There is a vacant lot in a residential neighborhood and it is covered in grass. Mountain doves are cooing somewhere. The scent of the mountain is carried through the air. Several megalithic sites have been discovered in these foothills, so the object in the middle of the overgrown grass that looks like an abandoned stone coffin may be part of an ancient tomb that was once here. Ordinarily, no one would visit this neglected stone coffin, half-buried in the soil. Yet a man is sitting on its exposed ruins. I see a giant green shield bug suddenly fly away from his shoulder. The afternoon light of the Faun is reflected on the grass, and amid its reflection I see the shadow of some kind of bird flying away, perhaps the mountain dove I heard earlier. As if blinded for an instant, the quiet grass field turns completely gray. However, the man on the moss-covered stone coffin is saturated from head to toe in green.

“That man, he was dancing in the grass earlier. Did you see it?”
“Nope.”
“He’s probably an alien.”
“A green alien in bronze armor…”
“I’m not joking.”
“Look, now he’s sitting and reading a newspaper.”
“Everyone does.”

The sun is low and slowly fading, and the drowsy afternoon is about to come to an end. It has been hot today. Even within the chill of the morning air, the Faun of the grass field would not present his delicate body to those who are no longer there. Mourning by burying oneself in a stone coffin is something from long ago. The funeral procession has already passed, leaving no trace behind. In the grass, however, there is a tiny eternity that looks like a puddle. The sky is reflected in this puddle. Nothing has triumphed there, just like those moments which once arced through the atmosphere. In those moments, there were only things which happened to fall from somewhere. However, even if the veil of night were to eventually fall softly upon this puddle, eternity would never transform the man sitting on the stone coffin into the man himself. What will become of the stone coffin at midnight? I look, and the man is no longer there.

Although no other works by Mallarmé were as distinct as The Afternoon of a Faun and “Le Minuit (The Midnight)” from Igitur ou la Folie D’elbehnon, for Ko Murobushi, there was not much separating one from the other. The 15 dancers assembled just before midnight, but Murobushi stopped the movements of his body at the precise moment the clock struck twelve. A profound silence persisted around them. Every object stood still. The silence could have been carried from a grave.“You all criticized the nymphs from The Afternoon of a Faun,” Murobushi thought. But he did not argue. Instead, he forced those thoughts down. “This very body of mine is a stone coffin. Transience means not having a grave, so this body is my grave.” (Translator’s note: The Japanese word for transient reads hakanai, which could also be interpreted as haka-nai, meaning no-grave.)  Murobushi wrote such things instead of going mad. He created scenes like this on the stage over and over. There was a false ideal. His breath was visible. How ugly the Faun could be! Neither Mallarmé nor Debussy had anything to do with Nijinsky’s towering presence on the stage. It wasn’t an affection toward ancient dreams. The gloomy euphoria was over. Surrounded by silence, a gentle night breeze blew through the tube of a flute without making sound. No one noticed. That’s why Murobushi had to get out of that place.

Murobushi said there was spinning and leaping in Nijinsky. For a while, Murobushi was thinking about the convulsions that emerged from the base of his body in unexpected moments. It was something that transcended the conventions of the physical body. On the stage, Murobushi was an expert in convulsions. Unexpectedly, he took pride in it as a Butoh dancer. Convulsions are different from either spinning or leaping. There were no convulsions in Nijinsky. If he had convulsions hiding in the depths of his body, he likely would have been able to avoid mental disorder. He would not have been sent from one hospital to another. Murobushi stated that there were no convulsions even during the scandalous masturbation scene in Nijinsky’s The Afternoon of a Faun. No one wants to see the process of ejaculation. There is no such thing as ejaculation of psyche. Especially on the stage. In that regard, Jim Morrison of The Doors, like the Ballets Russes, made a mistake. As a young rock musician, that thought never occurred to him while clutching his genitals on stage. “Passion is not convulsion, and neither is masturbation.” Murobushi said this several times, arrested by rage. Murobushi said there are fake ejaculations. Unexpectedly, there are moments in dance when the body becomes flaccid. It becomes so disorderly that the body makes no progress on the stage. The Butoh body simply continues to loier.

Nijinsky declared himself to be a person who moves, and was confident in that statement when he was dancing on the stage. On the other hand, Murobushi knew that the body in Butoh does not move, even if it tried to do so. Nijinsky was plagued by Diaghilev, who was like a crazed old lady. He was always afraid that Diaghilev might cause his downfall. Nijinsky was repelled by Diaghilev’s dirty black pillowcase and two false teeth. Nijinsky said he had made a mistake and he spent his entire life making amends for it. He was miserable on top of being indecisive, whereas Murobushi did not wish for misery even in times of agony. When Nijinsky wrote in his journal between fits of madness, he knew that the shadow of death was approaching. Yet Nijinsky lived for 30 long years after his kingdom shrunk to the size of a bed. By contrast, Murobushi headed to an airport to dance, and just like in one of his dances, he suddenly fell flat on the ground, his heart stopped then and there. Nijinsky said that he wanted to get out through the back door. That was true. Otherwise, nobody would write in a journal. Nijinsky continued to write in his journal because God commanded him to do so. However, if he could get out to the streets, he would have wanted to walk to an elevated location and look down at the world. By the time that was possible, it would have already been midnight outside.

Ko Murobushi planned Nijinski à Minuit and intended to dance, but his sudden death made that impossible. At the limit of total exhaustion, Murobushi arrived at a Nijinsky that no one has ever seen. This final Nijinsky could only exist in the depths of midnight. Artaud once planned an opera with the composer Edgar Varèse. Perhaps because Artaud had been confined to a mental hospital, the opera was never realized and instead became a mirage. I wonder what kind of performance Murobushi’s Nijinsky à Minuit, which was scheduled to premiere at La Villette in Paris in November 2015, would have been. It is hard for us to imagine, but I can picture Murobushi’s body becoming a stone coffin after a series of fiery movements and collapses. There is no grave. Only a stone coffin quietly nestled in a field of grass. Not only is the unknown stone coffin set down during the quietude of midnight; the stone coffin itself becomes midnight. In this way Ko Murobushi is calmly sitting upon his body, despite the edges it has. Nijinsky is no longer able to move on the bed. He only makes his palm flutter, just as he once did on stage.