Choreography was born under the reign of Louis XIV as a political technique to symbolize the “orthodox pas” in dance and to control bodies under power. In 1913, Nijinsky broke this norm with The Rite of Spring, intentionally choreographing “faux pas.” This choreography assigned the role of the sacrificial figure who deviates from the community and moves toward death. In reality, Nijinsky himself became an outsider confronted by madness and death. It was Maurice Blanchot who famously employed the concept of the “faux pas” as a form of deviation. Drawing on the ideas of both, Ko Murobushi performed dances toward death inspired by the motif of Sokushinbutsu (self-mummification). In both Nijinsky’s and Murobushi’s cases, might the “faux pas” have led to the emergence of a utopian body? This study attempts to explore the historical and contemporary significance of this phenomenon through the genealogy of the body and power.

Often, dance technique and ideology are thought of as two separate things, but they are not inherently distinct. Unlike sports, all dance techniques are based on some kind of ideology. Nijinsky transformed the symmetric two-dimensional axis of ballet into a three-dimensional asymmetric axis. This is related to Kant’s theory of Ding an sich and space. Ko Murobushi went further from there, stopping all dance techniques and reducing dance to the body’s convulsions and breath (respiration). What kind of thought can we decipher from this?

Over a career spanning nearly five decades, Murobushi Kō relentlessly questioned the art of dance, challenging his own body and turning it into a site for protest.
He encountered Hijikata Tatsumi’s butō in 1968, when Hijikata’s practice was undergoing a remarkable transformation from anti-dance to a more stylised form; a process that intensified in the 1970s, shaping the trajectory of butō and Murobushi’s own artistic path.
Nevertheless, Murobushi’s later experimental works, marked by his silver-body struggling against power, can be read as a paradigm of Hijikata’s butō-choreopolitics and intent of performance revolution, which was based on choreological inquiries and disintegrated norms that regulate representation, thereby delving into trans-corporealities and identityless, anti-emotional, non-essentialist, anti-narrative, non-oriented bodies.
Although Murobushi significantly contributed to butō’s international influence and reception, he expressed criticism towards its stereotyped forms/images. He, therefore, revisited the political qualities intrinsic to butō’s early experimentation, aiming at queered identities and addressing hetero-morphant corporealities that transborder limits between the organic and the inorganic, between human, animal and object.
Indeed, as examined in Aesthetics of Impossibility. Murobushi Kō on Hijikata Tatsumi (Cafoscarina, 2018) – the first monograph dedicated to Murobushi – the dancer explored in his works, for instance, cabaret dance, practices of self-mummification, the notion of “the outside” and anti-dance, entangling these elements in his impossible project while striving for resistance.
Part of my discussion will focus on the contrast/tension between the outcome of Murobushi’s performances quick silver and ATNARAT, both enacted during our collaborative project Torcito Parco Danza I (Lecce, 2007), a crucial juncture in the extended, profound and friction-filled exchange of ideas we cultivated from 2003 to 2015 (and beyond).

Ko Murobushi’s dance articulates a philosophy of absolute immanence, engaging with temporal rupture, the in-between (“midnight”), and the event. Informed by Deleuze, Mallarmé, Bataille and Nietzsche, his work enacts de-subjectivation and accesses the Outside through embodied interruption, repetition, and non-linear time (Aeon), positioning dance as a site of ontological transformation.

Dance is the drawing of a space, each time unique and singular. Even the slightest shift in a hand or finger is enough to transform the entire atmosphere on stage. Movement is drawing. What does Ko Murobushi draw with his vibrant body? and how does he withdraw from the space he has traced—as if he were (very) shy? Drawing, withdrawing, the dancer is poised on the trembling edge of the time.

This presentation forms the remnants of discussions with Ko Murobushi, in London in 2004, on Antonin Artaud’s final writings and conceptions of dance, and on Ko Murobushi’s own writing of fragments in intimate intersection with his dance. The presentation also investigates the demands and imperatives of translations of Ko Murobushi’s writings, fragments, journal entries, as exemplified in the first exploratory book collection of those writings to be published in (or projected into) English, Fierce Unworking (diaphanes, 2025).

“Journey erases Book. The journey is this erased book.” Murofushi continued to write and conceive the book between dance and journey. He had already written a book, and this book had been written and erased. The dance itself was such a process, such a journey. Being drawn into the darkness of groping. And dissolving into it. This groping is a “dance,” and there are words that extricate from the darkness what has dissolved into it. We will attempt to revisit this process of erasure and emergence.

What did Ko Murobushi leave behind? His writings, for one. From the late 1970s to just before his passing in June 2015, he continued to write journals and workshop memos privately and intermittently as part of his everyday life. These are not only fragments, but also expressions of the very movement of fragmentation itself. On this occasion, I would like to reconsider the sphere of language that coexisted in parallel with that of the body—i.e., dance—especially based on his writings from the 1990s onward.

Dance is lost as it is performed. At its core is unwork, which makes invalid activity. Ko Murobushi resists the institutionalization of dance into something meaningful, and tries to completely consume dance on the spot, returning it to unwork. Would organizing an exhibition of his dance using archival materials betray Murobushi’s unwork? Not necessarily. By montaging a variety of materials such as photographs, text, video, and flyers, it is possible to potentially present the loss of what was lost, rather than restoring and meaningfulizing what was lost. It becomes a different kind of creation that forms a sign of potentiality.

Facing Ko Murobushi’s works, seeing him crawling, groaning, falling, yelling, trembling or shivering, I am always invaded by a very strange and paradoxical feeling of freedom. This feeling is not coming from capacity, power or mastery. It much rather emerges from disability, sickness and precarity, from the abolition of any project and from passing away at every edge of the time. Borrowing the words to Georges Bataille, I suggest to name this very strange freedom “Headless sovereignty”.