Edge

Solo of Kô Murobushi, master of Butoh

I watched Ko Murobushi’s solo performance at Kagurazaka’s die Pratze.

The guest seating was filled with people, and it had become floor  seating. Still, it was for good reason as I was able to watch in person.
It was an incredible dance that admirably destroyed the idea that Butoh = bogus (it may have been so in the past but not now).
From the beginning, with the pillar as the starting point, he fell  facing upward, the back of his head landing on the floor! His grip on  the audience was splendid, and the stance of cutting through “arts” with  entertainment was very cool. Especially in the first half, when he does  not move his body much, as if  huge, another life form was wriggling  inside a bag of skin, some parts were made tense and stiff, and other  parts put at plain ease; no matter how you looked at it, both of these  extremities were put together in a strange way and it was astounding.  Together with his breathing, the man continually let out a strange yet  hard-to-describe voice, and at a comparatively early stage,  unexpectedly, he spoke!
Whether it was a conversation with the audience or something else, while  toying with a kind of unknown relationship, within this desperate  performance that expressed a developing, intense bitterness, I felt the  difficulty in the grasping of the body, along with the essence of art  form nowadays that has deviated from the common meaning of the word  “dance,” sink deep into my heart.
“What” in the world is Murobushi doing, “what” in the world are we  watching and “what” are we being touched by? I thought the fact that we  were never to know was made thoroughly clear. In any case, from  beginning to end, essential scenes were done in succession. Rather than a  number of essential scenes being programmed in, it felt like meeting  the various (critical) dimensions, Murobushi’s body and the audience’s  perception, one after another with time. In this way, each and every one  carried a sense of incidence, and seeing that was most certainly a form  of “witnessing.” If time allowed I would have come running again the  next day as well, but I had to let this time pass. I eagerly await next  year’s performance.

Source: Posting from Keisuke Sakurai’s blog, translation by Vinci Ting, November 22, 2000

More information: ko-murobushi.com