Hello, Kimiko and friends. My name is Christine Greiner. I live in San Paulo, Brazil, and work at the Catholic University of San Paulo.

I found the text written by Ko in 2004, and he asked very interesting question. He said why shouldn’t the body dance when it’s sick. It becomes a case of making dances of cripples or dances of blinds, this seems to be against the problems of choreography. Ko says, if there is a system of dance, maybe I will be against the system, a kind of anti-dance. I found this is very interesting because I’m kind of thinking the same thing. I’m very interested in some books and researchers that think outside or maybe not outside the systems, but thinking about movements of resistance. This is not exactly a lecture, but I would like to share with you some things I’m thinking and studying in the last month.

So, a first idea is about fabulation. I told Kimiko this talk would be about fabulations of the pain. I’m very moved by a book that I recently read, it’s about Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life[*1], written by Tavia Nyong’o, a professor that thinks about fabulation and specifically afro-fabulation, and to deal with something that he thinks like deconstruction between story and plots. How to create fiction to deal with reality. I found Gilles Deleuze also talks about this power of the false to give life, or to give visibility, to world that never mean to appear. So I’m thinking about this. About Butoh or Butoh experience since Hijikata. Maybe Butoh is about a kind of fabulation, to create fiction, to deal with embodied realities. I think this could be something very interesting to develop in the future.

Then I met another world very interesting which is Cripistemology. This is something that some authors have been reaching about and I thought it was something really amazing. For example, this author Mel Y. Chen, Mel wrote about Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke University Press[*2]. In this book, Mel tells us that Mel was sick, intoxicated by mercury. Mel experienced a very singular state of the body with the kind of brain fog, and lots of difficulties to walk, for example, to cross a street. This experience of living like something between a subject and object bring to Mel curiosity about the subject animacy, as well as how to think about epistemology or the field of knowledge, when you have a sick body, a body that doesn’t have a perfect movement that cannot think perfectly. So I start reading many texts about cripistemology. It is a kind of epistemology of something that feels strange, bizarre, and how can we think about knowledge through this kind of state of the body, that is outside the normal system, the mainstream. It seems very close to Butoh for me, and the little text written by Ko in 2004.

So, I create a bridge with these different subjects, one of them, this is other book very interesting, The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan[*3] written by Puck Brecher. He talks about early modern Japan, and some artists that worked with Ukiyoe like Hokusai and Hiroshige. He identified also something really eccentric strange among these artists, strange in the daily life and also in the artistic process. The Japanese author, Nobuo Tsuji, he talks about eccentricity as well. I think in Japan, not only Butoh, but there are many experiences dealing with these strangeness in the body. Of course this is not only about Japan. When I translated Kuniichi Uno’s book The Genesis of an Unknown Body[*4], he also talks about Deleuze and the different representations of the body. The body sometimes deal with a kind of darkness, a kind of unknown realities. And these I think it’s something really important to the creation of new possibilities of life, and the conversion of invisible knowledges to visible world new possibilities of movements. So I’m very interested in these two operations: the fabulation and the cripistemology. When cripistemology is very very radical, it starts challenge even the notion of epistemology, because maybe the way of knowing something doesn’t need a system of knowledge.

This is something really important nowadays, especially in the country where I live, because we were colonized and colonized in several ways—not only because Portuguese navigators came to Brazil when supposedly discovered Brazil, but we were colonized for several years until now by epistemologies of the north, which is something really important these days because this means a relation of power. So when Hijikata and Ko talked about the official system in Japan, the emperor, the governor, and they look for another kind of body, another kind of movement and maybe a knowledge that came from the sick body, this seems, for me, very powerful. And this metaphor of dead body dancing is very important.

Thank you very much.

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Reference material
An interview of Ko Murobushi