I. Introduction: A Poetics of Time and the Outside

In the house of Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of Butoh, there was an oil painting of the ocean, placed near the staircase.

I was once told by Yoshito Ohno that whenever the writer Yukio Mishima—whose novel Forbidden Colors inspired the first Butoh performance in 1959—visited Hijikata to dance with him, he would take off his watch.

That simple gesture is profoundly meaningful—removing the device that measures chronological time, the symbol of Chronos, the god of linear time. 

The god who counts, divides, disciplines. Chronos, who was born to construct Western society, industry, language—and, as Kō Murobushi called it, “the myth called identity.”(Murobushi, Ko: Dossieur, Nijinski, Paris, 2014)

Perhaps Chronos, the god of linearity, drowned there, in Hijikata’s house, 

in those painted waves—

devoured by Aeon, the god of cycles and eternity, while Mishima and Hijikata began to dance.

Within his dance, Kō Murobushi cut into the flesh of Chronos like a kama-itachi — the invisible weasel whose curved, razor-sharp frontclaws delivered bloodless, stinging wounds to the rice field workers of Tōhoku. His name became legendary through the photo series by Eikoh Hosoe and Tatsumi Hijikata.

Kō Murobushi cut with the deep desire to disappear, to transform, to become Other—and to awaken and extend an impersonal breath of the Outside, of an extended midnight within his own lungs.

This essay unfolds an exploration of temporal disobedience and corporeal poetics in the work of Japanese dancer Kō Murobushi. Drawing on philosophies of time—from Chronos and Aion to Nietzsche’s midnight, Foucault’s Outside, Deleuze’s moment, Maurice Blanchot’s destruction of time and Georges Bataille’s acephalic ontology—I aim to trace a choreography that cuts across representation, identity, and utility.

For Murobushi, to dance is not to express—but to erase.

Not to represent a body — but to disfigure it, to open the organism to forces that pass through it — trembling, decomposing, and recomposing it — until an impersonal breath and a field of becoming emerge.

There is a rhythm in Murobushi’s work that returns again and again:

The sea.

A metaphor of eternal movement and repetition. It is Murobushi’s ally.

For him, the flow of the waves resembles an absolute dance. For Kō Murobushi, the time of dance is outside of history.

As Michel Serres once wrote, the sea contains no memory itself.

It is full of eternal interruptions—and therefore, fresh beginnings.

Maurice Blanchot writes that the idea that everything repeats itself is a way of thinking about time by destroying it. (Blanchot, Maurice: Die Forderung der Wiederkunft In: Die Sprachen des Körpers, Merve Verlag, Berlin, 1979, p. 117)

Hijikata declares the necessity of being reborn always and everywhere, again and again.

Waves collapse, fold, restart.

So does Murobushi’s body.

The sea is not a metaphor of continuity—but of disruption.

It is movement without destination.

A repetition of interruptions.

Kō Murobushi writes: 

“I want to kill time.”

He does not swim in the sea.

He drowns in it.

He disappears into the waves of nothingness that move and move—and never arrive.

While truly dancing, we evoke the time of the sea to awaken, the eyes of Aeon to open, to look at us, to hold sweaty hands with the sensation of eternity.

The touch of Aeon’s fingers on our skin connects our bodies with non-Western and non-linear notions of time, suggesting that the lived present is entwined with both erasure and renewal—like the waves in the oil painting of Tatsumi Hijikata.

For Kō Murobushi dance doesn’t lie within dance. 

For him, dance starts as soon as we start to drill a hole to an Outside inside of our lives. 

One striking recurrence in his writing is his call to a nameless Outside—a matrix of disfiguration and desubjectification:

Outside, Outside, Outside.

Whose cry is it?

Someone, whose name is unknown (Mallarmé?)

The voice with no name,

without place,

at a non-place—

Cry…. C-R-Y. C-RA-CK! C-RA-CK.

Can you hear it? You—are you listening?

(Kō Murobushi Archive, 2001)

To drill or dig a hole towards an Outside is an active act, an ongoing movement, with no guarantee or serious aim of ever reaching it, but the body can acquire unique ways of digging and can remember them. 

He wrote about his dance: „Trying to reach the impossible to reach. My desire is to become this impossible thing’ (2013)

Digging outside’ is the opposite of ‘digging inside’. The sometimes-violent act of digging towards an Inside leads often to a sticky web of inwardness and to a land of memories, that are luckily or sadly irreversibly expired.

Instead of hanging there, Kō Murobushi was attracted to an Outside, that he called the “birthplace”, in which all discourses vanish and dissolve into an impersonal silence. 

For Kō Murobushi, the Outside is related to a moment of darkness in which all forms collapse. 

Tatsumi Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh, the dance of utter darkness in the late 1950s, was influenced by the so-called dark literature of Mishima, Bataille, Genet, Blanchot, de Sade, Lautréamont or Artaud. 

Hijikata’s body of Ankoku Butoh was fed by tones of words of writers and surrealists. 

In the late 1960s, Kō Murobushi spent eighteen months assisting Tatsumi Hijikata. 

Diving into the literature of Bataille or Artaud, Kō Murobushi was fascinated by the somatic experience of the edge, of limit experiences within writing and transformed  it to the dancing body. 

As inspiration he reminds us on the  moments of darkness in our everyday life: 

“Think of the excitement of children when the train passes through a tunnel. Think of the children, or the solemn mood of adults, when the candles are blown out at a birthday party or New Year’s party. Strangely, at these times, we encounter something that is charming and unshapely. That is the power of darkness that is found in everyday life. However, normally, we don’t think about this power. Probably because the tunnel is too short, or the party is 

too noisy…. Within darkness, for a moment, we experience death. When the train exits the tunnel, we come back to life. This is the reason why we need, if even for just a little, a soundless darkness at a birthday or New Year’s party. (…) my dance, continues to go to this origin in our consciousness. This can only be the death that could live. (Kō Murobushi 1983) 

Kō Murobushi’s first dance performances, in 1981 are named after a darkness without night, Hingata, who is found in the depths of the ocean. 

The moments of darkness are accompanied by an erasure of all paradigms of representation and its system of difference
and identity. You cannot see in the depth of the ocean. Its darkness is erasing all existing figures and forms. 

Kō Murobushi (1992) began dancing driven by a desire to dissolve into the ocean, to surrender to blindness and disappearance.

This longing resonates with Antonin Artaud, whose thought deeply influenced both Murobushi and Tatsumi Hijikata. In 1947, Artaud spoke of his yearning to extend the body into the depths of internal night—a gesture toward an inner void, a corporealization of nothingness (Artaud 1947: 563). In parallel, Georges Bataille, in Inner Experience, expressed his longing to remain blind within the darkness of the furthest night—a descent into a void where vision dissolves into unknowing (Bataille, 1988: 35).

II. Cutting Chronos: Between Production and Uselessness

Chronos—the linear, productive time of social order—is Kō Murobushi’s first enemy.

Time, as socially organized, is violent. It demands usefulness. It demands identity. It demands a body that performs, that produces.

Murobushi’s dance is a cut—a laceration of linearity.

An incision into Chronos—the measured time of society, of capital, of language and structure.

In this framework, the dancer’s body becomes a deadly uselessness. This uselessness is not absence—it is a subversion of capitalist logic.

A resistant body.

A body aiming to reach an Outside.

In an interview with me in 2011, Murobushi said:

“Time is always time-counting—to make society function.

Time is a production for society.

But if it’s a time of uselessness, it is out of time.

It is different from the time of society—because it is out of history.” 

Murobushi wanted to become unusable as a productive force. He wanted to burn all his energy in dance.

In his first manifesto, Tatsumi Hijikata described dance as the aimless use of the body and, for that reason, as the deadly enemy of a production-oriented society.

Because of this perspective, he drew a comparison between the dancer and a criminal.

Throughout his life, Kō Murobushi developed the idea of an aimless, useless, exhausted dancing body that celebrates this very kind of crime.

While moving slowly during a workshop, he remarked that his movements might resemble the established dance vocabulary or the aesthetics of Butoh or meditation. Yet, in those very moments, his intention was to kill time—to kill even the moment repeatedly (Video by Watanabe 2013).

Maybe in the moments we spend killing time by dancing aimlessly, forgetting us, we feel eternally alive.

Drawing inspiration from Mallarmé’s Midnight in Igitur (1925) and Nietzsche’s poem Midnight (2006: 264), he sought to violently rupture the flow of socially constructed, linear, chronological, and measurable time. He explained:

„I like Nietzsche very much, and Mallarmé. The poem Midnight by Mallarmé is very important. It exists completely outside of time. It belongs to another dimension… For Nietzsche too, it is something like the return of eternity. And this return is something very close to death.“ (verbal translation by Watanabe 2015b)

III. The Moment and the crack in Time

Deleuze calls the moment “the death of time.”

Sometimes he defined the „moment“ right before someone dies or right after someone died. 

In this in between moment the sensations of absolute immanence occurs.

Maybe Murobushi aimed to became a manufacture of eternity, destroying even the moment.

In trembling legs and whispering breath—sometimes in pain—

the landscape of his skin, brushed by sea salt on stage, meets the membrane of uncountable time,

touching what cannot be held.

The instant when the subject cracks open—something non-personal pulses through, like folds in a dark ocean.

His dance cultivates a transformative in-between space and time, cleansed by the sharp salt of the sea, like in a sumo bout.

IV. Faciality, Identity, Erotics and the Acephalic Body

For Deleuze and Guattari, the face is a regime. The face is Christ. The face is the White Man. The face is the child who must become obedient. The face is power’s favorite mask.

Faciality codes, controls, and recognizes individuals.

The face is identity.

And this is precisely what Kō Murobushi attacks.

In early performances, he smears his face with mud, plaster, paint.

Later, he wraps it in cloth—presenting an acephalic, faceless body.

A body without hierarchy.

A body where the skin thinks and the breath speaks.

Not aesthetic—but resistant.

The dancer becomes unrecognizable—and thus, free.

This is Bataille’s Acéphale—the figure without a head.

An erotic, sacred, terrifying body with no identity—and therefore, no limits.

Kō Murobushi wanted to become a monster, an Oni, that is rejected and alluring.

Murobushi didn’t want to become a man —but an alien presence refusing normative gender narratives. Gender, too, is disassembled and reimagined in this fluid space.

Murobushi becomes not man or woman—but plant, stone, water, rose.

His refusal to “grow up” into societal expectations of masculinity disrupts gender binaries and opens a queer corporeality that precedes and transcends social identity.

In this vein, the erotic emerges as a crucial site of resistance and power. 

Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic as a measure between the beginning of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings resonates deeply here. 

The erotic is not simply sexuality but a profound source of knowledge and transformative energy that subverts normative hierarchies. When paired with Georges Bataille’s notion of Eros—the force of transgression and dissolution of boundaries—the erotic power becomes an act of radical embodiment, a reclamation of self beyond imposed social orders. 

Murobushi’s dance enacts this dual force: an embodied rupture that cuts through temporal, gendered, and representational constraints, producing a space where new modes of being and knowing can emerge.

An alien presence refusing normative identity.

V. Midnight and the Mummy: The Impossible Threshold

A strange figure appears in one performance: the mummy.

Wrapped, blind, still, breathing once every two years, impersonal. 

Midnight made flesh.

Nietzsche’s midnight—a temporal wound, a time neither day nor night.

A moment of suspension.

Murobushi wrote in an email:

“I am in the time between day and night. It is out of now.”

To dance, then, is like dying—but not finishing.

A customary death.

Midnight is the breath of eternity returning—again and again.

Not presence— but absence made rhythm.

When the night of times awakes he crowls out the crack of the midnight- his body filled with a sensation of eternity. 

It unfolds a wide political dimension.

It resembles an extended moment of death that is carried out, but not completed. The eternal repetition and the midnight are very similar to Kō Murobushi. 

VI. The Outside as Becoming and the art of vanishing

We return to Foucault’s Outside—

“An experience that brings the subject as close as possible to the unlivable.” 

For Murobushi, this Outside is not transcendental.

It is somatic, visceral, pained, radically immanent.

It lives in quivering limbs, cracked breath, and broken grammar.

This is not dance as performance—

but dance as threshold.

A place where the body becomes a site of forces—

a trembling edge of disappearance.

In an image-saturated world governed by productivity, representation, and identity—

Kō Murobushi proposes a disappearance.

A poetics of vanishing.

Of becoming opaque.

Of breathing in non-time.

“During dancing, I want to disappear.”

This is not absence.

This is resistance.

This is refusal.

A profoundly ethical gesture:

To reject the face, the name, the narrative and to open the organism to something impersonal.

Something eternal.

Something that cannot be owned.

In doing so, Murobushi does not escape the world.

He exposes its fault lines.

And dances on them.

It is known that Mishima took off his watch one final time in front of the camera—before committing suicide.

Murobushi wrote:

“Dance is suicide, isn’t it? But it is a suicide never reached.”

In the chasm between the possibility within imagination and the impossibility of actual realization, the poetry of his dance occurs. 

In a workshop video, filmed once in Mexico—

now flickering softly here in Vienna,

during the Impulstanz Festival,

in the wandering Kō Murobushi Archive

in the café space of the Odeon Theatre,

just up the worn stairs—

he says, almost to himself:

“Until my real life finishes—

I die.”