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.
The radical reassessment of performance conceived by Tatsumi Hijikata calls into question the body informed by dance systems and society. While exploring a wide range of corporealities, Hijikata focused his attention, in particular throughout the 1960s, on the nikutai (carnal body). This specific corporeality is corruptible, pluralistic, metamorphic, ungovernable, intrinsically political and anti-capitalistic. The nikutai permits the performer to access and explore gaps between reality and fiction, to uncover the quality of deformation and malformation inherent within reality, while resisting systems of knowledge and forms of monolithic identity. As Hijikata states, the nikutai is shattered at the moment of birth. Hence, it may be said that disfiguration is at the very root of the carnal body, which oscillates between the rotting corpse and living body. In his 1960s dance aesthetics Hijikata experiments with corporeality by challenging image, reproduction and representation, and dismisses the figurative outcome of the performative act. Central to this enterprise is the corruption of the body and of the standardised body-object relation disciplined by language and quotidian behaviour. In this essay, I examine aspects of Hijikata's artistic strategy to undermine choreographic methodologies and framed corporeality. With reference to James Gibson's theory of affordances I also argue that the challenge in butoh's movement process and corporeal work disrupts affordance. In relation to this alternative economy of movement, and of attention and exhibition, is highlighted the question of how Hijikata, in his earlier experimentations, avoids 'the aesthetic consciousness of those who dance' and switches off the power of gaze. ; The radical reassessment of performance conceived by Tatsumi Hijikata calls into question the body informed by dance systems and society. While exploring a wide range of corporealities, Hijikata focused his attention, in particular throughout the 1960s, on the nikutai (carnal body). This specific ...
This article discusses the strong resonance provoked by the 2011 triple disaster in the Japanese performance and visual arts by focusing on multimedia artist Yamakawa Fuyuki and the antinuclear activist network's intersection with the underground music scene. Directly plugging into the disaster, Yamakawa re-elaborated his artistic practice in relation to the nuclear crisis by addressing internal and external exposure to radiation. Illustrated are connections between polluted environment, corporeality, politics and performance art, and how his performative experimentations offer novel insights into the interaction between art and disaster enhancing alternative modes of interpretation in technoscience and aesthetic theory.
