Thank you for being here today.
My name is Yuma OCHI, and I’m delighted to have this chance to share my thoughts on Ko Murobushi.

This presentation consists of four steps and a final step.
Each step is a move—perhaps even a misstep—toward understanding how Murobushi’s dance confronts the institution of the body and opens a space for new possibilities.

Let me begin with Step 0: Introduction

Step 0: Introduction

I will begin by presenting part of my conclusion.

Ko Murobushi is our mirror.
Ko Murobushi is our corpse.
Ko Murobushi is our corpse as a mirror.
Through him, we can see the corpse within ourselves.

This is what I call the “utopian body.”
We must clearly distinguish between “utopia” and the “utopian body.”
Ko Murobushi is a corpse that reflects the multitude of possibilities within our own bodies.

Today, I will focus on Murobushi’s idea of “faux pas,” or “misstep.”
Why is the misstep so important?
As Maurice Blanchot observed, it marks the failure of an institution.
Blanchot paid close attention to the moments when literature, as an institution, fails—because only in such moments does literature reach its true literariness.
I believe we can say the same about dance.
At least, Murobushi seemed to think so.
Dance is an institution, and yet, as an institution, it must fail.

We can also put it this way:
The body itself is an institution.
And as an institution, the body must also fail.
For that, we need not just a “pas,” but a “faux pas,” a misstep.
And through that misstep, we might discover within ourselves what I call the “utopian body.”

I will take you through four steps, and then a final step, as we trace the idea of misstepping — or ‘faux pas’ — in dance, from history to Ko Murobushi’s practice.

Step 1.  Dance and the Subordinate Body

I would like to begin by looking back at the history through which dance and body became an institution. This is also the history through which our bodies have been transformed into subordinate bodies—or, as Michel Foucault would say, docile bodies.
One historical turning point I want to highlight is the seventeenth century: the founding of the Académie Royale de Danse by Louis XIV and the birth of the concept of choreography.

In 1662, the Letters Patent of the King for the Establishment of the Royal Academy of Dance in the City of Paris stated the purpose of this academy. Let me quote:

Dance has long been recognized as one of the most solid and necessary means of shaping the body. It provides the body—especially the military body—with an important and natural disposition for acting effectively. For that reason, dance is one of the most effective and beneficial practices for acquiring the nobility we value. It is therefore an honorable practice not only for the army in times of war, but also for the entertainment of court dance in times of peace.

When dance began to be taught by a state institution, it served two roles: in wartime, it trained bodies for combat; in peacetime, it trained bodies for social interaction in the court. Both body is polictical.
Dance thus became a tool for shaping the national political body—a body subordinate to the king’s authority, the body of subjects.

Michel Foucault, using the example of training soldiers’ bodies in seventeenth-century France, identified here a form of disciplinary power. By prescribing in detail how to move, how to stop, and how to hold one’s posture, this power transformed the peasant’s body into the soldier’s body. What emerged was a uniform, homogeneous, and highly regulated army.
Foucault called this fine-grained intervention of power into the body micropolitics. Dance, as an institution, was one of the key technologies that made such micropolitics possible.

I also believe that an invention, published in 1700 as a result of Louis XIV’s order to the Academy, made dance, as an institution, truly decisive.　This invention was choreography.
Choreography is a technology for codifying the steps of dance, systematically describing them, and collecting and classifying “correct” steps.

Under the authority of the Academy, dance steps were canonized. Raoul-Auger Feuillet, the author of Chorégraphie, classified and described countless steps: pas droit, pas ouvert, pas rond, pas fortillé, pas plié, pas élevé, pas battu, and many others. Feuillet’s book reflects the historical process by which dance became increasingly complex and systematic. As a system—an institutionalized form—Chorégraphie spread throughout Europe via numerous publications, helping to establish Western aesthetic standards in dance.

Yet we should not forget its original aim: to encode the human body and make it manageable.
The seventeenth-century techniques and micropolitics that shaped the bodies of dancers and soldiers were later applied to factory workers’ bodies, and then to students in schools.

This story is not unrelated to Japan. During modernization, Japan imported the clasical dance of the French court in 19th century . At first, in Japan, this dance was called butō. The term butō is composed of two characters: mai (舞), which denotes horizontal movement, and fumi (踏), which refers to vertical movement or stepping.　Of course, this is entirely different from the butō of Tatsumi Hijikata or Ko Murobushi.
In the Meiji era, “butō” aimed at executing the correct European step, pas. Similarly, the bodies of modern soldiers and factory workers were modeled after European examples.
What they shared was a body that is rational, efficient, agile, and disciplined—in other words, a body capable of continuously performing the correct steps: an institutional body.
The disciplinary power Foucault observed in seventeenth-century France, and the institutional body it produced, eventually traveled over centuries to Japan.

But can the diverse bodies of those who danced before dance was institutionalized really be reduced to such codified steps?
And what happens when someone steps outside the “correct” step?
Do they become an uncouth barbarian? Or do they acquire another, entirely new body?

I would argue that it is precisely when one step between the correct steps—when one makes a misstep (faux pas)—that the dance as institution fails.
And at the moment of this failure, the human being steps outside the institution, exposing another form of humanity. Tatsumi Hijikata called this attempt ankoku butō (dance of darkness).
Following Foucault, I would like to call the body that exists outside the “institution of dance” the utopian body—the body that Ko Murobushi shows us as a possibility.

Step 2. A Genealogy of the “Misstep” in Dance: Discovering the “Utopian Body”

Ko Murobushi was acutely aware of the importance of the misstep—the faux pas. But before him, after dance had already been consolidated as an institution, was there anyone who “misstepped”? I would say: Vaslav Nijinsky. Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of butō, repeatedly expressed a deep sympathy with Nijinsky. What butō and Nijinsky share is precisely this misstep.

As is well known, in The Rite of Spring (1913), Nijinsky literally forced dancers to take faux pas. From the perspective of classical, academic norms, the dancers were compelled to execute steps that deviated from the canon; they felt intense discomfort and displeasure. It is said that the piece required over a hundred rehearsals before it could go on stage. There are two especially memorable moments of faux pas in The Rite. The first is the moment when the Chosen Maiden is selected: young women form a circle and play a game, during which one of them stumbles and falls. The second is the now-famous scene in which the chosen victim stands pigeon-toed—an internally rotated position that simply does not exist within the classical positions.

It is not hard to imagine that many spectators felt unease—even disgust—when confronted with a pose that violated academic and canonical rules. It signifies a deviation from the standards of beauty. And I want to stress this: in both instances, the faux pas directly ushers in the character’s death. Over more than a century, The Rite of Spring has been stripped of the superficial exoticism of its premiere and continuously reinterpreted by countless choreographers and dancers. Perhaps this is because it exposes a concealed, essential dimension of the human being—the human as a dying being—that the “institution of dance” had not allowed to appear. Codified, stable steps cannot possibly represent the fear, anxiety, and heterogeneity of a dying individual within a group. A faux pas was necessary. After the two faux pas, the Chosen Maiden continues to dance in an extremely unnatural posture and becomes a sacrificial corpse. The force of The Rite may lie in the materiality of this “corpse” that has undergone the faux pas. Among contemporary commentators, it was Jacques Rivière alone who discerned a certain “grace” in the convulsive movements of this sacrificial girl.

More than half a century later, in Japan, Hijikata’s butō emerged—modeled explicitly on the corpse. Hijikata defined dance as follows: “Dance is a corpse standing upright at the risk of life.” Ko Murobushi, who served as Hijikata’s assistant for a year, seems to have continued responding to this thesis throughout his career. Tellingly, the title of Murobushi’s final solo was faux pas. Minute, convulsive, his dance performs a misstep at every moment; it makes the institution of dance fail, and with it, the institutionalized body. As a result, the body appears as if it belonged nowhere in this world. It is a moving corpse—almost a creature from a parallel world.

Murobushi said: “Were we not leaping toward a place that belongs to nowhere?”

I find this “outside” dance of Murobushi truly beautiful. And I can only imagine the immense time of physical and conceptual training he devoted to it. To step away from disciplinary power, he kept honing a technique to kill dance as an institution. In doing so, he led us to the edge of the utopian body.

Step 3. The Difference Between Utopian Thought and the “Utopian Body”

In The Rite of Spring, and in butō, which takes the corpse as its model, the image of the corpse is crucial. It is not an abstract, idealized, or utopian notion of death. Michel Foucault, in his typology of Western utopias, pointed out that such utopian thought tends to erase the bodily dimension of human existence. What I want to emphasize here is that death is always tied to the corpse—to a decomposing, foul-smelling, material body.

According to Foucault, and as the Japanese philosopher Yoshiyuki Koizumi also argues, our civilization, culture, myths, and political institutions tend to erase the reality of our body/corpse. Why? Because by eliminating the corpse and abstracting death, death loses its concreteness and materiality, and the relationship between the dead and the living is fabricated. This is the issue I wish to question. Death should not be separated from the corpse.

Foucault suggests that utopias were invented as a way for humans to overcome or even erase the body. He identifies three kinds of utopias:

The first utopia is a place inhabited by bodiless bodies—by fairies, spirits, and other incorporeal beings.
He describes this utopia as a place of “beautiful, clear, transparent bodies, filled with light, agile, endowed with immense power, infinite duration, sharpness, invisibility, protection, and perpetual transformation.” Here, we can also recall that Louis XIV played the role of the sun.　Yet these bodies lack the heaviness, clumsiness, and awkwardness inherent to the human body.

The second utopia is the utopia of the dead—a realm of death. Here, Foucault points to ancient Egyptian mummies and pyramids. The mummy is a utopian transformation of the body: covered with a golden mask, imbued with the power of the sun, and placed in a stone pyramid endowed with divine eternity. The materiality of the human corpse is thus erased. However, the Japanese mummified monks that Murobushi used as models should be distinguished from these.

The third utopia is the myth of the soul. According to Foucault, this myth has existed at the foundation of Western history. The soul resides in the body, and at death, it quietly slips away to survive. This soul, “smooth like a bar of soap, lifeless yet round,” is imagined as beautiful, pure, and clean. But it unjustly devalues the body as something impure, and it is disconnected from the rot and filth of the corpse.

Foucault summarizes the function of these three utopias as follows:

“Yes! My body has vanished under the effects of all these utopias. The soul, the tomb, the spirits, the fairies have stripped my body away, erased it in an instant, blown on its weight and its ugliness, and returned to me a body that is radiant and eternal.”

But Foucault continues: our bodies can never truly be reduced in this way. This is like how our dancing bodies cannot be reduced to Feuillet’s notation. Foucault’s stance is critical, even negative, toward utopias that erase the body’s concreteness. Instead, he turns his attention to the body’s own capacity for imagination. This is what he calls the utopian body. He describes this body as “a body that is incomprehensible, both transparent and opaque, both open and closed,” and yet “absolutely visible.”

Foucault says:

“In order for me to be utopia (to be a utopian body), these three types of utopia are unnecessary. It is enough that I am a body. The origin of utopia lies in our bodies themselves. All these utopian ideas probably arose from the body, only to later turn away from it and attempt to erase it.”

The Japanese philosopher Yoshiyuki Koizumi criticizes such utopias that erase the corpse even more fiercely than Foucault. He argues—drawing on myths and wars across history—that “myths and religions always fabricate relationships between the living and the dead.” Why is this a problem? Because once the corpse is hidden and death becomes an abstract idea, the dead gain a transcendent, authoritarian position over the living. It produces a logic in which sacrificial dead are required for the sake of the living. This logic, in turn, creates docile bodies for myths and wars. The “utopias that erase the body,” classified by Foucault, are variations of this mythical power. Koizumi also criticizes politicians and scholars for abstracting the dead, using them for deceptive politics or deceptive forms of enlightenment.　 In other words, death without corpse of someone is also institutionalized.

But as Foucault says, the human body is always a primary participant in utopia. And among the inventions humans have devised to access the utopian body, Foucault names masks, makeup, tattoos, and dance.

These practices place the body into communication with invisible forces. They inscribe a mysterious language onto the body, remove it from its ordinary space, and project it into another space. According to Foucault:

“The dancer’s body becomes a body extended according to a space that is neither purely internal nor purely external to itself. The body, as flesh and materiality, becomes like the product of its own imagination.”

What Foucault is saying is that the body is always a cultural construct. Meanings and ideas are constantly inscribed onto it. Society, institutions, and history mark our bodies. But we can also inscribe something else—something beyond such discursive power—onto the body. In dance, the faux pas, the misstep, can be understood as precisely such an act. Murobushi’s dance, too, can be seen in this way. His body dismantles the institutionalized body on which all forms of power are inscribed. It draws the darkness of the body—the midnight of the flesh—into itself, turns it inside out, and makes it visible to us. What Murobushi offers us is a body/corpse that can potentially become anything, leaving individuals who have been institutionalized.

Step 4. The Function of the Mirror and the Corpse

Our bodies are not simple utopias because of the mirror and the corpse according to Foucault.
We usually forget this, blinded as we are by our habitual worldview and mythologies.
Our world tends to act as if corpses do not exist.

In other words, the mirror and the corpse are crucial mediators for discovering or attaining the utopian body.
For us, who can never see the totality of our own bodies, the mirror and the corpse reveal the body’s full outline—and in doing so, they prevent us from escaping into utopia.

Foucault explains this through two examples: It is about the way infants and Homer perceive the body.

An infant, during the first months and even the first year of life, cannot form an integrated image of its own body.
It only experiences scattered limbs—arms and legs unorganized.
Its sense of bodily unity emerges only in the image seen in the mirror.
Similarly, in Homer’s text, the Greeks had no term for the living, unified body.
The Greek word for body was used only to refer to the corpse.
Homer does not erase the corpse; he is faithful to it.
As Foucault puts it, the concept of “body,” as we understand it today, did not exist in ancient Greece—or perhaps their language was simply more honest about our inability to fully grasp our own bodies.

Turning to us: it is not utopian thought, but rather the corpse as a mirror, that concretely shows us where the utopian body exists.

It silences the convenient utopias we rely on.

We know a dance that does not abstract death, but instead holds onto the ugliness of the corpse—its wrinkled skin, protruding bones, and raw materiality.　

 Here, at the Odéon Theatre, Ko Murobushi presented two works in 2013 that danced the corpse: Dead 1 and Enthusiastic Dance on the Grave.
The convulsions, the falls, the exhaustion of the body were beautiful.

The dance of the corpse—revealed by the misstep that breaks the body of political institutions—teaches us the place of our own corpse, something we cannot reach by ourselves.

Final step: Conclusion

Whenever I speak about Murobushi, I am reminded of the limits of being a scholar.
Blanchot found literature only outside the institution of literature.
Likewise, Murobushi found dance only outside the institution of dance.
There, in that misstep, true art emerges.
And to grasp this true art, “scholarship as an institution” is of little use.
I, too, must misstep—step outside the institution of scholarship—if I am to approach their practice and the utopian body.　 Following Ko Murobushi’s advice in one of his essays, I want to practice the lesson of becoming a corpse.

So I decided to borrow the methods that Foucault says can help us discover the utopian body—mask, makeup, tattoo, or dance.

Among them, I will choose the mask.
I will use my hands as a mask.
With this small misstep outside the frame of an academic presentation, I will enact my conclusion as a performative statement.

When I hide my face with my hands, I become another body.
I offer this body to you, the audience, as a mirror.
I am your corpse as a mirror.

My final claim:

Ko Murobushi is our mirror.
Ko Murobushi is our corpse.
Ko Murobushi is our corpse as a mirror.
Therefore, through Murobushi, we can discover where our own corpse lies.

It offers us a blank surface, an open space on which something new can be inscribed.

We must clearly distinguish between utopia and the utopian body.

Let us step away from the biopolitics and necropolitics that manipulate our life and death.
Our body itself is the core of utopia.
Ko Murobushi is the corpse as a mirror that reflects the infinite possibilities of our bodies.
That is the utopian body for us.
And the body standing here now—my own body—
is also your corpse as a mirror.

Thank you for sharing this space and moment with me.”.