To exhibit. But what is it that we are exposing? Something that no longer exists, something that has been lost. But how can we exhibit something that no longer exists? How can we exhibit something that is absent as something that is absent, as something latent? Of course, through materials. By composing a myriad of materials, such as photographs, videos, diaries, flyers, pamphlets, and so on.

This year, we are holding an exhibition and symposium on Ko Murobushi. Ko Murobushi passed away in 2015. We cannot bring him back to life. This exhibition is not a reproduction of his dance. It is not a restoration. His dance has been lost. But the materials remain. After his death, Kimiko Watanabe has been collecting and organizing flyers, pamphlets, videos, and photographs, and has been working on digitizing Murobushi’s diary. By montaging these materials, we are calling Murobushi to come as absent, and forming an indexical phenomenon, a symptom, of the unappeared.

There are notes written by Murofushi when he held a workshop at ImPulsTanz in 2005 (two thousand and five). In them, there is a reference to Georges Bataille’s Inner experience. I quote.

What was dance? It was a surprise and a “discovery.” It is the « speechlessness », The self being the other. For example, the first time I saw the pure blue sea, It was like being thrown to the horizon. It was equivalent to the atomic bomb. It is the extreme north of possibilities, the limit of possible times, As going to the extreme. That is, if we pursue what Bataille means by ecstasy, By probing what inner experience is, We will encounter not Butoh, but « Butoh-ness ». Just one step before At the edge of religious-mystical experience. What is just one step before The illusion of rescue or salvation that activates it. The form of supplication.[*1]

End of quote. Murobushi says that dance is a surprise, a discovery of “the self being other “. There are various possible interpretations, but what does it mean? It is reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, who said, “I am an other,” but the issue here is Bataille’s inner experience. Let’s consider this in accordance with Bataille. I would like to consider this by discriminating between the subjective “I” of the first person singular subject and the “self” that is the “self” but is the other to the “I”. There is a part of our “self” that cannot be reduced to the subjective and rational “I.” It is a surplus for the “I,” a part of the “self” that is invisible to the “I” and of which  “I” am not clearly conscious. It is the “other” to the “I,” but it is still a part of the “self.” This part is related to “what Bataille calls ecstasy” and “experience – inner experience.”

Bataille’s “inner experience” is the experience of “ecstasy” which means “escaping the oneself (extase).” It is a kind of mystical experience, but there is no God to be united with. In the experience, the object as God disappears, and the absence of the object appears. It is an unknown thing without limitations, and while gazing at it, the subject becomes non-knowledge (non-savoir), and experience becomes a ecstasy in which the “I” is lost. The french word “extase” is translated in Japanese as “ecstasy（恍惚）” or “escape from oneself（脱自）” in Japanese. The origine of this french word is the Church Latin ecstasis or the Church Greek extasis, and means “the act of being outside oneself.” It is a state experienced by the self, but it is a state of loss for me, a state of being outside the limitations of the “I.” Therefore, it is an unknown experience for me, which cannot become my experience, even though it is my own experience. And when the experience ends, I am reborn, but even if the physical sensation of the experience that I experienced remains, the experience itself is lost to me. It is an experience like a blind spot for me, and shows, as Murofushi says, “the self is other.” In the midst of the experience, I cannot talk about it, describe it, or think about it. It is the silent part. I can only talk about and think about it after the experience has ended, starting from the remaining physical sensations. For me, therefore, it is an experience of stepping aside, “faux-pas”.

In his first book, Inner Experience, Bataille tried to talk about and think about this experience. It was an attempt to talk about “my silence,” what Murobushi calls “speechlessness,” an extreme attempt to open the limits of my knowledge to non-knowledge (le non-savoir), an impossible attempt for me to talk about my absence, an attempt to reach “the extreme limit of the possible.” This book is a montage of words constructed around the loss of such a “speechlessness,” around the experience of being lost. The structure of the book appears disorderly at first glance, but it indicates an attempt toward a different kind of structure from systematic order. But why and how is Bataille’s question related to “dance,” or rather, to the “dance-ness” that lies at its core? Isn’t the state of the body of the self without me a “corpse”? In both experience and dance, the self that I am no longer present still survives and stands still. Isn’t this the dancing body that Tatsumi Hijikata called a “standing corpse”? I would like to consider this issue further by referring to another text by Murobushi, “私は痙攣するダンサーである(I am a convulsive dancer)”. 

According to the Japanese dictionary, a “convulsion”, “Keiren” in Japanese is “the phenomenon in which muscles contract involuntarily and suddenly.” It is an uncontrollable contraction of muscles that betrays my will, and is a misstep, “faux-pas” in physical movement. If a normal moving body, such as the body of a ballerina, aims to control physical movement willfully and produce a pre-established movement, then a convulsion is an involuntary disharmony of pre-established movement, a defect, a kind of failed step, a misstep, “faux-pas”. However, Murobushi argued that such convulsions are the essence of dance. Although it will be a bit long, I would like to quote from Murobushi’s writing.

I am a convulsive dancer. I cannot recognize dance without convulsions as dance. / Why? That’s because dance is a convulsion… This doesn’t say anything… / Why? I don’t know when I was born (it’s not that I forgot my birthday), but I was born pulling away myself from the « time before » I was born, or being pulled away from it, and since then, it has been a convulsion (that returns forever). What is my life? / Therefore, my dance is not something that was taught to me or learned by anyone. It is something that was given (gifted) to me at the moment when I was born. / It is the <I = non-I> that transcends me, but it is an impossible I that will never reach <God = transcendence>. Didn’t Hijikata Tatsumi say, « My dance = a standing corpse, it cannot be for a shrine or temple »?[*2]

End of quote. We are a single existence that is born and dies, but we cannot experience the moment of birth or the moment of death as a subjective “I”. Therefore, my whole life is suspended between the absolute unknowns of birth and death. When I am born, “pulling myself away/being pulled away” from that “state of my unbornness”, my life is born in the midst of convulsions. These convulsions are dance, and they were given to me without my realizing it “at the moment when I was born”. Therefore, dance, which is a convulsion, is “I = non-I” that is related to my formation, but is also outside of me. In other words, convulsions as dance continue to vibrate within the “self”, but they are vibrations outside of me, and for me they are a remaining physical sensation, a forgotten memory. If the body in which I am absent after death is a “corpse”, then convulsions as dance are the vibrations of the body in which I am absent, that is, the “standing corpse” that is a corpse but still survives as a self. Murobushi then connects the question of dance as convulsion to the words of Tatsumi Hijikata, “Dance is a corpse standing there, risking its life.” This primal tremor slips through my volitional memory and remains latent in my “non-place” as an involuntary memory of the “non-self” that cannot be recalled voluntarily. It is also the non-place of Bataille’s inner experience.

And so Murobushi reminisces strangely. I quote.

What I remember is a very vague memory. Because there is memory “outside” memory. Another memory of mine (that I have forgotten) remains in a non-place that I do not know…[*3]

End of quote. Murobushi says that in the non-place outside of me, another memory remains, a memory that has been forgotten and become vague for me. It is the memory of when he saw a drowned body that was as stiff as a stone. He says that when he saw that body, he himself became as stiff as a corpse, as stiff as a stone, and death struck him. During this experience of his death, during the “time of losing time,” a “convulsion” occurred in his body.

Dance is the bringing of death into the midst of my life. The dance as convulsion occurs in my body without me. It is a ferocious inactivity, ferocious unwork (“féroce désœuvrement” in French) that pierces a life of activity, a life of work.

However, Murobushi carefully adds that the issue is not simply forgetfulness of onself, or “the experience of losing oneself.” I am not simply absent. I am erased while I exist. Bataille, in his book “Eroticism,” defined the dynamics of prohibition and transgression as follows: Humans become rational “I” by prohibiting themselves from the natural state. So does the transgression of the prohibition lead to a return to the natural state, to simple selflessness? No. I quot. “But a transgression is not the same as a back-to-nature mouvement; it suspends a prohibition without suppressing it.” End of quote. Let’s define this differently. “But an inner experience is not a return to selflessness. An inner experience suspends I without erasing it.” In the experience, a loss of  I occurs to the self. However, even though I am annulled, I remain. This is why the memory of my experience of death remains as a “different memory” that cannot be recalled willfully, and the physical sensation of the experience remains in me. The boundary, the edge, between that self without I and I is important, and it is there that the convulsions – the dance – occur.   I quote.

It is different from the experience of forgetting oneself, of losing oneself. I am a body on the border. On that line, on the edge, on the veranda, where I « can » escape in either direction, but I « can’t », my body is suspended in mid-air and trembling. […] « Something » that is no longer a dance, dance as a becoming, bubbling, and convulsions can be formed or not? It is that “edge,” at all times. It’s the edge… There’s no need for it to be a dance anymore… It’s just a wave of convulsions. Then it connects to another wave… it turns around… it’s an undulating edge.[*4]

End of quote. And the convulsion as dance, disappears into nothingness. Furthermore, Ko Murobushi himself died in reality. Wouldn’t organizing an exhibition and montaging materials around Murobushi’s lost faux-pas be damaging to the essence of his dance? His act of risking everything at that moment and doing faux-pas across the boundaries of dance was born in that moment and lost forever. Wouldn’t montaging it around lost Murobushi’s dance mean reconstructing the faux-pas as a “step to land”? Not necessarily. It depends on the montage. The question is to construct an indexical phenomenon, a symptom of the loss that does not become apparent, while keeping what was lost latent as lost.

Here we must recall Didi-Huberman’s Images malgré tout,  (Images in Spite of All : Four Photographs from Auschwitz) (2004). In that book, Didi-Huberman attempted to refute the criticism of Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux. Didi-Huberman was discussing four photographs taken by prisoners secretly at the Birkenau extermination camp. The subject of this book is the historical event known as the Holocaust or Shoah (extermination), an event in which all images and documents were planned to be destroyed, and in which the fact that the event was taking place and all traces of it were to be ignored. The clandestine photographer snatched four images from this event, which is considered impossible to represent and imagine. These blurry photographs cannot show the entirety of the Shoah, which is considered impossible to represent. However, the four images remain, and we must overcome the stopping of think caused by the impossibility of representation and exercise our historical imagination from there. The montage of the four images, and the montage with words, thus makes it possible to overcome the aporia of the impossibility of representation. In contrast, Wajcman and Panoux both believed in the production principle of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah as the absolute principle in representing the Holocaust. In other words, there are no images that record the scene of people dying in the gas chambers. The core of the Holocaust is the impossibility of representation. Therefore, Lanzmann did not use any archive footage or re-enactments, but instead constructed the film using only interviews with survivors and footage of the location. It was an attempt to visualize the present that remained from the past without making the past events themselves present, and to read the wounds and traces of the latent past inscribed in the present. The montage was a centripetal montage, and the present images and words were organized around the darkness of the impossibility of representation that is not present. Didi-Huberman highly praised this Shoah‘s montage itself in Places in spite of all (1995), which preceded  Images in spite of all. It is an attempt to represent the impossible to represent and imagine the unimaginable. However, Wajcman and Pagnoux dogmatize the idea that Shoah is the only way to visualize the Holocaust. In response to this, Didi-Huberman criticizes the thinking style that is based on the binary opposition that everything is unrepresentable or everything is representable, or that all images do not exist or that images that show everything exist, and he calls for its dialecticalization. His ideological position is that, in the face of the binary “everything,” fragmentary images remain that resist “everything,” and that we must attempt to represent the unrepresentable and imagine the unimaginable by montaging them. What they both criticize as a premise is the easy spectacle and montage that is based on the representability that forms icons of fear. For the time being, let’s call this the Hollywood-style representability.

We have thus organized an exhibition and held a symposium around Ko Murobushi’s Dance of ferocious inactivity, unwork (désœuvrement) or his Anti-dance, but this is not aimed at recreating the lost dance. That said, we are not sanctifying the lost dance and performing a montage on the impossibility of representation. We are attempting to make a montage of what has been lost by constructing and reconstructing the remaining materials, thinking about them and rethinking them. It is an attempt to reconsider and examine the past from multiple perspectives while illuminating it in various ways, and at the same time deriving from it the possibility of dance that has never been heard before. The montage thus carried out is always an attempt to ask and respond to questions, and there is no conclusion. I would like to make further considerations about such montages of the lost past.

In his pioneering theory of photography, A Short History of Photography published in 1931, Walter Benjamin distinguished between two trends in contemporary photography. One is creative photography and the other is constructive photography. Albert Renger-Patzsch was a representative figure of creative photography. As symbolized by his photographic album The World is Beautiful, creative photography converts the world into fragmentary images, extracts it from the world, and abstracts it into an aesthetic form. In this way, photography is stripped from its human context and the context of the real world, and reduced to a mere object of aesthetic enjoyment. For example, an iron bridge that has become an abstract form is cut off from the life of the homeless people living underneath it and is reduced to a superficial form. Creative photography fetishizes the world and entrusts it to fashion. Benjamin criticized creative photography, which thus commercializes and advertises the world and organizes it according to associative forms. In contrast, he highly values ​​constructive photography. Representatives of this type are August Sander and Germaine Krull. Sander took portraits of people from various social classes in an attempt to present the diversity of people who make up German society. The people who appear in his photographs are each unique and are not reduced to a mere aesthetic form. Each person shows an appearance that has been formed in their lives, and presents the heterogeneous appearance of the German people, who are by no means homogeneous. Captions are added to such constructive photographs, and the montage of images and words encourages the interpretation of the diverse images. Just as detectives and police officers must interpret traces at deserted crime scenes, we too must interpret traces in the form of images. Thus, by looking at photographs, images of the past, we can interpret what has been lost. “Construction” is the method for doing so.

Here, I would like to mention an example of a constructive photograph, moving away from Benjamin and focusing on what has been lost. It is a photographs taken by Japanese photographer Keiji Tsuyuguchi entitled Place Names. Tsuyguchi composed photographs and words around place names in Hokkaido. Hokkaido, located in the northern part of Japan, was a land where the Ainu people lived for a long time. However, the land was internally colonized after the Meiji era. Hokkaido was dominated, cultivated and Japanized by the Japanese state centered on the Emperor system, and the Ainu people were deprived of their land, forced to speak Japanese, and became Japanese. There is almost no trace of the Ainu land in present-day Hokkaido anymore. The “former” land which once exited, has been lost. However, the place itself still remains from that “former” time. With this in mind, Tsuyguchi attempts to form a symptom of the lost past while photographing the landscape of present-day Hokkaido. The present-day place names in Hokkaido are Japaneseized versions of the Ainu language of the past. Tsuyguchi goes to places which have such place names and first takes a single shot. Then, after a certain time has passed, he goes to the same place again, pans from the first shot, and takes a shot of an adjacent place. At first glance, the two photos look like ordinary landscapes. However, the two shots, which are taken by panning the same place, contain temporal differences. These photos show the temporal differences contained in the “same” place, and the spatial differences caused by the pan. These photos allow us to understand that what is considered to be the same place contains differences, temporal differences, and that the landscape we see today actually contains layers of time, that the landscape of the “now” has a latent “past” and that the “now” retains the “past”. Furthermore, the words of the caption are added to this. The caption indicates the “place name”. However, the proper noun is not univocal, but polysemous. The place names of Hokkaido are Ainu place names that were phonetically converted into phonograms and eventually converted into Chinese characters, and have continued to the present. Tsuyukuchi shows this historical process in the captions. First, the present-day place name in Chinese characters is shown, then its phonetic alphabetize Romanization  is shown, and then the Romanization is segmented according to the Ainu syllables. In addition, the meaning of the Ainu place name is given in Japanese. In other words, the caption presents the history that is latent in the place name written in Chinese caracters. By adding this to a pair of photographs, Tsuyukuchi’s photographs construct the symptom of the “past,” the past Ainu land, which is not present in itself, through multiple images and words. What is formed in this way is what Benjamin called a “dialectical image.” I quote.

It should not be said that the past illuminates the present, or that the present illuminates the past. On the contrary, an image is a place where the “What-has-been” meets the “Now” in a flash of light, creating a constellation situation. In other words, an image is a dialectic at rest. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of the “What-has-been” to the “Now” is dialectical. The latter relationship has a figurative, not temporal, character. Only the dialectical image is truly historical, that is, not archaic. The image that is being read – that is, the image in this “Now” where recognition becomes possible – bears in the highest degree the signs of the critical and dangerous moment that is the basis of all readings.

End of quote. What should we do then? What kind of montage should we construct around the lost dance of Ko Murobushi? The question is always open. This year in Vienna, we held an exhibition called Faux-pas. This was merely an attempt. And the attempt itself is Faux-pas. By constructing this Faux-pas, we must continue to attempt a montage of what has been lost.

Thank you very much for your attention.