Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates Murobushi Kō's exploration of corporeal art in relation to body-paint, focusing on his silver-body politics seen as a way to eschew power, surveillance and forms of identity in connection to Guattari and Deleuze's nomadology, and suggesting references to Minamata disease.

Paper long abstract:

Since Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours, 1959), when Hijikata Tatsumi appeared with his black-painted skin (kuronuri), the practice of applying colours on the naked body, or parts of it, has become a distinctive feature of butō dance. The emblematic white body-paint (shironuri), implemented especially after Anma (The Masseur, 1963) and adopted increasingly during the 1970s, may be viewed as a powerful device able to erase the performer's age, (human) identity, gender, and social status, thereby pulverising residues of subjectivity and exasperating the corporeal presence/absence on stage.

The aesthetic strategy of covering the body with colour can be understood as facilitating the heteromorphic process of the trans-body actualised in butō.

In the late 1990s Murobushi Kō re-elaborated this trans-body, opting for the silver makeup (ginnuri). Previously, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he had experimented with cross-dressing, eventually adopting kuronuri to stage the self-mummified miira, gold dust (kinpun) paint in his cabaret dance, and shironuri in his female choreographies. In his later years, Murobushi envisaged a corporeal identification with quicksilver/mercury (suigin). Being extremely volatile and toxic, this metallic element embodies speed and mobility, androgyny and gender fluidity.

This paper investigates the evolving stages in Murobushi's persistent concern with the exploration of corporeal art as a political enactment in relation to body-paint. Particular attention will be paid to aspects of transcultural and transnational migration within his silver-body politics seen as a way to eschew power, surveillance and forms of identity in connection to Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze's nomadology (1996). It will also suggest possible references to the Minamata disease.