My presentation today is titled “Swinging the revolution: Ko Murobushi’s grammatical mis/steps.” This title is based on a line in John Cage’s diary, which states: “if we could change our language, that’s to say the way we think, we’d probably be able to swing the revolution” (210). I chose this title, in part, because I find it humorous and because I enjoy the way in which the expression “Swinging the revolution” rolls off the tongue, almost dancing. Perhaps more seriously, I chose this title because of the revolutionary possibilities I see in Ko’s work, and because of how I see those possibilities as relating to an undoing—or perhaps, to a dis/ordering—of language and of dance (mis)understood as a form of language. Those of you who attended my last presentation, in November, will also be aware that this turn to John is in fact a return to John Cage, whom I already mentioned last time.

In my last presentation, I delved and dwelled into silence, neurodivergence, and the ethical stakes of Ko’s work, following him into the cracks of language to see what else can happen in the breaks. Beware: autistic people are both obsessive and repetitive. And so, to some extent, today’s presentation is a continuation of my previous presentation, because the questions which I started to address last time are the questions that have occupied me for the almost two decades since I first discovered butoh. In my last presentation, I introduced the term “neurotypicality.” Let me offer a brief refresher: while neurotypicality is a term that finds its origin in the adjective “neurotypical,” a term used by early Autistic activists to both poke fun and speak back to the idea of a “normal” brain or mind against which autism was constructed, philosopher Erin Manning has proposed that neurotypicality represents a pervasive yet unspoken form of identity politics with devastating consequences “for anyone who doesn’t easily fit within the parameters it sets to frame the human” (51). In today’s presentation, I want to focus on how Ko saw his own work as a way to escape, to fight or to undermine systems. Though neurotypicality was not a term in his discussion, and though it was most likely not the system that he had in mind, I propose that Ko’s work offers ways to escape neurotypicality as a system that constrains the ways in which ‘the human’ can speak, move, or dance. By the same token, I propose that in seeking for an ‘outside,’ in attempting to step outside of the system and in being out of step with it, Ko sidestepped the system of neurotypicality.

In their amazing text “Autism: An anecdotal abecedarium,” autistic writer Stacey Easton ponders: “Can we talk about an autistic grammar of the body?”, proposing, in turn “shallow breathing” and “the sounds that emerge from language without being language” as having “grammars of their own” (101). Whether or not there is such a thing as an “autistic grammar of the body,” what seems obvious is the existence of a neurotypical grammar of the body—understood as a set of rules that structures the way(s) in which a body is supposed (and expected) to be ordered. This neurotypical grammar of the body seems to be precisely what autistic people (among other minoritarian people) cannot (fully) acquire, or that to which they/we can never (fully) submit. And, to return to Manning’s definition of neurotypicality as a system of valuation, the state of being out of step with this system is a misstep that often comes with dramatic consequences. Whereas people tend to think of dance as a recreational activity and by extension, as something harmless, Ko’s dance was a dangerous act, a form of subversion.

In his writings and in interviews, Ko often invoked Hijikata Tatsumi’s discussion of butoh as the “aimless use of the body,” and hence as a criminal act in the face of a system that values productivity above all. In an interview with dance critic Ishii Tatsuro, Ko states:

The pinnacle of Hijikata’s art may indeed be the ‘weakened body’ concept. It was probably his stance not being bound to the rule that dance is done on two feet but, rather, that it is something to be built up from what you might call ‘incapability.’ Hijikata-san spoke of removing the normal pause/interval (ma) or timing, and left the term magusare (deterioration of interval) and it is based in the concept of a body that has fallen out of some type of productive role, and it is dysfunctionality or incapacity, or you could call it impotence, I think. […] He was thinking about a communal body that could connect to what you could call a type of incapacity of malformation (Murobushi, interview with Ishii Tatsuro).

It is interesting to note that while Hijikata himself did not explicitly connect the “aimless use of the body” to disability when discussing it in his text “To Prison”—linking it instead to things such as “male homosexuality,” “crime,” and “festivals”—Ko does link it to “incapacity,” “malformation” and “impotence” in this passage, hence bringing it into the domain of disability. It is also important to note that a system, a grammar of being, that values productivity above all else is bound to be both an ableist and a neurotypical system. History, after all, is replete with examples of productivity as a marker of value being weaponized against disabled people (among others), and used to justify their dehumanization if not their deaths. To dance with “a body that has fallen outside of a productive role” is hence to mis/step outside of the system of neurotypicality, with all the risks associated with such acts.

If neurotypicality is associated with a “grammar of the body,” or a “grammar of being” ruling the ways in which people exist, move and dance, it is also interesting to note that neurotypicality can also be seen at work in the way in which ‘we’ use words. French educator, poet and writer Fernand Deligny, whom I mentioned in my last presentation, tirelessly denounced what we could describe as (French) language’s neurotypical slant, and especially its constant demand for a subject “to serve as the key to it all” (111). In the absence of a subject, language mis/steps. After all, the subject or the self is at once neurotypicality’s favorite form and favorite role. If Ko, following Hijikata, attempted to dance “with a body that has fallen out of a productive role,” his mis/step went beyond a mere rejection of productivity: in his work, I see a rejection of all roles, and perhaps especially of the role of subject or self.

In a text written at the occasion of the 80^th anniversary of Hijikata’s birth, published as part of his Collected Writings, Ko once again discusses butoh as an escape from the system, stating: “dance is stepping outside of the system that holds that ‘the body is the body’” (or ‘my body is my body’), to encounter instead “multiple other bodies” but also ‘the body’ not as a singular bounded form, but as multiplicity (Murobushi Ko shūsei 300, my translation). In the same text, Ko describes dance as both an “incident, ” and has having to do with the “difficulty of being in-between” (Murobushi Ko shūsei 300, my translation) Dance, to him, is not an endpoint, and neither should it ever become a known form. Rather, dance is about remaining in a liminal space. It is a dangerous act that demands for the self or the subject to be sacrificed, an exploration of the (a)grammatical possibilities of a dance that does not begin with a subject. Over and over, Ko writes of “losing [himself] in multiple directions and times” and of finding in the cracks, at the edge of confusion, possibilities for existing and dancing as something else than a self. He writes: “Dance is the trembling of the in-between. Dance is ceasing. Dance is the interruption of dance, something arising through abortion. Where dance becomes an established shape, it must simultaneously collapse” (Murobushi Ko shūsei 300, my translation). That is, his dance arises at the moment when grammar collapses, and refuses to bring forth a new grammar. And importantly, Ko stands against his dance ever settling into a known form. It is about evading the system rather than about establishing a new one.

In their book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel Chen, whose work spans disability studies, queer studies, and critical theory, offers a discussion of “a particular political grammar” which linguists term the “animacy hierarchy” (13). They describe the animacy hierarchy as what “conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority” (13). If neurotypicality is a system that favors a single vision of ‘the human’ above all others, the animacy hierarchy can be seen as a manifestation of the hierarchies created by neurotypicality at the level of grammar. The “animacy hierarchy” notably determines who is the most worthy of being the subject of a sentence. For example, if we think of the verb “to dance,” it is, grammatically, most likely to attach to a human, preferably non-disabled and neurotypical subject.

If I mention Chen’s work, it is because in many respects, I see Ko’s work as calling into question or disrupting the animacy hierarchy. This is perhaps most obvious in his work quick silver. Discussing quick silver, Katja Centonze argues that Ko’s dance “focuses more on the non-emotional corporealities crossing the edge between organic and inorganic, including processes for which the performer animates the inanimate and renders inanimate the animated” (231-232). Though I agree with the gist of her argument, I believe Ko’s dance actually asks us to go a step further, and to question whether the performer is actually the agent of this sentence, the subject who in turn animates and renders inanimate. In their discussion of the animacy hierarchy, Chen mentions contamination and intoxication as examples of the animacy hierarchy being violently disrupted. They write: “In a scene of human intoxication, for toxins and their human hosts, the animacy criteria of lifelines, subjectivity and humanness (where the human wins) come up short against mobility and sentience (where the toxin wins)” (203). In regard to mercury—the other name of quicksilver—specifically, they state: “The word mercurial means what it means—unstable and widely unpredictable—because the mercury toxin has altered a self, has directly transformed an affective matrix: affect goes faster, affect goes hostile, goes toxic” (201). Though Ko did not, to my knowledge, explicitly link quick silver to the mercury contamination of Minamata bay, I am reminded, in writing of his grammatical mis/steps, of the way in which mercury, in Minamata, slowly crept up the animacy ladder. For a time, before it started to affect humans, Minamata disease was briefly named ‘dancing cats disease,’ mercury contamination messing up the animacy hierarchy by associating dance with a nonhuman agent.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold proposes to shift from the idea of a “dance of agency” to the idea of a “dance of animacy” to describe engagements with the material world (101). He states: “In the dance of animacy, bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing, morphogenetic field of forces” (101). To me, Ko’s dance is less about Ko as the performer animating and rendering inanimate, and more about a dance of animacy. Ko’s dance—though here, my point is exactly that the dance might not (solely) be his, might in fact undo the idea of ownership through the logic of intoxication—works toward the undoing of the animacy hierarchy. For Chen, a central feature of intoxication is that it remaps the boundaries between the ‘I’ and the ‘external’ world in the form of the toxin They write: “toxicity becomes us, we become the toxin. The mercurial, erethic, emotionally labile human moves toward quicksilver, becomes it” (203). In Ko’s dance, in his body “[moving] toward quicksilver, [becoming] it” (to use Chen’s words), I see the convulsions of (human) sufferers of Minamata disease, but also the spasmodic movements of the cats of Minamata, resonances with a dance of toxicity affecting humans and non-humans indiscriminately.

Elsewhere, in a tape given to the archive by Kawamura Yohihiko and recorded circa 2004, once again discusses the system, and the possibilities that are found not in the absence of a system, but rather in the existing system “crumbling and shifting.” There, Ko raises the question as to why dancing should be seen as the province or the property of non-disabled human beings, stating:

So well, for example, why shouldn’t the body dance when it’s sick? The people who think that only particularly healthy people have the right to dance, and that a dance isn’t beautiful if a healthy person doesn’t dance it—that’s an idiotic (laugh) way of thinking. So, then, it becomes a case of making dances of cripples, or dances of the blind, or dances of shouting only. […] So, on the contrary, a scale of beauty, a hierarchy of beauty – if there’s that kind of thing, if there’s a system of dance, that’s essentially an extremely political problem that confronts me, and so I think it’d be good if there were an anti-dance, or else, if I didn’t bring to the midst of dance something like the crumbling of Dada, I’d lose my integrity.  (tape , translation by Frances Watson)

In Ko’s work, there was an attempt to bring both the system of language and the system of dance on the brink of collapse, to make them crumble and shift so that change could occur. He saw, in attaching dance to unlikely agents (be it quicksilver of disabled people), the possibility of making the existing system trip or mis/step.

In the last part of this presentation, I want to focus on another passage by Ko, part of a 2009 interview with Juan Carlos Piedrahita , published in El Spectator, which shows his deep awareness of how language as a system is not only entangled, but also complicit in perpetuating and maintaining other systems. For Ko,

Where a single meaning is established, exclusion and selection towards
meaninglessness follows. And our bodies are made into something significant. But what about a body hemmed in by authority?
To learn words is to be trapped in a single framework and, at the same time, it is to select, to exclude that which is insignificant. That’s the way the ‘cultural body’ comes to form. However, in these excluded, insignificant things, isn’t there a deep motivation for creativity?
Well, if dance is a means of communication, and if communication is something that demands reward, then I think that my body is a donation, and that it should be an insignificant expenditure that does not demand reward. (Murobushi, interview with Piedrahita, translation by Frances Watson)

In this text, Ko points to an issue that is central to my work: the problem that arises when not only dance but also gestures are understood in and on neurotypical terms, as forms of (neurotypical) communication and as primarily signifying activities. What Ko points to, in this passage, is a system that decides, in advance, what means and what matters, what is significant, and discards all the rest. And if not only dance, but also gestures are often envisioned as means of communication, as something akin to speech and fulfilling the same role as speech, Ko attempted to extirpate his dance from the economy of communication.

Faced with the expectation, or perhaps more accurately the injunction for his body, for his dance, to mean and to signify, Ko set up to explore the possibilities of a body unconstrained by the system. He did so, in part, by foregrounding the insignificant—what has been decided, in advance, as not mattering. In The Order of Things, Foucault writes of the writings of authors such as Artaud as exploring “that formless, mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom” (418). Rather than using his words to support an existing order or an existing system, Artaud dis/ordered language and the system of thought it upholds, reopening a space for the unsignifying and the insignificant, for all that and all those that the current order excludes. Ko, to me, attempted to do something similar with the body. Dis/ordering, shattering the existing system(s), foregrounding the insignificant and foregrounding the act of unsignifying, Ko sought freedom.  

I return, in closing, to the words of John Cage: “if we could change our language, that’s to say the way we think, we’d probably be able to swing the revolution” (210). Changing the language of dance, disentangling dance from language as an established system in service of an established (neurotypical) order, Ko created possibilities for changing the ways in which we see and the ways in which we think, for starting to shatter neurotypicality as a system that always-already ‘hems the body in.’ This, I believe, is the first mis/step on the path to swinging a revolution.

Works Cited:

Deligny, Fernand. The Arachnean and other texts. Univocal , 2015.

Centonze, Katja. Aesthetics of Impossibility: Murobushi Kō on Hijikata Tatsumi. Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, 2018.

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press, 2012.

Cage, John. M: Writings ’67-’72. Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

Easton, Steacy. “Autism: An Anecdotal Abecedarium.” kadar koli, vol. 8, 2013, pp. 99-108.

Hijikata Tatsumi. “To Prison.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2000, pp 43-48.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Routledge, 2002.

Manning, Erin. For a pragmatics of the useless. Duke University Press, 2020.

Murobushi Ko, and Ishii Tatsuro. “The Body at its physical edge: A solitary presence among Butoh artists, Ko Murobushi.” Performing Arts Network Japan, 1 Nov. 2011, https://performingarts.jpf.go.jp/en/article/6983/.

Murobushi Ko. Tape recording.

Murobushi, Ko. Interview with Juan Carlos Piedrahita. El Espectator, 2009.

Murobushi, Ko. 室伏鴻集成 [Murobushi Ko Shusei]. Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2018.