“Butoh” and its stray

1985

To be a Butoh dancer is to be in “Butoh”/ to be in its stray.

It is to affix a wanderer’s signature jointly in the name of the wandering.

It is to live in the name of many individuals, who originate from the oblivion and loss of ‘self’: living with the confusion of the self as a power.

I myself am a positive tremor three times, or more like a thousand times, the fears and shudders. I am the quivering seeds endlessly scattered.

And am I the life fringed with <burden>— <fortune> scattered from the beginning, something both unique and infinite?

That is a pleasant drift.

I, Ko Murobushi, am a sutasuta bou*.

Just as my dance exists on the edge of the beginning of and midway along the road, my pathetic “body” is non-existence = non-point, glimpsed within the transition, within the blue of this “transition.” To navigate just like flickering, unknown, and innocent stars.

1985 Autumn Paris 
                                                                  

*Sutasuta bou: A begging monk from the Edo period that sings and dances while holding a folding fan and staff.

1985
Ko Murobushi

Description

In my subsequent performance in Paris this April, I aim to be forced to dance by relationship and distance, which would be made by embedding another author between such a distance that is generated between spectators and the self who is dancing, or the self who is watching the dancing self. This will be performed across fourteen days, and I picked up nine artists for some reason to make numerous combinations in relation with Takehisa Kosugi from New York—for a direction of original tape and act, Natsuyuki Nakanishi—whom I optionally quoted from his drawing books, Wim Mertens—a pianist from Crepuscule (note: a Belgian music label that pioneers a field of neo-acoustic music) whom I will be performing two improvisational duos with over two nights, Hijikata—who gave me some things that can be taken as either dialogue or directions, among others: Hisaki Matsuura, Shuhei Hosokawa, Osamu Goto, Akihiro Ozawa, and Carlotta Ikeda. To plunge the self into turbulence, rather than to perform certainly or to act subjectively, and therefore, to plunge the audience into turbulence, meaning to dance in a state of going through or drifting into a vertigo, dizziness, and untangibleness.

From his interview with Kuniichi Uno

 

“EN,” danced improvisationally by him in this performance, would be one of his solo works subsequently.

translation
Ikuya Odamaki

All works

“EN”

“EN”

1989
“EN|Ephémère”

“EN, Ephémère”

1988
“EN”

“EN”

1985
Utt|EN|9Performances Creations

Utt, EN, 9Performances Creations

1985
EN1985