Dancing is depletion, consumption of energy. It is wasteful. Who will be happy just because you danced well and enjoyed yourself? No one. Only you. It is yours and yours alone. Even when it is danced in a group, even when it is danced well by an ensemble, it is the viewers who are happy. There is nothing else to do but to share a discord that is not identical with lovers, with family, or with the gods, that accentuates isolation, disjuncture.

In the old, magical days when ritual and dance were inseparable, when community and dance went hand in hand, when the gods descended into dance, when everyone unquestioningly believed in a religious union of forces, dance could fulfill the happiness of a one-way gift and exchange of energy. The gift of energy took the community beyond the community together and connected it to an outer, cosmic scale. There lived an exchange with omnipresent forces, a communion, an infection of magical forces. As Octavio Paz says, there was only one day, one power, one destiny.

No longer is the exchange of power detached. We are living a separation, a gap.
The dance of our time is danced according to weakness. It is danced not by the fullness of power, but by the power that is lacking, weak, in the process of illness. It is danced by the small strength of a child, innocent and vulnerable.
Oh, it is not danced by that healthy, faithful, fighting-energy-filled physical beauty. It is no longer danced with faith in the power of the sun god, identifying it as a community or destiny in a non-Christian, indigenous, still magical trance.

The power that is losing its power to dance, the power that is about to run out of power here and now, the power of what has already exhausted power, the vanishing point of the “I,” the power that has lost its power or strayed from the straight path of power, the power that has been distorted and excluded from the group, and so on.
Those forces are still forces. They are involved in the process of the decay of power, they are in the process of illness, they are always in danger, they are ephemeral, they reveal their power by the process of their weakening itself.
My sympathy for dance is torn in two.
My power is divided into two parts: I, who feel the magic of rhythm and am immediately made to dance with an innocence that jumps, splashes, and becomes joyful, and I, who become more isolated the more I do so, and my will to dance disappears into

dissimilarity. I must save myself from the annihilation of my power. Is it to regain one’s composure and give oneself over to the demons of rhythm?

Faible – weakness is marginalized by the strong.
Weakness, sickness, is differentiated to the recipient of charity.
It is like looking for a way out, at the entrance, before power, community law, and established authority.
Hesitation, hesitation and perplexity. Not knowing how to pass through the threshold, it is afraid and surprised at its own body, which is embarrassed with its cheeks, rejecting with its whole body, resisting, and shaking.
It is the body of a child.
When I danced “The Mummy,” Hijikata saw me as a seven-year-old child. In looking at myself, animals, the road, the square, and all of them as distance from the child within me, I find play = the power to refuse entry into the festival of communal production, to expose myself to criticism, and to conform to the innocence of generation, the purity of the rustic. The search for weakness is a search for communality.
The search for weakness is the division of communal life into different functions. The division of different talents within the community. (In the culture of identity, difference, the power of difference) a pact of difference, like a Japanese outside of being Japanese.
This is the struggle.
Perhaps this is a laboratory of experimentation.

1999 Ko Murobushi