Babyface

Abstract

UPDATED---June 23, 2020. "Babyface" is a machine-augmented, contemporary dance performance responding to feminized tropes in popular media and modern technology. Through choreography (both human and machine-based), costuming, and sound design, the piece collages ideas of perfection, servitude, aspiration, limitation, and spectacle. Specifically, this work centers a "cyborg" performer who wears a pair of robotic wings. The wings' two-degree-of-freedom motion is activated by the performer's breath through a pressure-sensitive sensor placed on the performer's abdomen. This machine defines parameters for the performer's choreographic vocabulary extending their physical reach and range of motion and activating, while also limiting, the backspace of their body. Through breath activation, it is a tool that can be consciously and unconsciously activated. Through tight coupling with this machine, "Babyface" offers an artistic response to the gendered pressures of modern technologies that absorb and disseminate existing feminine stereotypes.