So, this short lecture will explore the idea of the ‘innumerable’ that is at stake in Ko Murobushi’s text of February 2014, ‘For the Innumerable Nijinskys’, and also how the ‘innumerable’ may be a valuable way to engage with the interconnections between the work of Ko Murobushi and that of the theorist Antonin Artaud whose work inspired him in many ways. I’ll begin by discussing some of the diary fragments whose translations form part of this ‘Nijinsky at Midnight’ project, and which give us Ko Murobushi’s approach to the idea of judgement, which perhaps resonates with the fragments written by Antonin Artaud for his final radio work of 1948, ‘To have done with the judgement of god’. I’ll go on to speak about Ko Murobushi’s performances in Berlin in 2014, at the Treptower Park cemetery memorial, which might be seen as a form of ‘midnight performance’. If Antonin Artaud held ‘midnight performances’, alongside that final radio work, they could be his very last interviews, given in the final week of his life, in Paris in 1948, so I’ll go on to discuss those ‘midnight’ works. Finally, I’m going to recollect an evening of discussions I had with Ko Murobushi, in London in February 2004, firstly on his own attendance at Tatsumi Hijikata’s live performance at the Osaka World Exposition of 1970, a near-forgotten and lost solo performance which could be conceived as Hijikata’s ‘midnight’ work, and secondly, in that discussion with Ko Murobushi, a focus on those fragments by Artaud written around his final radio work, also a particular creative source for Deleuze and Guattari, in which the idea of ‘wrong-way-round dance’ – a kind of innumerable dance, infinite and resistant in its transformational corporeality – is also at stake.

In the diary fragments of Ko Murobushi, we can witness a resolute excavation of the matters of the human body, of the ‘outside’ that always holds imperatives of transit which render fixed namings inoperable, and also of the gesture of judgement that forever needs to be interrogated and disintegrated. It seems that excavation may be located – if it can be located at all – in the zonal place at which that transmutation can be attempted, oscillating between living and dying. Ko Murobushi is thinking in one diary fragment from 1990 of Dostoevsky’s judgements and punishments, but perhaps also of Artaud and his working notes for that last radio work, ‘To have done with the judgement of god’, which imagines dance as able (in alliance with percussions and screams) to annul both judgement and plagues. Artaud writes that ‘there are only plagues, cholera, smallpox because dance… hasn’t yet started to exist.’

Judgement is what defeats us… Without judgement, in Ko Murobushi’s diary fragment, another kind of knowledge reveals itself, proximate to the body in its deviations and its underhand manoeuvres. Whenever we discover that inverted or wrong-way-round knowledge, in the diary fragments of Ko Murobushi, it demonstrates why it’s so important to search for them, in his endless archive of writing and documentation – via a leap into the archive. Hidenaga Otori’s text on the project ‘Nijinsky at Midnight’ emphasizes that such a leap involves, as he writes: ‘a new search for resistance’, and new searches too into incarceration’s proliferating spaces: jails, camps, cells, cages, all of which can only be annulled through equally new ‘underhand’ resistances, that are simultaneously convulsions.

This leads me to think that Ko Murobushi’s dance could be the embodiment of that resistance. Dance could then be reimagined as through Ko Murobushi’s work, as in that same diary fragment from 1990 – in which Ko Murobushi declares an aim for dance to: ‘throw ourselves into the most dangerous and suspicious, and therefore tempting, place’ – and via Artaud’s demands (in his radio project ‘To have done with the judgement of god’) for the instigation of, as Artaud writes: ‘dancing back to front/as in the delirium of dance halls/and that inverted place will be the veritable one’. So, that place may optimally be one that is outside of judgement, if such a space is conceivable.

So, incarceration, performance and the cemetery… The writer Jean Genet wrote in the 1960s that his ideal location for the performance of his work would be a cemetery, located in the heart of a great city, but which is also deserted or abandoned – and that the performance would take place at the dead of night, around midnight. Jean Genet wrote that what he wanted was: ‘a unique performance, possessing such an immense and radiating intensity that it will act to inflame its spectators, thereby also illuminating and disturbing all those who were not present’. The last performance of Ko Murobushi that I ever attended was at the Treptower Park memorial cemetery, in July 2014, with its vast monument to the arrival of the Soviet Union’s army of young soldiers in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. This was in the context of the dance event ‘20 Dancers for the XX century’, curated by Boris Charmatz. Around seven thousand soldiers are buried beneath the memorial, but the exact number of the dead cannot be determined, and therefore remains innumerable. A performance in a cemetery, then, with the presence of the innumerable dead, but also in a vastly open space. Because every other performance I witnessed by Ko Murobushi took place in a confined space, in auditoria or galleries in Tokyo or London, that performance in Berlin held a completely different resonance. Ko Murobushi danced twice on one of the plinths located around the mid point of the cemetery memorial’s expanse, with a break in between, during which he sat on a bench at the edge of the site. In contrast to other performances, it seemed to me that very few photographs were taken of Ko Murobushi’s dance. I think this was because the audience were so deeply immersed in the performance, as in the quotation from Jean Genet that I read a moment ago: a ‘radiating intensity’ was emitted by the dance, able perhaps to transmit itself to the dead or to those ‘not present’, as well as to the spectators. At such a moment, the status of representation itself appears to be contested or annulled. But in those few photographs, you can see the audience of about one hundred spectators gathered around that memorial plinth above the cemetery, most of them standing, some very close to Ko Murobushi as he danced, others further back, three or four of them seated on the ground, during the half-hour duration of the dance. Throughout the performance, Ko Murobushi was speaking, or exclaiming, as at many other performances, but here, again, with another resonance, in the space of the memorial, with its innumerable bodies, above and below the ground.

Ko Murobushi announced the performance at the Treptower Park memorial as being one held in remembrance of Tatsumi Hijikata, with whom he worked around the end of the 1960s. Everyone listening to this lecture knows something of the rapport between Ko Murobushi and Hijikata, and Hijikata described his admiration for Ko Murobushi in an essay from 1977. In the programme notes for the 2014 performance in Berlin, Hijikata’s work is located as being: ‘specifically after the student riots’ [in Japan] and the text continues: ‘The roles of authority were now subject to challenge and subversion.’ So again, the idea of the innumerable is at stake here: once roles are no longer unitary, but innumerable, they can be performed in an infinity of challenging ways. And I’ll speak some more about Hijikata and Ko Murobushi in a moment.

That performance in Berlin took place in the evening, not at midnight, but still with an intensity that perhaps transmitted the last moment in which such a dance could be performed, or realized, in that cemetery space. So, what is ‘midnight’? – alongside the evocations and songs of Mallarmé and Nietzsche? Is it a performance which risks disappearing into its location? That can only take place when a choreographer or an artist has already amassed their work, over decades?

To explore the interconnection between the work of Ko Murobushi and Antonin Artaud further, I’ll now speak a little about the very last interviews given by Artaud, to two newspapers in France, the newspapers ‘Combat’ and the ‘Figaro Littéraire’, in the very last week of his life. For both of the interviews, Artaud invited the journalists who wanted to interview him, to visit him late in the evening, at his one-room pavilion in the grounds of a convalescence home, on the edge of Paris. They came to visit him in a room that perhaps evokes that of Mallarmé’s Midnight: ‘And the presence of Midnight remains in the vision of a room of time…’ (‘Igitur’). Both interviews would be performances, concerned with the imminence of death, in both Artaud’s words and also in his gestures, in which he struck a knife into the table of his room to reinforce those words, for the benefit of his visitors.

In the first of those two interviews, for the newspaper ‘Combat’, the journalist Jean Marabini describes his journey across the parkland to that room in which Artaud was living his last nights:
He was living in a desolate room in what had once been one of the dukes of Orléans’ hunting pavilions. Next to an immense fireplace, he was stretched out on a rickety old bed. On the walls were his searing drawings, which reminded me of Van Gogh’s sketches. He writes a dedication for me on a photograph of himself: ‘Into which stain of blood are we going to travel together?’, and on a copy of his book on Van Gogh he writes the response: ‘The stain of blood will touch the darkness’… Outside, the fir trees: a lost pavilion hidden in undergrowth. He tells me this building is the Mortuary and that this outlandish undergrowth which surrounds it – only two hundred metres on one side from a forest, two hundred metres on the other side from factory chimneys – could well be the ‘Garden of death’ of Hans Christian Andersen.
In that interview, Artaud is concerned with his own death, which took place in that room, a few nights later. But that death is something which he simultaneously invites, and also denies, or refuses, by proposing a history beyond death, as he tells the journalist:
‘What I’m telling you is that we have lost a particular conception of the human being. Around the year 1,000, nobody died. There was an era when people lived for several centuries. Entire villages of the living dead existed at that time, as they still exist now in certain remote locations in Asia… For as long as philosophers are going to believe that there is, on the one hand, the mind, and on the other hand, the body: the world isn’t going to move forward. All that counts is the human body, which is lost as soon as it thinks. In that former time, the act was direct: no kind of mental debate existed; the hand never disputed with itself whether to seize something or else not to seize it.’

In the second of those two interviews, with the visit to his room of the journalist Jean Desternes, Artaud is more angry, and strikes his knife into the table to emphasise his words, as the journalist narrates:
‘- To get out of this, I know only one way!
He took a knife from his pocket, opened it up slowly and then, with a sudden strike, embedded it into the table which already displayed the evidence of previous attacks of that kind.
[The interview continues]: ‘ – That’s the only means to get out of it – the knife – yes, that’s the only weapon to use against those scoundrels. Their crime: that is what is not being considered enough. You have got to act now – and not to chatter idiotically as you and I are doing at this moment. Elsewhere, yes, elsewhere, there are people who are engaged in acts, or who are getting ready to commit acts… I am haunted – haun-ted for a long time now – by a kind of writing which is not within the norm. I’ve wanted to write outside of grammar, to find a means of expression beyond words. And now and then I’ve believed myself to be very close, to that kind of expression. But everything is driving me back to the norm.’

So, in those two strange ‘midnight’ interviews, just before the death of Antonin Artaud, I think there are resonances of the innumerable presences which Ko Murobushi wrote about: of a language and a dance that is outside, at the edge, which operates best at midnight, or at the depth of the night. A dance which requires excavation, or questioning, or interrogation. And with resonances for innumerable bodies, of dancers, or writers.

I met with Ko Murobushi one night in 2004 for a dialogue on the work of Antonin Artaud. But we also spoke of his time with Tatsumi Hijikata. He spoke about his experience of seeing Hijikata’s performance at the Osaka World Exposition of 1970, at its ‘Pepsi Cola Pavilion’. Hijikata had actually appeared at two of the pavilions of the Osaka Exposition. Firstly, in the medium of film, in the ‘Midori Pavilion’, commissioned by a number of corporations based in Osaka. That film was projected in an immersive format and was seen by an estimated eight million spectators at the Exposition. The film was miraculously re-discovered some years ago, by Takashi Morishita of the Hijikata archive at Keio University. And the Osaka Prefectural Expo ’70 Commemorative Park Office holds many records of the Midori Pavilion.

But Hijikata’s only live and solo performance at the Exposition was seen solely by the small preview audience, on 11 March 1970, at the Pepsi Pavilion, before the opening of the Exposition, at a time when Ko Murobushi was working with Hijikata. The interior of the Pepsi Pavilion was entirely covered in reflective silver material which inverted the reflections of the spectators, so that they appeared as wrong way round bodies, upside-down. The Pavilion was intended to focus on sound art experimentation, and was commissioned by the Pepsi Corporation with the intention to promote the involvement of business corporations in art. The President of the Pepsi Cola Corporation, Donald Kendall, declared at the Pavilion’s opening ceremony: ‘We believe that the Pepsi Cola pavilion will set a precedent in new corporate participation in the arts.’ But the Pepsi Cola executives decided that Hijikata’s performance was not what they wanted, to represent the Pepsi Corporation: Hijikata’s performance was never repeated, and planned further performances at the Pepsi Pavilion were cancelled. That one performance – witnessed by Ko Murobushi – may have been Hijikata’s final solo performance, in which he was entirely alone, rather than performing his solo work as part of larger companies of dancers. It has the aura of a lost work, a vanished work, perhaps again of a ‘midnight performance’.

The main focus of the discussion in London with Ko Murobushi on Artaud’s work was the fragmentary material written in preparation for the radio project ‘To have done with the judgement of god’, as well as the surviving recording itself, in which Artaud’s screams are heard, along with his beating of percussion and xylophones, in collaboration with the actor and director Roger Blin, later known for his work with Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. I think the audience here will perhaps know of the seminal importance which that project of Artaud also held for Tatsumi Hijikata, at the end of his life in the 1980s, and of how vital the intervention of Kuniichi Uno was, in Hijikata’s engagement with it. That project of Artaud is a sustained interrogation of the entity of dance, as well as a refusal of the status of judgement on the human body, either by deities or other powers.

By that extreme stage in his work, Artaud believed that dance alone – only dance – could enable the human body to resist whatever destroyed it. So, dance that is activated from a process of corporeal transmutation: a distinctive manifestation of dance, which I think resonates closely with the work of Ko Murobushi. So, dance as an outright struggle or fight, a bitter contestation: whether against assassins who visit Artaud in his room, at Midnight, or else against death itself, or another power. That dance is at the origins of what Artaud called: the ‘body without organs’, and also forms a dance that returns dance to its origins – if dance, in its fragments, could ever have been originally simultaneous with the body. That dance may also incorporate the act of writing about dance, in its irrecuperable, inassimilable, innumerable forms and figures – as in Ko Murobushi’s diary fragments and in his texts in preparation for future works of dance. As I mentioned earlier, Artaud writes about his conception of ‘wrong-way-round’ dance, but he also evokes dance in connection to his celebrated ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ theories of the 1930s, emphasising that it’s solely dance that can now accomplish that previous work, as he writes: ‘through a collapsing of this world of microbes which is nothing but the coagulated void’.

That dialogue with Ko Murobushi in London was located eleven years in time before his performance in Yokohama in 2013, titled ‘Artaud Double’, which I didn’t have the opportunity to see, but which I think must have distilled that long engagement with the work of Artaud. And I’m now going to end with an extract from Ko Murobushi’s notes of 1999 written on that engagement with Artaud – notes extracted from the great documentation project of Kimiko Watanabe – and which recall for me his living words in dialogue on the work of Antonin Artaud: ‘With empathy to Artaud’s fight, I began to dance. My dance of ‘the Mummy’ was also to cut a gouge into my body and my words, it was to expose them on the border of life and death, it was to invent the dance of the body that had strayed from dance.’