Don’t know if I like Hijikata. Believe rather in the desire to carry his writings, which themselves carry his dancing. His dancing, his butoh, his emotions are to be found already in the lame territories, the feelings of defeat, « the baby’s head at the bottom of my mud » that he lays down on paper. Which perhaps radically saves us the necessity of performing, re-performing, his dance. « While being glad of possessing one’s own head and one’s four limbs, to think nevertheless that one would have wished to be born impotent once and for all ; because it is only when such a desire comes to you, that the first step in dancing is finally achieved. » Not that it would be a disgrace to try to remake the butoh. (There is surely a butoh left to invent : the re-butoh ? _rebuffing, that’s what the new butoh should be…) But my idea is that we will not make butoh from these haunting texts, because they already carry the butoh inside them. Straw, mud, deformity, guts, everything is there… The work shall be done from underneath, on the sides. We shall dig up the thought of a tremendous artist so that he leaves us entirely to our own madness. Let the strength of his writings, which must be as if given to read, give us freedom within the very gesture of carrying them. Let us not draw our inspiration from Hijikata, let us not construct a show which proceeds from his writings, let us not really make any « mise-en-scène ». We wave a banderole at arm’s length but they threaten to drip on us, to shed their stains. And perhaps this is why I’m not sure I can like Hijikata : he looks dirty, dead, impotent, a virgin, and obscene.

Boris Charmatz

Surrounded by lashing nudes, the dance creator wastes away tremendously. My chest, by dint of immersing its scraggy ribs in the sewer canals, has become cluttered with the wrecks of the time. To prevent it rusting, I oiled it copiously, before settling down to my job for endless days. Far from this chest and its painful convalescence, I was offering myself the pleasure of sunbathing in the theatres. Inside shelves of a well watched over mortuary, the gaze has been threading its way upon the present generation, whose soul couldn’t under any circumstances live only on the possessions received in legacy. Meticulously striding over Tokyo — where that generation which has conceived the eyes of the hands, is not inevitably extinct — I come to the material. All I had to do was to pick it up among a youth busy here rubbing in a galvanization shop, there squatting in a garage. I look at the hands. A movement of raw particles arises from them. The spinal column bends slightly forwards. A dance rushes down its slope. For just one unhappy gaze, one risks being changed into gelatin. Burning heads. The constricted vengeance of a cold button has bowed its forehead very slightly; the material must first be a lover. I move closer. The smell produces between the boys and me an almost ascetic balance; in general, all those bodies extended like an umbrella’s branches to catch things falling, all those crooked, brittle bodies, stiffened by sacrifice, give in various ways priority to the quasi trademarked lines of their circle of twenty years old, instead of all the attractive figures. In the boundless Tokyo there are some bodies to burst.

Tatsumi Hijikata, From Inner Material, Translated by Patrick De Vos

Helmet performance devised and passed on by Gwendoline Robin