Murobushi Kō and his challenge to butoh

Murobushi Kō explored the political quality inherent in Hijikata Tatsumi’s anti-dance, viewed in terms of terrorism against his own body integrated into the system. Murobushi’s counter-discourse elaborates critical assessments of identity, body and dance in relation to politics of knowledge, gender, society, ideology and religion. In combination with an anti-religious and anti-nationalistic attitude his artistic investigation posits at its centre the corpse and practices of self-mummification achieved by anchorites (miira or sokushinbutsu). While drawing on Foucault’s biopolitics, Murobushi’s butoh of the outside questions immobility/movement and disrupts the fictiveness of the performative act, processing through his critical corporeality crevices of ontology and fiction. His influential work spread on an international level and challenged the stereotyped image of butoh blurring categories of both butoh and contemporary dance.

Murobushi Ko occupies a key position in articulating butoh's original intention of corporeal revolution. Murobushi says he started to dance when he decided to die, and he started to dance/die when he encountered Hijikata's corporeality and writings. The core of Murobushi's art becomes the oxymoronic essence of dance, which according to Hijikata is "the corpse standing straight at the risk of its own life". Pivotal to Murobushi's corporeal landscape was a centrifugal attitude which pushed him to continuously experiment with new ways of challenging his body, and which was presented in his manifesto as the concept of "butoh of the outside". Murobushi explored shugendo as a form of resistance to social order, to cultural categorization. He discovered the nucleus of his performance, the apotheosis of the corporeality of the outside, in the miira or sokushinbutsu, "the ascetics who sought to achieve salvation and immortality through self-mummification".