ko Murobushi a decisive image, an image that has texture and scent, and a vivid double. Shadow goes in and out of the body. This point is always vibrating, and there is one another body in a degenerate state, a border that is not clearly separate from the border of the body.

This Mummy’s body is not simply dead. At the same time, it is donated to us, to our nothingness. The potlatch of nothingness appears in the dimension of the body.

In his text “of the Mummy,” Ko Murobushi says:

Decaying, the impersonal of a dying donation and breath; Outside of that, I lie my twitching body
Going far or coming near
Our undecided and unmodified border; in this spiral
For the first time, I saw your eyes; for the first time, you saw my eyes

The body cannot be fixed independently from how it is. Twisted neck, broken arm, evicted feet. Murobushi says, “The body is here, and it cannot be reached.”  In the same way as the distance from the object was for painters like Giacometti, this SOKUSHINBUTSU of the Mummy already included this closeness and remoteness that cannot but appear at the same time. For Butoh, it was obvious that the body that can dance or not dance is close and remote at the same time. 

Murobushi wrote:

How, did I come so far?
Why, did I bring my nearest far so far?
It is to realize this question

To realize this question, therefore, the breath of the Mummy had to be blown into Murobushi and possess him. Clean is dirty. Dirty is clean. Close is far. Far is close. And the body comes out from the breath. 
From this breathing, intermittently, a new body is born. As the Greek philosopher Chrysippus said, if one says “carriage”, the carriage comes out of his mouth. The same thing is happening in the phase of the body image. It is a wonderful view. This may be an unnecessary addition, but there was a statue of Buddha from which many people came out of its mouth.

So for a Butoh dancer, if it goes well, the body will break out from the body; the body has to break out from the body. It seems that there is a “body of the body”. Illusions come in vast numbers, but we have to see through them whether it is in the morning, during the day, or at night. The body does not move. It is also an illusion. It is only possible to break out. The “body of the body” and the “body that breaks out from the body” overlaps with this body. Usually it piles up, but it gradually seeps out from body or knocks us down all at once.

03
Once when Artaud came to Mexico, what in the world did he know? What he saw was not only the “mountain of symbols.”

L’empire physique était toujours là. Ce cataclysme qui était mon corps… Après vingt-huit jours d’attente, je n’étais pas encore rentré en moi ;——il faudrait dire : sorti en moi. En moi, dans cet assemblage disloqué, ce morceau de géologie avariée.

La Danse de Peyotl

I go out inside me. The outside was everywhere and  the body had been a “fragment of broken geology.” That is why, as Artaud says, we must go out into the body. To put it in a different way, it is to go out to the “outside” that is the body.
Artaud recalls this experience again much later on.

Je n’ai pas toujours retrouvé mes souvenirs concernant ma vie passée jusqu’à des époques indéfiniment reculées comme je tiens depuis dix années.
Et c’est au Mexique, dans la haute montagne, vers août septembre 1936, que j’ai commencé à m’y retrouver tout à fait.
J’étais monté chez Tarahumaras avec un signe, une espèce de petite épée de Tolède, attachée de 3 hameçons, qui m’avait été indiquée par un nègre sorcier de La Havane.
Avec ça, me dit-il, vous pouvez entrer.
Mais je n’avais pas désiré entrer.
Or qui va pour voir quelque chose c’est pour entrer dans un monde donné, mais jusque-là clos, insoupçonné,
ce n’est pas l’idée que je me fait des choses,
pour moi il ne s’agit pas d’entrer mais sortir des choses,
or qui se détache c’est aussi pour entrer,
sortir peut-être, mais dans quelque chose, quitter l’ici pour fondre ailleurs,
fondre et se libérer hors de l’ailleurs,
ne pas fondre, mais se libérer dans nulle part,
ne plus savoir,
renoncer à avoir existé,
alors ne plus souffrir jamais,
les alternatives sont innombrables et ce n’en sont plus, chaque religion et individu a la sienne,
or tout cela est idiot.

Histoire vécue d’ARTAUD- MÔMO 

Artaud said that the few days that he spent with Taraumara were the happiest in his life, but for Artaud when he was at the mountain, his body was but a distracting burden.
And as I quoted, Artaud’s experience of Peyotl may be different from Michaux, Castaneda, or Hippie’s experiences in regards to the “outside” or “going out” into oneself. According to Peyotl, Hippie and the others thought that they could go inside themselves and expand their “consciousness.” But “the mountain of symbols” was too powerful, and they had to escape into themselves. For Artaud and us, we never think that we want to go inside. In addition, in the case of Artaud, “consciousness” shrinks rather than expands. What points the way is not consciousness, but the edge of the body that integrates with the “outside” just as Artaud and Murobushi say. 

Murobushi may have passed away, but his Butoh will never perish.

When I imagine his body, a lizard appears in my vision. This lizard that came out from the dark crack in the wall stays still on the sundial bathed in sunlight. The rusted iron, bronze, dry air, reflective scales, mucus, stillness. The lizard had been feeding on the darkness just a few seconds before.

Who was it that journeyed under the devil’s sun? Under the strong sun, the earth is red, and the lizard is looking at me as I am lying on the ground.
The lizard says to me,
“Who are you?”