1

I’m very grateful to Kimiko Watanabe for inviting me to give a presentation here, and for all her extraordinary work over the past decade at the Café Shy in Tokyo, which I’ve had the opportunity to visit many times between 2016 and 2019. For the first part of this presentation, I’m going to speak about that Café Shy as an archival space or entity, and then I’m going to talk about some discussions I had with Ko Murobushi, in London in 2003, about his engagement with the work of the artist & theorist Antonin Artaud, and finally I’m going to speak about the filmic documentation of Ko Murobushi’s performances, and about performances that escaped or resisted moving-image documentation.

So, what is the archive of someone who was itinerant, compelled perpetually to travel?

As well as creating fixed locations – as Ko Murobushi himself did in Tokyo in 1981 with his subterranean ‘Shy’ bar-space – many artists, performers and writers have also carried their archives with them on their travels – as ‘itinerant archives’ – and transported  those materials: notebooks, journals, fragments of paper.

2

For example, the French writer and theatre director Jean Genet carried his entire archive with him in a suitcase, or two suitcases, crammed with documents and manuscripts for ongoing work, as well as the detrita of abandoned projects, from country to country, from hotel room to hotel room, across many cities such as Tokyo, Beirut, London and Paris. The photographic innovator Eadweard Muybridge did exactly the same, carrying everything with him from city to city in packing cases.

Of course, that kind of material transportation of archives is now an obsolete manifestation of itinerance, and most writers or artists would now carry everything in digitised form, on a memory key, or even invisibly.

Transportation of material archives is something that a writer or artist may actively desire to undertake, but it can also be a forcible compulsion, as with that of the writer Antonin Artaud, who carried his manuscripts, drawings and accumulated notebooks in a battered metal chest, as he was forcibly transferred between numerous psychiatric hospitals across France, in the 1930s and 40s.

In most cases, such itinerance, as with that of Ko Murobushi’s incessant international travels for workshops and performances, eventually takes on the ‘location’ of a repository, which may or may not be that of an archive. Jean Genet’s materials, for example, after his death, are now permanently located in an archive, the IMEC centre, created for the work of philosophers and writers, in Normandy, in northern France, while the notebooks of Artaud are at the National Library in Paris, and Muybridge’s moving-image materials are at a museum in London. Some archives also sometimes preserve the materials’ medium of itinerance or transportation itself, such as Genet’s cheap vinyl suitcases, as a vital part of that archive, while others, such as Artaud’s metal chest, have somehow been lost.

3

But other archives, such as that of the instigator of butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata, with which Ko Murobushi’s work intersects, never really went far. In that instance, Hijikata’s materials remained at his studio-residence, also often used as a bar: the Asbestos studio, in Tokyo’s Meguro district, remaining there after his death in 1986, until the subsequent death of his widow in 2003, when the studio building was sold, and eventually those materials were relocated to the Art Center of Keio University, a few kilometers to the east across the urban space of Tokyo. Hijikata was never internationally itinerant in the way that the other figures I’ve mentioned were, never leaving Japan.

And the Keio University Art Center’s Hijikata archive is an entirely different entity to Café Shy, in its role as the repository of Ko Murobushi’s materials. The Hijikata archive requires negotiation to enter, while Café Shy is contrarily an entirely open space, directly on the street, with large windows. Not only those interested in Ko Murobushi’s work enter, but also passers-by who are attracted by what they see, and also students from the nearby university who need a receptive place to study.

So, an archive may be composed of materials that were once entirely, or in part, itinerant, but that then finally demand a location.

For the work of a choreographer who began their performances in the 1950s or 60s, the medium of film is also a vital archival element. In that case, films may need retrospectively to be amassed and then assembled, in an archive or on its website. That need to assemble dispersed filmic materials wasn’t entirely the case with Hijikata’s archive at Keio Art Center, since Hijikata kept celluloid prints of at least some films of his work at the Asbestos studio, in 8mm or 16mm formats, and projected them to visitors, sometimes dancing while holding the projector in his arms.

4

As well as films created as performance documentation, Hijikata’s films were also sometimes fiction films or art films, as with his collaborations with the photographer Eikoh Hosoe and the American filmmaker Donald Richie. The presence of film may sensorially disrupt an archive, and may resist digitisation, as with the film of Hijikata’s work projected at the 1970 Osaka World Exposition, across its 6-month span, to an estimated total audience of 8 million spectators.

5

That particular film’s surviving celluloid reels are now subject to nitrate deterioration, so that the film envelops visitors to that archive with an acrid stench, if it is released from its container. Ko Murobushi told me that he had accompanied Hijikata to that Osaka Exposition’s vast site, during the brief era when he worked as an assistant or collaborator with Hijikata, aged 22 or 23, not to see that projected film,

6

but instead to witness Hijikata’s only live performance at the Osaka Exposition, titled Adagio, held at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, on 11 March 1970, as an experimental event that took place shortly before the Exposition’s official opening.

7

By contrast with that filmic archiving of Hijikata’s materials, mostly in celluloid form, the filmic documents of Ko Murobushi’s work that are assembled at Café Shy have required a vast global collecting-together of material from his many performance locations, but more often in digital formats, since they were mainly shot two or three decades after those of Hijikata’s work, with different technologies, so that they have their new comprehensive location on the Cafe Shy’s Ko Murobushi website.

So, what other attributes could an archive possess?

It may be subject to the still-living transplantation of its elements – a new manifestation of itinerance, perhaps – as with the current exhibition of Café Shy materials in the Odeon theatre’s foyer. So, an archive can become: ‘outlandish’, if that’s the right word, through such a transplantation, rendered strange to its habitual location, but simultaneously generating new insights and experiences.

Also – as a vital element of archival corporeality – that archive can also contain: a library, as one entire wall of Café Shy in Tokyo does, with its amassing of Ko Murobushi’s personal collection of books, which enable researchers to investigate materials that Ko Murobushi cites within his own writings. Once the accumulator of a library has died, then their library can either be dispersed, or else it can be publicly re-located, as at Café Shy, to embody the preoccupations and inspirations of its collector. It’s often the intervention of death: that vitally generates an archive.

Alongside written or filmic traces, Café Shy is also vocally inhabited by visitors with memories to share of their meetings or collaborations with Ko Murobushi.

8

Among other attributes, an exploratory or experimental archive – as with Café Shy – can also be a generator of ideas for: translation, as with the discussions that generated the first volume of Ko Murobushi’s writings in English, together with texts in Japanese, French and German, to be published in the coming months by the arts publisher Diaphanes, and titled: Fierce Unworking – the book which is planned to be the first in a series devoted to Ko Murobushi’s writings, or to reflections or studies about them.

*

So, I’ll now go on to talk for a moment about a further future book in that same series, which also traverses archival time. This one concerns Ko Murobushi’s engagement with the work of: Antonin Artaud. As well as extant materials, an archive can also incorporate seemingly lost, spectral or vanished books, as well as lost memories, films or projects, which it possesses the unique capacity to resuscitate, or reactivate, or to conjure them back into existence – as Café Shy has done for this particular project.

Ko Murobushi performed in the United Kingdom on numerous occasions – and the instigator of many of those visits, at least from 2001 onwards, was a choreographer from Wales named Marie-Gabrielle Rotie. This also involved intensive collaboration on duet works with Ko Murobushi, and in workshop contexts. And it was on one of Ko Murobushi’s visits to London, in 2003, that I had some dialogues with him focused on the work of: Artaud.

9

Now, twenty years or so on in time, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie is best-known for her choreographic work with filmmakers, and currently with the prominent filmmaker: Robert Eggers, so for example she choreographed the work of performers such as Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe for Robert Eggers’ 2024 feature-film Nosferatu, and is currently choreographing Eggers’ next film, titled Werewulf. So, last week I asked Marie-Gabrielle how her intensive collaborative work of the 2000s with Ko Murobushi had directly informed her current choreographic, filmic work – and also about her memories of bringing Ko Murobushi to England – and she told me:

‘I’ve [often] referred to Ko Murobushi’s solo materials when preparing for the current film with Robert Eggers, Werewulf – because Ko’s work with animal/human transformation is legendary and unsurpassed.’… On her memories of working with Ko Murobushi from 2001 to 2014, I’ve distilled them here to a short account. So, Marie-Gabrielle told me: ‘I met Ko in 2001 when he came over to teach for my organisation, Butoh UK.This then established a creative and producer relationship between us that continued up to his death. The first performances at the Place Theatre in London happened in 2003 and the director of the theatre was convinced I was taking a [big] risk booking out the theatre for two nights. I paid for the venue on my credit card. As it transpired, both evenings were sold out. So I definitely got my money back!… We took the touring to the Colston School in Bristol [Bristol is a city in the west of England]. I will never forget the young audience (all aged 12 to 16) being absolutely mesmerised by Ko. One student commented when she saw him afterwards, after the show: ‘ Gosh he is so short!’ – In the child’s view, he had appeared like a giant on stage – such was the force of his energy to transform any notion of physical stature. As one student noted, Ko had the most magical feet, very tactile and sensate….

10

I last saw Ko in May 2015. He was performing some improvisations at the Tate Modern art-museum for an event choreographed by Boris Charmatz. He told me he was: quote: ‘facing death’. I took this on a metaphoric level. Although his physical struggles to move seemed too real on this occasion. He knew his time was near, and a few weeks later he died…. In  the last workshop I had produced for him, at London Buddhist Arts Centre in Bethnal Green district, which must have been in 2014, I practically had to drag him away from long cigarette breaks. In that workshop, he seemed to be in a real crisis about butoh and teaching. He kept saying: ‘I am not butoh’, or: ‘butoh is dead’, or: ‘I am no longer a butoh dancer’. It was both painful but also funny, having to persuade Ko to teach the room full of 20 eager participants… Now, I carry Ko’s memory as a ghost.’

So, those are Marie-Gabrielle’s Rotie’s memories and there must be parallel vocal accounts to be collected from Ko Murobushi’s collaborators in cities worldwide – from Mexico City to Berlin – so that’s a London-focused account, out of innumerable other potential accounts.

Marie-Gabrielle Rotie’s invitations to Ko Murobushi to travel to London formed the context for those dialogues which took place in March 2003 while he was in that city for workshops, and over several evenings, following the workshops, or on adjacent nights, we discussed the work of: Antonin Artaud, in an Armenian restaurant, in a street in London called ‘The Cut’. The aim we had was to create a short book of dialogues, which somehow didn’t transpire at that time, and became lost, but will now be reactivated, two decades on, within this new series of books with the publisher Diaphanes and via the vital initiatives of Café Shy.

11

In looking through Ko Murobushi’s journals and other writings, it’s evident that he very frequently cites or evokes the work of Artaud, alongside other figures such as Nietzsche, and many others, but Artaud appears a very constant preoccupation. For whatever reason, those dialogues with Ko Murobushi focused especially on the last project Artaud undertook, a work for French radio titled To have done with the judgement of god (Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu), which Artaud wrote and recorded in November 1947 and January 1948, with three collaborators, and was intended for transmission in February 1948, but was censored and prohibited by the radio station itself, to Artaud’s great anger. He died in the following month, March 1948. While I was researching Artaud’s work in Paris in the 1990s, I had the opportunity to meet the surviving participant in the recording, a woman named Paule Thévenin, who had been in her twenties at the time of the recording. Although the recording was prohibited and then unheard for several decades, the texts for it were immediately published in that late-1940s era, and by the 2000s, the recording itself was already widely available to hear, on vinyl records, cassettes or CDs.

Now, Artaud himself was not a choreographer, and had rarely worked with dancers, although in the mid-1930s, he had occasionally directed the lighting design for solo dance performances, as with a performance by the celebrated Peruvian dancer Helva Huara, at the Salle Pleyel venue in Paris in 1934. And in his final radio recording, he extensively evokes his travels in northern Mexico in 1936 and especially his witnessing and participation in: peyote rituals of the Tarahumara people, which he calls: ‘the peyote dance’.

Even though Artaud was not centrally a choreographer, what is at stake in his radio recording, especially the final section, which he performed himself, is: dance, especially dance as having a transmutatory potential for the human anatomy, and it transpired in those dialogues with Ko Murobushi that this was a source of deep engagement for him. It’s in that final section of Artaud’s recording that he invokes the necessity of creating the: ‘body without organs’. He demands the reconstitution of the human body on an: ‘autopsy table’, and that it will be generated through what he calls an act of: ‘dancing the wrong way round’ (or: in ‘inversion’), and that such a dance will be executed in delirium, as he says: ‘in the delirium of public dancehalls’. So, that act, as Artaud envisions, will generate: ‘freedom’, opening up liberty, for the human anatomy. At the same time, for Artaud, that recording formed a final, last-ditch, even detrital work that was denied freedom or liberty through its abrupt censorship.

Other than the raw material of the recording, Ko Murobushi was also interested in the fact that the recording had been anticipated to have an audience of at least one million auditors, through its transmission, but was then silenced, voided, and unheard, at least for several decades.

Those dialogues I had with Ko Murobushi were not recorded sonically, because the restaurant was simply too loud for that, so I noted everything in a notebook. Looking back, there appear to have been numerous processes, or ‘constellations’ of translation, between multiple languages, taking place there. Firstly, we were talking about a recorded work that had been created mainly in French, as well as through the numerous glossolaliac languages that Artaud invented for it, and also in the language of screams which Artaud deployed at several points in the recording, along with his beatings of percussion. That dialogue in London was also itself a translation, since Ko Murobushi was having to speak to me in English and so was compelled to translate his thoughts simultaneously from Japanese, and the words then needed to be inscribed manually in the notebook I was using, as another translation, or transcription.

In any case, the final ‘transformation’ of those dialogues in London – focused on Ko Murobushi’s engagement with the work of Artaud – into the form of a book, or part of a book, in that series I mentioned, seems a valuable project to undertake – it’s still an ongoing project, but I hope to present the finished work later this year, or early next year, as a presentation at Café Shy in Tokyo.

*

12

So, for the last part of this presentation I’d like briefly to return to the filmic documentation of Ko Murobushi’s work, which for me is perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of his archive – since I’m a film historian – and I’ve been writing about several examples of that documentation in a new book…

As I mentioned earlier, that documentation, extending from the 1970s through to the mid-2010s, is immediately accessible to view on the Ko Murobushi website of Café Shy, following Kimiko Watanabe’s collecting together of it. A film of a performance is only ever a fragment of it, but often an acutely revealing fragment. Documents of dance, or of performance art, can either be the work of named, even celebrated, filmmakers, or else they may be the work of entirely anonymous documenters, even bystanders who happened: to have film cameras with them. That may be the case, for example, with the performances of the Viennese Actionists, often filmed in the basements of buildings, or in university auditoria, and which were documented both by renowned Vienna-based experimental filmmakers of that era, the 1960s, such as: Kurt Kren or Ernst Schmidt Jr, but also by unnamed technicans, attendees, or bystanders. It’s the case also with butoh: with the films of Hijikata, and also those of Ko Murobushi. Often, with Ko Murobushi’s work, the organiser of an event then also filmed it, or else delegated its filming to a technician, as with those performances in London which were filmed by the organiser I mentioned, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie. So, a film can be technically adept, or else it can be extremely raw, perhaps in a way that actively enhances the dance itself.

So, I’ll read just a very short passage from a new book, titled: Wasteland Apocalypse, which is about: the ongoing or imminent engulfing of contemporary or future cities by their wastelands, in times of ecological devastation.

This brief sequence focuses on two films of Ko Murobushi’s work, both shot in outside or exterior locations – that idea of the ‘outside’ or the ‘edge’ is certainly a pivotal or vertiginous one for Ko Murobushi’s work. So, here’s the extract:

‘At an improvised performance in Japan filmed apparently by an anonymous bystander, in 1998, Ko Murobushi begins his performance alongside a large, oblong earthen crater dug with sheer vertical sides; in the film, it remains a mystery whether the crater has been dug intentionally for the performance itself, or else has resulted from some kind of industrial wasteland excavation. Soon, Ko Murobushi propels himself into that deep earth aperture, at least three metres down, and pursues his dance on all fours, crying out as he performs. The person filming does not follow Ko Murobushi into that open subterranea, but zooms the camera onto his figure. Ko Murobushi then appears to want to extricate himself from that pit, but its sides are too deep and slippery for him to climb. He shouts out to the audience (in English): ‘Help!’ and a bystander leans down to seize Ko Murobushi’s arm and arduously haul him out of the crater, back to the surface. Once rescued, Ko Murobushi yells (in German): ‘Danke!’ and then immediately plunges back into the crater….

13

In another film, of his work quick silver that was shot in Italy, in 2007, Ko Murobushi – his skin entirely painted silver – appears to be performing at night in a cratered ochre-rock wasteland. His performance is illuminated by lighting directed from above. At one point, he appears to plummet from an illuminated area over a precipice, but once the previously unlit area of his corporeal fall is also revealed, Ko Murobushi is unhurt, still performing, moving gradually across the rough surface.’…

14

Now, the last performance of Ko Murobushi that I attended, in 2014, was one that took place, as an improvisation, also in outside space, at the Treptower Park war-cemetery in eastern Berlin. That’s the vast cemetery park constructed for the Soviet Union’s soldiers killed in that city in 1945, so it was literally a dance over the dead, with Ko Murobushi’s dance taking place on a kind of ledge over the cemetery’s expanse. It took place twice, with a break in-between, and it was part of that choreographic project of Boris Charmatz that also entailed Ko Murobushi’s later improvisations at the Tate Modern art-museum in London that Marie-Gabrielle Rotie evoked.

What especially struck me during the second performance was that nobody in the crowd of fifty or so spectators appeared to be filming it, or even photographing it, even though many people were gripping smartphones in their hands. This eventually turned out to be a mistaken impression, since two photographs do exist of the performance,

15 then back to 14

one focused on Ko Murobushi’s figure, the other on his figure with the crowd and then the panoramic expanse of the cemetery park in the background. But in the instance of experiencing that dance, it appeared – perhaps through the sense of acute intensity it transmitted – that it had somehow aberrantly resisted – or annulled – or enacted the defiance of: its own representation, its own documentation, and even its own archiving – in its corporeal focus within that final moment.