Kengo Nishimoto

Introduction

A lecture by dance critic Keisuke Sakurai, who had interacted with Ko Murobushi during his lifetime, was held on February 7, 2025, at “Ko Murobushi Archive Shy.” The lecture lasted exactly two hours (starting at 19:00), and the venue was at full capacity. Despite it being midwinter, the atmosphere and space were charged with palpable intensity.

This lecture focused on viewing archival recordings. It began with an almost complete screening of Butoh / With All Its Soul and Nervous System (1998, Theatre Tram), followed during the session by excerpts from several works, including Edge (2000, Kagurazaka die pratze) and Heels (2004, Azabu die pratze).

One of Sakurai’s central questions was whether Murobushi’s dance ultimately amounted to a display of masculinity or an expression of (male) violence. Within the lecture, masculinity was also reframed as “youth.” Murobushi’s powerful butoh masculinity = youth was contrasted with Tatsumi Hijikata’s “weakened body / aging” and Kazuo Ohno’s “cross-dressing.” This report reconstructs how Sakurai responded to this question by reorganizing the flow of the lecture. However, it should be noted that this reconstruction is shaped by the author’s personal interests and points found “interesting.” Some arguments have therefore been omitted. Words enclosed in angle brackets (〈 〉) indicate terminology used by Sakurai during the lecture. Honorifics are omitted throughout this text.

“Ridiculous” Deformation of Form, and the Time-Disoriented Judson

Sakurai described Murobushi’s body as “a body like two pairs of slender steel beams arched into a bow.” Although the author attended the lecture with only partial knowledge of Ko Murobushi, this description became an important guiding line for understanding his dance.

The exaggerated curvature of the bent back, movements that abandon reflex and fall as if surrendering to gravity (how are such actions as falling from the back or striking the head against the floor even possible?!), nanba walking (indeed, like two pairs of steel beams), flexing and recoiling legs, walking with the instep twisted outward, a body moving on all fours, protruding scapulae, and silver-painted skin—all of these evoke images of metal. Sakurai extracts this metallic body as “form.” “Form” refers to a static image separated from movement; combined with metallic hardness, it produces strength, beauty, and “coolness.” As a representative still image, Sakurai presented a photograph of Murobushi crouched, slightly tilted to the right, resembling an egg.

However, what was crucial in Sakurai’s lecture was his attention to moments when this hard metal = strength becomes “ridiculous.” This was also described as “ruining,” “wasting,” or “meaninglessness.” One example was Murobushi’s act of “speech” in Edge. In his performance, Murobushi shifts seamlessly yet heterogeneously between dance and speech, and back again. His speech was described as “old-man-like” (oyaji-like). His muttering, resembling complaints, was presented by Sakurai as a “ridiculousness” that squanders masculinity and youth. (Personally, however, Murobushi’s shouting felt somewhat frightening and even violent, leaving some reservations, which will be revisited later.)

“Ridiculousness” is not limited to speech. In Heels, Murobushi’s geta footwear, as well as the high heels worn by other performers, ruin youthful vitality. Likewise, Murobushi’s struggle with a 13 kg brass plate appears both as “labor” and as childlike “play,” revealing a ridiculous expenditure of youth.

This is the key point of the lecture. In contemporary discourse, where the violence of masculinity is critically questioned, ethics often concern suppressing, restraining, or “castrating” it. What Sakurai sees in Murobushi, however, is a mode of outputting masculinity while simultaneously rendering it meaningless. It is a way of using strong form in a ridiculous and deforming manner. This perspective may be crucial for considering contemporary “male” dance.

Sakurai further connects Murobushi’s choreography to the Judson Church movement’s concept of “task.” Gestures such as opening the mouth widely or struggling with brass plates, pillars, and floors are interpreted as “material.” These gestures are also strangely detached and neutral. In other words, they do not express emotion. In this sense, Murobushi approaches the Judson Church movement, which pursued movement stripped of spectacle, Sakurai argues. Only movement is produced—but it is produced meaninglessly. Or rather, precisely because it is produced in a material way, it transforms into something “ridiculous.”

However, if there is one difference between Judson and Murobushi, it is that Murobushi’s movement is not everyday. One factor disrupting everydayness is temporal dislocation.

Slow Yet Fast

The earlier metaphor of steel and metal leads to the image of mercury, a substance that is both fluid and solid. It is a slowly flowing metal. Sakurai once named one of Murobushi’s works Quick Silver.

Murobushi’s dance is fundamentally “slow,” and yet it is also “fast.” This contradiction arises because, although the movement is slow, it contains innumerable micro-movements folded within it (it is not simply slow motion). Additionally, sudden bursts of speed are inserted within slowness. For example, the falling movement in Butoh / With All Its Soul and Nervous System—a collapse from the coccyx as if yielding entirely to gravity—is suddenly fast.

Murobushi’s dance lacks ordinary, everyday speed. It is extremely slow and/or fast. Ordinary time is dislocated. Sakurai describes this coexistence and abrupt switching between slow and fast as “gear change.”

What remains particularly memorable is Sakurai’s remark: “In slow motion, the pose becomes burned in.” Slowness emphasizes a static condition at its limit. This frozen pose = form is both “cool” and “ridiculous.”

Remarkably, after viewing Murobushi’s dance through the lens of gear change and form deformation, one finds that even dance within normal temporal flow begins to appear differently. This realization was triggered through the following operation: Sakurai first showed Murobushi’s dance in fast-forward playback. In his words, fast-forwarded Murobushi becomes “a normal good dance.” Next, footage of George Chakiris from West Side Story (1961), considered an origin point for Murobushi, was shown. When we attempt to view Chakiris as if he were a fast-forwarded Murobushi (though he is not perceived that way), his youthful, fresh dance begins to appear somewhat “ridiculous.” At the very least, it undeniably appeared far more compelling than usual.

What does this mean? Compressing a “normally good dance” into slowness appears contradictory, since compression should produce fast-forwarding. But Murobushi’s dance is different: slow movement contains an increased number of frames of micro-movements. The number of “frames per second” increases, producing an abnormal density of form deformation. At the same time, because of slowness, this density is burned into perception as near-static form. This awareness may sharpen the viewer’s perception of dance itself. It may also explain why Chakiris’s dance suddenly appeared more compelling.

As the most extreme example, Sakurai proposes treating still photographs of movement as containing latent motion and “defrosting” them. He cites Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs. Sequential images divide movement into frames, each containing potential before-and-after motion. To defrost motion from a single image is to perceive movement (“becoming”) within “photograph = form” as motion at zero degree. Once equipped with this perspective of “ridiculousness,” we can no longer defrost Murobushi’s photographs as simply “cool” movement.

Ko Murobushi, Lisa Lyon, Madonna

A key argument of Sakurai’s lecture is that Murobushi’s dance outputs masculinity = youth while simultaneously rendering it ridiculous. This may be enabled by his focus on form.

Toward the end of the lecture, Sakurai develops a more speculative and experimental argument, arguably the most controversial and thrilling moment of the session.

He places a still image of Murobushi alongside photographs of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon and an image from Madonna’s S.E.X. photo book. What Lyon and Madonna share is a muscular, sculptural, Greco-Roman beauty—a “female beauty that is not feminine.” In other words, they do not express conventional femininity. At first glance, these three images resonate: monochrome aesthetics, skin texture, and sculptural qualities.

Sakurai presents Murobushi’s image as almost equivalent to those of Lyon and Madonna. However, a crucial distinction remains. In the latter, women produce masculinity; in Murobushi’s case, masculinity is not replaced by femininity. Thus, while they are placed as equivalent, they are not interchangeable. Murobushi, like Lyon and Madonna, outputs masculinity, but it becomes meaningless. What they share is the act of producing normative beauty = masculinity while simultaneously confronting it.

Sakurai himself admits this hypothesis lacks persuasiveness, yet even so, placing Lyon, Madonna, and Murobushi together supports thinking critically about masculinity. Producing femininity through a male body may negate or “castrate” masculine violence as given. But can this truly be a sufficient critique of violence in male dance? Sometimes yes—but even when castrated, violence may return (we repeatedly witness the authority of supposedly liberal men). If so, perhaps it is also a “healthy” stance to output masculinity = violence while simultaneously rendering it meaningless.

Murobushi’s “old-man-like” speech, mentioned earlier, carries paternal authority and a certain fear. It can freeze the viewer. But perhaps this is necessary: by outputting paternal authority, it becomes possible to deform it into waste.

Conclusion

Sakurai’s lecture notes included two keywords not spoken during the session: “divine violence” and “mythic violence,” concepts from Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1920/21). Benjamin describes mythic violence as law-establishing violence, while divine violence is law-destroying “pure” violence. Both are forms of violence.

Sakurai attempted to find in Murobushi’s masculinity = violence the possibility of its own destruction (rendering it meaningless). However, this is highly precarious, as the boundary between these forms of violence can easily be crossed and is often difficult to discern.

As a concrete example, on February 27, Sakurai posted on Facebook a comparison between the “haka” performed as counteraction to the 2019 mosque shooting in New Zealand and “haka” used in attacks against LGBTQ parades and pro-Palestinian solidarity demonstrations. The Māori war dance “haka,” originally bearing aggression, demonstrates how the meaning of violence shifts depending on context and target.

This lecture can thus be understood as an attempt to read Murobushi’s dance as standing at the unstable “edge” of violence, and as a dance that critically interrogates contemporary critiques of masculinity = violence.

Kengo Nishimoto
Co-director of the performance unit “Team Chiipro.” With Team Chiipro, he creates stage works that explore the criticality of the body and gesture. Recent works include Imperial Palace Running Man (2019–2020, LABO20#22 participation), Kyoto Imaginary Waltz (KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2021 AUTUMN), Onna Shiko Dance (KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2022), and nanako by nanako (2024).

Since 2024, he has co-founded the New Dance Research Group with Team Chiipro and Keisuke Sakurai. In May 2025, the group is scheduled to undertake a residency at Dance Base Yokohama as the New Dance Research Group.

WEB: https://www.chiipro.net/

Translated into English by ChatGPT