Baby-Q: Remnants of a Post-Human World
Andrea Liu
Dance Theater Workshop was home to the American premiere of ALARM! –zero hour edition, by Japanese dance company Baby Q, a multimedia dance performance group with a sardonic pop culture and highly-visual stylized flair. Opening with a half-nude, barely gender-discernible androgyne with red, green and blue painted marks on her torso and a brown paper bag over her head sashaying with faint seduction across the stage, Baby-Q immediately enunciated its panache for making Warholian art-chic visual presentation. Along with the paper bag woman was a solitary fire engine red tricycle with white handlebars circling in a futile repetition. It seemed to be a signifier without a referent, yearning for other tricycles, kickballs, frisbees and toys to accompany and make real the referent of "innocence" that the synecdoche of a kiddie tricycle elicited. It was an innocence that the stridently painted-redness and the newly-bought gleam of the tricycle seemed insistently to want to recapture, but instead was engulfed in a nightmare.
What followed was a series of about ten disjointed dance vignettes in a silent but thick blackness. In one vignette, a boy-girl astronaut-robot pair–looking like figures out of Japanese Otaku, with Michelin tire man costume, pigtails and a Hello Kitty playful Japanese pop culture flair–flounder futilely in a numbing void, waving their arms synchronously and undulating their upper body. In another, a quintet of dancers in a circle, male and female both, each with a spotlight on them, gyrate and move with an urgent and spastic poetry, seemingly working out or exorcising some internal anxiety. One of the most memorable vignettes was the Ave Maria vignette, whereby three male dancers with long, furry white bunny ears attached to their heads perform a ballet adagio warm-up at a barre, with absurdly sarcastic solemnity. At the end of their drag queen bunny rabbit ballet exercise, two of the male dancers embrace and kiss on the lips with torrential passion. Schubert’s Ave Maria, in its luscious lyricism and elegiacal beauty, juxtaposed to the nonsensical scenario of the Bunny Rabbit-ear drag queen mock serious ballet dancers, created a pungent disconnect that was evocative of a tragic discrepancy between the beauty that is strived for in the world (Ave Maria), and the actual meaningless disjointed shards of a fool-ridden absurd existence. Even their climactic kiss seemed depressingly comical–depressing for its underscoring of the hollow nature of the kiss and the its acidic mockery of the cultural assumption that a kiss is a form of human connection.
The most memorable vignette, however, was of the dancer and founder of Baby-Q herself, Yoko Higashino, towards the end. It begins with Higashino with her back to the audience sitting with legs straddled apart. An exceptionally spindly, svelte woman, even for a dancer, she has a faint white powder on her body. The effect of seeing her with back to the audience with two legs slightly bent at the knees straddled, created the uncannily precise impression of a spider. She then performs a dance solo for about seven minutes, doing a "squiggly dance" that seems to be a trend in avant-garde circles currently, of spastic gyrations and undulations of the upper body. An idiosyncratic movement with no discernible progenitor in the lexicon of modern, classical, ballet, or even butoh dance, the body gyrates on a non-perpendicular axis in a series of "squiggles." She, by turns, does squiggles and then a spidery crabwalk on the floor, clambering with her spider legs. She seems utterly transformed in this vignette and scarcely like a human, much less a dancer or a woman, but rather like some gross rodent or hybrid of a crab and a spider, with a roach-like single-mindedness and determined creepy crawliness. This is backgrounded by a soundtrack of sustained high-toned maniacal shrieking laughter. If for nothing else, Higashino must be wholeheartedly commended that she is not afraid to be an utter freak. I do not say this glibly, or use the word freak as a demeaning high school-like ostracizing epithet. In a field (contemporary dance) especially for women, where so much of what constitutes dance in the case of a female dancer are aspects of her looks, dress, sexuality, female presentation and projection of cultural notions of (heterosexual bourgeois) femininity–it takes gumption to throw that out the window and be a maniacally creepy white powdered crab-spider freak. I felt that this vignette touched on similarly dystopian themes as did the Ave Maria vignette, but to a much darker, more irreconcilable conclusion. This was a post-human world completely removed from notions of human character, meaning, relationships, or "purpose."
The piece closes with a long haired female dancer with a tape ruler wrapped around her body that she snips little by little with scissors, until she starts unknowingly destroying her dress, laughing and crying simultaneously, with an impotent glee and a sadly insane or broken disconnectedness from the consequences of her self-immolation.
The piece as a whole conveyed a bleak nonsensicalness without the release or romantic tragedy of full-blown insanity, but something much more debased and trivial, a more pointed indictment of the world. Its aesthetics might be characterized as dystopic-nightmare-clown post-human: full of bright primary colors in sets and costume assembled perfectly and stunningly, but in absurd contexts, that unsettlingly did nothing but elicit a sense of a chillingly exuberant meaninglessness to the world. Much of its visual representation was evocative of a Blade Runner future noir aesthetic, with the destroyed robots and spastic inanimate/cyborg robot parts that seem to operate autonomously of human agency. It also shared with Blade Runner a sense of a menacing and imminent hyper-accelerated future devoid of meaning or humanity set against the backdrop of a heterogeneous and hodgepodge "junky" world with no overarching narratives. As in Blade Runner, there are only leftovers, freaks and faint allusions to a more coherent or healed state where pain or psychological damage, now post-humanistically ontologically impossible, might have been an option.
The strength of Baby-Q was its syncretic coalescence of visuals, sets, sound and dance to create very precisely drawn and unforgettable moods and sentiments (usually: absurdity, dehumanization, psychological damage, tragedy, disjunction), which ultimately successively conveyed a moral commentary. Its weakness was perhaps that it was a little too impressed with itself, visually, almost verging at times on being eye candy, in danger of being an invulnerably impeccable procession of art-chic visual styles and codes. Its nihilism was not the gusto-filled wounded romanticism of Western nihilism, but a cynicism without a wounded innocence at its core. This was a cynicism emanating from a bleaker origin of degeneration: chilling, moving, and mesmerizing in its emptily colorful splendor.
