Dance is generally recognized to be a temporal art form. Choreography is the design of a temporal trajectory of movements to accompany the rhythm of a piece of music, and the dance performance is realized when audience perceive this both aurally and visually. It can also be described as the pleasure that the audience derives from watching physically competent dance, in which lively movements are carried out smoothly, supplely, and rhythmically. Butoh emerged as a reaction against this fixed idea, and transformed dance from a temporal art into a spatial one. It also demonstrated how true mobility can exist in an immobile body that “does not dance.”

This transformation actually had its beginnings prior to butoh, in Vatslav Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un faune (1912). Unfortunately, in the West, this work is yet to be fully understood for what it is, and it has become incorporated in the classical ballet tradition. Nevertheless, there is a reason why Nijinsky emerged from traditional ballet. No other kind of dance in the world is so focused on the axis of the human body. This focus on the fluidity and dynamism of movement, to the point of suppression, is clearly oriented toward the spatial property of the body. The axis in Western classical ballet is supported by the en dehors position, in which the dancer’s arms or legs lead away from the body. When the toes are turned out in this position, movement within the body is limited to one that flows upward, making it more difficult to feel gravity pulling down from above. The body is constituted as a transparent two-dimensional plane without thickness, based on the clear hierarchy between heaven and earth and symmetry. The straight line of the horizon and the vertical axis of the body that divides it with bilateral symmetry preserve the unified identity of the body in which there is no difference between left and right. The body, a three-dimensional entity, is confined to a temporary two-dimensional space.

In L’après-midi d’un faune, Nijinsky emphasized the effect of gravity on his body by turning his feet inwards, blurring the hierarchy between heaven and earth and creating a distinction between left and right. However, the axis did not disappear but created a rent or hollow. In other words, a three-dimensional thickness was restored to the body, and as the axis became three-dimensional, the body space began to distort into a figure of eight. The statue-like form in L’après-midi d’un faune—with the chest facing forward, the face turned sideways, the arms held up and bent, and the knees bent—is a body that is disunited in every possible direction, a figure dangerously unified by a hollow axis. If there was no axis, it would probably collapse into a limp posture without any strength.

In fact, this issue was already noted by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, when he wrote in “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?”:

In the proper meaning of the word, to orient oneself means to use a given direction (when we divide the horizon into four of them) in order to find the others—literally, to find the sunrise. Now if I see the sun in the sky and know it is now midday, then I know how to find south, west, north, and east. For this, however, I also need the feeling of a difference in my own subject, namely, the difference between my right and left hands. I call this a feeling because these two sides outwardly display no designable difference in intuition.[*1]

According to Kant, empty space was a subjective shape to be grasped by the senses; it was not the representational space of the thing-in-itself, loaded with geometrical principles like the body in classical ballet. Kant calls this sensitivity “feeling,” it is that which distinguishes between the orientations of left and right, up and down, and front and back as seen from the axis of the body, and sets these in the foundations of spatial form. This “immeasurable space of the super-sensorial” that goes beyond representational space is what makes forms such as the statue in Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un faune possible. Moreover, what preserves the balance of this hollow axis is not the muscles, as is the case with classical ballet, but breathing.

 Speaking of right and left, I also like football, so I started thinking about it. At its core of the game, football is about reading the axis of your own body and your opponent’s. The most obvious football technique is the cutback: you pretend to go right, then immediately go left using your body and the ball. When done quickly, the opposing defender cannot react. Why can’t one move? Because the body has an axis. Once the body has an axis, even a slight tilt to the right makes it difficult to move to the left. A more straightforward example is a penalty kick situation. The goalkeeper stands in the center of the goal with an equal amount of space on both sides. It’s a battle of reading the body’s axis between the goalkeeper and the kicker. As you can see, if either the goalkeeper or the kicker shifts their center of gravity to the right or left first, they lose. If one moves first, the other can simply move in the opposite direction. Once that happens, the other player cannot move at all. I believe football players understand the importance of body axis better than most dancers. 

Although Kant and Nijinsky lived more than 150 years apart, Kant’s concept of subjective space is based on the premise that a representational, geometric space, from which ballet was born exists, as mentioned earlier. He is not denying this. Therefore, the space that each of us perceives through our bodies is related to that space as the thing-in-itself but is entirely distinct from it. We live within these individual, subjective spaces. Kant was the first man of the modern era, but his intuition regarding space only became evident in dance 150 years later, through Nijinsky.

In L’après-midi d’un faune, did Nijinsky not attempt to take the dancing body outside time, representing the immobile statue as a corpse? This attempt of anti-dance was taken over by a movement from the edges of East Asian culture, a culture which was not originally dominated by the hierarchy between heaven and earth and symmetry: the idea of the fragmentariness of the body was pursued by butoh practitioners Tatsumi Hijikata and Kō Murobushi. However, for them it was actually also a way of becoming more conscious of the hierarchy between heaven and earth and symmetry. I feel that Nijinsky tried quite intuitively. Murofushi writes that if Nijinsky  had pursued it methodically, he would not have fallen into madness. I agree with that. In that sense, I think that what Nijinsky intuitively presented was methodically refined by Hijkata and Murobushi, especially Murobushi.　

In technical terms, what was it that Murobushi, did in order to stiffen, portray the corpse through dance, or freeze or sever time? He did away with any kind of dance technique and reduced dance to convulsions of the axis of the body and breath (breathing). Incidentally, this wide range of dance techniques also include butoh technique(so-called notational butoh). Murofushi was greatly influenced by Hijikata, but at the same time, he was also the biggest critic of Hijikata who established the style of butoh that emerged in the 1970s. Therefore, Murofushi’s position is difficult to understand, as it deviates from butoh community. However, is there anyone else who has pursued dance to such an essential level?  Murobushi’s dance existed at the edge of the paradoxical relationship between simultaneously being and not-being. What is not being is the organic energy of repetitive breath, which cycles forever between the inside and the outside of the body. Murobushi referred to this as a spiral (or figure of eight) movement that wandered around the body, this is because he thought of the power of the breath as being connected to the power of eroticism. Eroticism creates a vacuum, closing the body, while at the same time exposing the axis and opening up a route to the outside. However, the route to the outside is not opened by eroticism alone. Eroticism must be transformed into the power of the breath.

The term “vacuum” refers to a state where there is no air, how does this state of no air relate to dance? Vacuum is the process of making space extremely dense, so in a way, creating a vacuum without air actually draws air in, or brings air back into one’s body. This is not an imaginative concept but a very real phenomenon. I myself experience this sensation in my own body. In other words, the state of suffocation caused by the absence of air paradoxically makes one crave air, and one pulls air back into one’s body with force. Moreover, this creates a center of gravity. This idea is closely linked to what Murobushi is saying, or rather, to his dance. So, this vacuum state is essentially a closed state, but that closed state opens a circuit to the outside. The medium that opens that circuit to the outside is breathing.

What is important is that “breath” here does not mean the organic breath taken instinctively by the newborn baby, but the conscious breathing that accompanies language. This process creates distance or hollow space between the subject and the words they express. This moment is the critical moment when the axis convulses and the subject disappears. The transformation of dance takes place when the convulsions of the axis and the power of the breath of the dancers shake the bodies of the audience who are sharing their performance space.

Giorgio Agamben, in Homo Sacer, focuses on the difference between the two words for life in ancient Greece: zoē and bios. Zoē refers to the fact of being alive―bare and indistinguishable from other animals. Although Agamben does not use the term, it would not be wrong to say that it refers to the life of a laborer as a slave. Bios, on the other hand, means cultural life―the life of a polis citizen with political awareness. Ancient Greek democracy actually relied on the hierarchy between bios and zoē. Agamben, on the other hand, sees modern democracy as a demand for the rights and liberation of the zoē. This means that zoē has penetrated the bios, and “having a body” has become a political subject. In other words, it is the bare body that holds the power in the modern country governed by law.

If this is true, then it should be obvious in dance―a genre which adopts bodies as its media. The history of dance has undergone various innovations since the 20th century, but in my opinion, most of the bodies we see under the name of “dance” are only bios bodies. Even the body of Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Company is like that. However, there are at least three dancers who have exceptionally deviated from the bios body and reached the bare body of zoē. These are Vaslav Nijinsky, Tatsumi Hijikata, and Ko Murobushi. Then, under what aspect did their bodies as zoē appear? 

In Homo Sacer, Agamben takes up the ancient Roman figure of homo sacer as a precedent for the modern zoē. This is a figure that Pompeius Festus describes in the heading “sacer moms” in “On the Significance of Words”:

The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.” This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred.

That is, homo sacer is a life that cannot be sacrificed, but can be killed―in other words, a life that deviates from both the religious and legal realms. In a related vein, Agamben discusses an interesting ancient Roman ritual called the “image ceremony”. There, after the sovereign dies, his wax imago, “treated like a sick man, lies on a bed; senators and matrons are lined up on either side; physicians pretend to feel the pulse of the image and give it their medical aid until, after seven days, the effigy ‘dies’.”

This motif of the image seems to be extremely important in considering the body as zoē in dance. In this respect, another text by Agamben, “The Immemorable Image” from “The Potentiality of Thought,” is highly indicative. In this text that discusses what precisely is returned to in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Agamben considers the notion of <Gleich>, which Nietzsche says is the same that recurs forever. The German word Gleich is formed from the prefix ge- (which indicates something collective, a gathering together) and leich, which can derives from “lich” in Middle High German, and finally to the theme lig, which means appearance, figure, or likeness―and in modern German, Leiche. Because a corpse is that which has, excellently, the same image, the same likeness [as the deceased before death]. In other words, the eternally recurring “same” can be said to be the image of a corpse. And to reinforce this idea, at the end of the text, Agamben quotes Schelling’s “Philosophy of Revelation” as saying that this ever-recurrning image that “would pass over into being before all thought” is “an Immemorable.” “An Immemorable”―that is, what cannot even be recalled, is what time has been cut off, and we come to realize that this is exactly the word that Murobushi always emphasized in his own attempts at dance.

Hijikata, in an interview with Akira Uno titled “Gaze at the sanctuary far into the darkness,” stated the following:

I deny the origin story of dance, which is that there is rhythm first and then the movements follow. Use a purgative to rhythm…The Japanese folk dances that are based on the rhythm of the Harvest Festival probably originated from what the wondering monks would be reduced to dependence on a rural village and inspire the laborers by giving them the rhythm instead. However, in reality, if you remove the cruelty and misery from their labor, dance would be 80% dead.

Here, Hijikata defines dance as something distinct from the rituals and rites of the community (the religious realm), and then exposes the bare bodies of the workers (in this case, directly the peasants) who deviate from it. The body of the worker, stiffened by the purgative applied to the rhythm and cut off from time, is precisely the body of zoē, who penetrated the bios and became the sovereign. And according to the words of Murobushi, the body of zoē, or the immemorable image, is spasmodically recurring and repeating itself without end. However, it is in a form that is never the same. “Repetition, the repetition of the same thing but never the same, it is a constant repetition, a series of strikes into the emptiness without origin! That’s what repetition is.”

In his essay “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Agamben discusses Herman Melville’s novel “Bartleby”, stating that the protagonist, copyist Bartleby, became a “blank tablet” by abandoning writing, saying, “I would prefer not to.” This “blank tablet” is a metaphor used by Aristotle in the volume 3 of his “On the Soul” to describe the state of intelligence or thought in its potentiality, known as “nous.” The three major monotheistic religions all describe the creation of the world by God from nothing. The opening of Genesis chapter 1 in the Old Testament reads as follows:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

While myths about the creation of the world from nothing exist throughout the world, what makes Genesis unique is that it depicts this as an instantaneous act of creation by God. In other words, the God of the Old Testament created this world in one fell swoop from a state where there was no material substance. This story is derived from the monotheistic doctrine that explains all phenomena in the world as inevitable outcomes of God’s will. However, Agamben emphasizes that the “blank tablet” is not the same as the void of no material substance, but rather a void that still contains material substance. Agamben divides the potentiality that signifies something like matter into two types: “the potentiality to exist” and “the potentiality to not exist.” The latter, which Agamben calls the potentiality of non-being, quoting Aristotle, is more important to him. The actuality that excludes the potentiality of non-being is nothing more than the ordinary necessity of God. Bartleby’s refusal to write, despite being able to do so, is an attempt to preserve this potentiality of non-being. In other words, Bartleby’s behavior is interpreted as an experiment in de-creation immersed in the contingency of being able to exist and not exist simultaneously, through the potentiality of the materiality of writing, thereby resisting the monotheistic god. I believe that Murobushi’s immobile body was also a “blank tablet.” In his performances, it often looked as if he was only standing around or lying down on the stage. However, if you have looked more attentively at his body, you would see rigidity, tension, heaving, and spasms. You ought to be able to see a great deal of physicality swirling around. Many dancers mistakenly think that good dance consists of simply moving your body or your arms from point A to point B in a skillful, clean, and supple way, but selecting one movement means excluding countless others. The immobile body intrinsically conceals within it the limitless possibilities of movement. The act of standing contains the act of not standing; the movement of extending the arm contains the movement of being unable to extend the arm. The movement cannot start and always returns to the body. It is tethered and bound within the contours of the body. Eventually the movement or the latent force that has become a slave for the body will make it stiff and convulse the scream as if rebelling against the body.