Altérations /

Vibrating tribute, Altérations / Kô Murobushi follows as closely as possible the pulsations of Murobushi’s (1947-2015) body to immerge the viewer in the radical worlds of the butô dancer. The film also gives us the opportunity to hear his testimony about his mummy – a creature with a strong symbolic power through its situation between life and death – that he regularly embodied, as well as his links with his master Tatsumi Hijikata, co-founder of butô with Kazuo Ono.

In 2006, Kô Murobushi asked Basile Doganis to film his work for the ten years he still had to live. Fulfilling this strange prophecy, the dancer even disappeared a little before the fateful date. Through the images he gathered during these ten years, Doganis chose a bias as radical as his subject. Alterations unfolds, in one movement – interrupted by a single dialogue – images extracted from performances danced outside, in the darkness of an apartment or on stage. Supported by an experimental sound creation combining breath, squealing and saturated nature sounds, dances alternate with Morubishi’s texts on screen. There’s something telluric in these tangible, brutal choreographies, showing the moods of an almost naked body altering itself at will, as if to better experience its environment. The diversity of images (black and white or colour, film or video) is matched by the plurality of places invested as the bodily states of an artist to whom dance is a borderline place, “an absolute duty / an endless alteration”.

(Caroline Châtelet)