遊戯Yugi no.3 (WT)

In her latest dance performance, Hanako Hayakawa scrutinizes the political aesthetics of cuteness. In particular, she addresses the image of ‘the girl’ as being trapped in normative systems, but an image that also constantly splashes beyond the boundaries of those systems. 

The work harks back to Yugi to Shōka (Games and Songs), a Japanese magazine from the early 20th century featuring educational dance material for female students. The magazine presented choreography that was influenced by Western modern dance, but translated into the Japanese imperialist context. The joy emanating from the bodies of these girls seems to reverse all the violence simultaneously inflicted upon them. ‘Cuteness’ is ambiguous, both then and now. It does not challenge the prevailing order, but rather makes use of it. The girl functions as a paradigm for our culture of attention, not for gender or age. It is a subject that survives through self-representation on the platforms that now organize our social lives, and whose image can be deployed as a weapon. 

Hawayaka’s own body becomes a terrain where all these genealogies of ‘the girl’ meet and where she tries out ‘cuteness’ as a tactical form of subjectivity: where desire, softness, ambiguity, and ruptures are maximized. The cute surface turns out to be permeated with violence, and the violence with joy. The performance involves bodies in the gazes and texts projected onto them. Hawayaka transforms them into playful, self-directed forms of movement that subtly disrupt power structures.