ABSTRACT
Murobushi Ko occupies a key position in articulating butoh's original intention of corporeal revolution. Murobushi says he started to dance when he decided to die, and he started to dance/die when he encountered Hijikata's corporeality and writings. The core of Murobushi's art becomes the oxymoronic essence of dance, which according to Hijikata is "the corpse standing straight at the risk of its own life". Pivotal to Murobushi's corporeal landscape was a centrifugal attitude which pushed him to continuously experiment with new ways of challenging his body, and which was presented in his manifesto as the concept of "butoh of the outside". Murobushi explored shugendo as a form of resistance to social order, to cultural categorization. He discovered the nucleus of his performance, the apotheosis of the corporeality of the outside, in the miira or sokushinbutsu, "the ascetics who sought to achieve salvation and immortality through self-mummification".
