Dance is immeasurable. It’s not only dance—there is something unique to dance that resists measurement. That is why there are dancers who live, think, and pursue dance as something immeasurable. It also means that the dancing body itself is immeasurable. If not only a single body, but also sensations, memories, and thoughts are entangled and dancing together, then each of them—and the whole as well—must also be immeasurable.

Dancers may dance while questioning dance itself. Yet it is uncertain whether such a thing as “dance itself” truly exists. Dance is always open to and connected with things beyond itself. It is permeated by the infinite—by the world, by society and nature, by human beings and their lives, by countless living things and objects. Ko Murobushi continued to dance, pursuing dance in dialogue with all of these. Dance, being so radically open to the world, is boundless. It can never be fully achieved—only continually pursued. He kept on dancing, murmuring to himself, “What is this discursiveness?”

Murobushi ceaselessly moved back and forth between dance and language. Between them, an intense friction seemed to persist—a continual collision, penetration, fusion, and tension. He ruminated on, examined, and critically diagnosed the direct and indirect influences he had received from Tatsumi Hijikata.

Hijikata’s Butoh creation was accompanied by original and agile poetic thoughts from the early days. As a remarkable example of the chiasm between dance and language, the case of ballet and the writings of Nijinsky, which Hijikata also noted, comes to mind. The verbal creation poured into Yameru Maihime (Ailing Dancer), after he stopped performing on stage, was necessary for the genesis of Butoh. The language which Hijikata forged was itself the process of pursuing and discovering the Butoh body, and it was neither an explanation nor a theory of dance, neither a script nor a synopsis, nor a work notebook nor a memoir of a Butoh dancer. The creations of Kazuo Ohno and Akira Kasai were no exceptions; Butoh was often realized in close connection with the dense vibrations and lines of force that penetrate the meaning of language, which itself is also dance. In this regard, Tatsumi Hijikata stood out, and there was certainly a process of the genesis of the Butoh-language that belonged to him alone.

Ko Murobushi tried to catch the thoughts which existed at the core of Hijikata’s creation, while reacting sensitively to this linguistic act of Hijikata. Hijikata himself responded to Murobushi’s pursuit and described Murobushi’s direction, in a beautiful phrase, as “fierce unworking” (“The Butoh of Mummy – Ko Murobushi”).

Then, what is this “unworking,” which seems to have a deep relation to both Hijikata and Murobushi? What is unworking for Butoh? Isn’t it the strong non-sense that pierces the immeasurableness of dance?

Besides the Shusei, which includes the essence of this pursuit, and the open texts in the published archives, there are still unpublished writings of Murobushi. Among them, he sometimes directed the force of negation toward existing dance and even his own dance, and looked for a way of revival each time, as if declaring a death sentence to dance. He never abandoned the motifs inspired by Butoh, but his dance of unworking had already thrown away every form. Material, particles, melting, collapsing, deviating, and so on are always pursued.

Blanchot’s term faux-pas (misstep) has become a kind of keyword. Deviation from the pas (steps) of dance, falling down, disarticulation, and failing to die. Hijikata’s phrase, “Butoh is the standing dead body,” became overly famous, but it never means the dance of the dead (danse macabre). It is the dance of the living dead, the dance of becoming a corpse, the dance of anti-realization.

The inspiration of early Murobushi is violent. “Pain and intoxication beyond endurance make me lose myself. What lies at the boundary of egolessness and stupor is also the origin of Butoh. I kill myself on the dance stage. But I am immortal and I revive.” While maintaining this inspiration, he repeatedly conducted lessons during his long collaboration with dancers, directing subtle attention to extraordinary gestures, states, and transformations, and continued to pursue the unworking of dance.

Pursuing the immeasurable, infinite dance also means perceiving, examining, and experiencing various limits (“the edges, borders, corners, peripheries…”)—and at times, passing through them. While the body’s capabilities are, of course, finite, the body itself can also be infinite. Its forms and forces pass through endless transformations and modes. Even a single line of gesture contains multiple directions, branches, and vibrations. I have witnessed moments when, in the slow gestures of Murobushi, countless facets seemed to shimmer as he transitioned from a state of convulsion to another state of movement.

The attempt to exhibit the trajectory of this exploration would be an experiment in opening a finite space to the infinite. At the same time, the very meaning of “limit” itself must be transformed.

Translated by Hanako Takayama

Quoted texts in the conference by Kuniichi Uno :
Singularly indefinable diseases

Antonin Artaud, Theater and it’s double, tr.Mary Caroline Richard’s, Grove Press New York,1958

“Whatever the errors of historians or physicians regarding the plague, [writes Artaud,] I believe we can agree on the idea of ​​a malady that would be a sort of psychic entity and would not be brought on by a virus.” (18, tr. mod)

“Everything portends an organic storm without precedent.” (19)

But it “most often indicates that the life at its center has lost nothing of its There are always these lived sinuosities of intense and subtle movements between forms, between organs.

strength, and that a remission of the illness, or even a cure, is possible.”

 “All indications point to a fundamental disordering of the secretions. Yet there is no loss or destruction of matter as in the case of leprosy or syphilis. The intestines themselves, which are the site of the bloodiest disorders of all, where matter arrives at an unparalleled degree of putrefaction and petrification, are not attacked organically.” (20)

 “The only two organs truly affected and damaged by the plague, the brain and the lungs, are both directly dependent on consciousness and will.” (21)

In short the plague, which “would be a kind of psychic entity,” in Artaud’s words, does not destroy the corporeal matter, does not afflict it organically (21).

All of which in short demonstrates the “spiritual physiognomy of an illness”. (22)

“If it requires a major scourge to bring into appearance that frenetic gratuitousness [or excess], and if that scourge is called a plague, perhaps we can determine, in relation to the totality of our personality, the value of that gratuitousness …Everything about the physical appearance of the actor, as of the person who has been afflicted by the plague, shows that the life form has reacted to a paroxysm, and that nonetheless, nothing has occurred.” (24)

Correspondence with Jacques Rivière in Selected writings edited by Susan Sontag, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1976

“My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words.” “It is a question of (…) a total absence, a real extinction” (31) .

It is true that the one who says these sentences articulates this loss, “this complete nothingness,” with great eloquence, and he demands the absolute right to express “the substance of [his] thought,” the right to “continue to think” even in paralysis.

In another letter, he elucidates his “case” more closely, attributing it “to a central collapse of the soul, to a kind of erosion of thought, both essential and fleeting, to the temporary non-possession of the material benefits of [his] development, to the abnormal separation of the elements of thought,” and so on. He points out what diminishes his “mental tension,” which “gradually destroys the mass of [his] thought in its substance” (34-35)

“Restore to my mind the concentration of its forces, the cohesion that it lacks, the constancy of its tension, the consistency of its own substance.”(35)

“that I am not in the world, and [the problem] is not a simple matter of my mental attitude.” It is: “The poison of being itself. A veritable paralysis, a sickness which deprives you of speech and memory, pulls up your thought by the roots.”(45)

“Never, when it is life itself that is leaving…” Artaud, in the preface to The Theater and Its Double, thus immediately raises the question of life, speaking of “this generalized collapse of life.” “The most urgent thing” in his view is to extract from what we call culture (and therefore theater), “ideas whose compelling force is identical to that of hunger.”

But what is at stake in this case is “our simple strength [or force] to be hungry.”

No doubt, we will need to “brutalize forms” (in Artaud’s words) to reconnect with what survives underneath or behind these forms. We must not linger on the forms themselves, as Artaud writes: “when we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it in its exterior facts, but to that fragile and fluctuating source which forms never reach.” (13)

And if theater is to be reforged as one kind of language, “the important thing is to move in stages, creating perspectives from one language to another. The secret of theater in space is dissonance, the gap between timbres, and the dialectical discontinuity of expression.” (in Theater and its double)

Murobushi’s writings (in Murobushi Ko shūsei, Kawade Shobō Shinshu,2018)

“Repeating,

Repeating, to be yourself identical to yourself, to be myself identical to myself

It is the only way, living while dying, until the point of becoming a perfect corpse,

Thus

It is life that is the very body of death overlayered” (p. 338)

“So, to dance is to lose oneself. Dance makes one lose oneself. It is dance that makes dance lose itself. If this is so, then who is it that then stands up? Is it possible to stand? It is a corpse. My own corpse dances, since in this moment, dance becomes a place for the genesis of another. It is the coming into being of an unknown thing.

Otherwise, what is it? Repetition, the coming of the same thing, yet there is nothing the same. Eternity returns. “It is found again, what? Eternity.” (Rimbaud) » (p.345)

“The experience of Ankoku Butoh began with a throw of the dice, un coup de dès.

And after half a century, even now, over and over one must continue to throw the dice.

What is the outside? The formless present, impossible to continue being, by always already being there; the impossibility of remaining for the ‘now, here’ that passes already transformed at the moment it is designated; and the non-place, place without place of a no one without person, where the body, the dance, arises, bringing into action the flesh.” (p.347)

I would echo those phrases:

Writing to pass into this zone of impossible death, this repetition, in order to give oneself to the impossible, to unravel the impossible, to dance this invisible halo: this is not mysticism, but a simple and perhaps animalistic gesture of an unknown animal.

Wilhelm Worringer Abstraction and Einfühlung (Empathy)

 “Although the ornament is founded on a purely linear and inorganic basis, we hesitate to call it abstract ornament. Rather, we cannot help seeing there a disquieting life in the interlacing of the lines. This disquiet, this groping interlacing, does not possess an organic life that could introduce us gently into movement. But that does not mean that there is no life within. Rather we find there an intense, frenetic life that compels us to follow its movement into unhappy feeling. On an inorganic basis, we find vitalizing movements and expressions.”