We’d just stumbled out of Cremaster, brains still melting from Barney’s latex and petroleum jelly fever dream, trying to articulate what the fuck we’d just witnessed, all that obsessive bodily mythology, those baroque genital landscapes, when the alley starts filling with them.
White painted bodies coming at us like a slow-motion avalanche of the undead, dozens of them, moving with that signature Butoh crawl, that trembling-insect-broken-marionette thing that makes your spine remember it used to be a snake. The timing was so cosmically perfect it felt scripted, except no one scripts this kind of collision.
Here’s what Hijikata knew that Barney circles around in his own baroque way: the body is the last honest thing we’ve got, and using it for anything other than meaning, for pure, aimless, useless expression, is revolutionary. Not revolutionary like Che Guevara, revolutionary like your cells suddenly remembering they’re not office equipment.
These dancers weren’t performing for us. They were just happening, occupying space with their awkward, trembling, utterly uncommercial flesh. After hours of Barney’s million-dollar body horror, here was the street-level version, no budget, no narrative, just human rehabilitation in real-time. The machine hates this because you can’t monetize a shudder, can’t package genuine physical strangeness. Both Barney and these dancers understood: the body, unproductive and strange, is a weapon.
My profession is the business of human rehabilitation, which goes today by the name of dancer… All the power of civilized morality, hand in hand with the capitalist economic system and its political institutions, is utterly opposed to using the body simply for the purpose, means, or tool of pleasure. Still more, to a production-oriented society, the aimless use of the body, which I call dance, is a deadly enemy which must be taboo.
Tatsumi Hijikata (founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh)