Baby-Q

Monstrosity, sexuality and the separation of the masculine and feminine are recurrent themes in the work of Yoko Higashino, dancer and choreographer in the company Baby-Q. They are however treated without any real “feminist” intent. In her new piece, Watashi wa sosorareru/I am aroused, she allows us a glimpse of a world between dream and reality, a space charged with scenes from our fantasies played out on smudged mirrors and screens and weighted with crimson velvet curtains. Yoko Higashino invents a spasmodic universe of deaf brutality through which radiate the beauty and androgyny of her double-jointed dancers.

Baby-Q opened for business in the comfortable but something restrictive Osaka in 2000. Tokyo, concentrating more artistic energy, professionally more stimulating, beckoned. The time was right when Yoko Higashino won first the Toyota Choreography Award in 2004, then the Yokohama Dance Collection R in 2005. Several members of Baby-Q followed her and the whole company relocated in 2005.

One of Yoko Higashino’s aims is to make dance more accessible. “In contrast to cinema or music, dance is still a largely misunderstood art form in today’s Japan”, Yoko says, always busy with lessons both in the Baby-Q Dance Lab studio and outside. She has invented a double: Kemumaki Yoko (literally “Yoko disappearing in smoke”), who, dressed in a blonde wig, descends into the depths of Tokyo clubs to improvise cathartic performances with noise artists and touring avant-garde musicians. Always on the same mission, her goal is to bridge the gap, get contemporary dance on the map.

In Baby Q shows, different scenographic elements come together to combine forces. Dance, costumes, music, lighting and sometimes robotic or medical technology are all managed with the same precision. There is always a strong central theme, like in Alarm!, Geeeeek (deformity) or Watashi wa sosorareru/I am aroused. The titles alone are enough to call powerful imagery to mind and on this Yoko’s choreography is constructed, critical and liberating of our unconscious desires. Baby-Q throws back a vision of our own decadence, a world in which wars, marital violence and the most unbridled sensuality are part of a single whole, the everyday, televised, banal.

© 2008 text: Franck Stofer, translation: Jack Sims, photo: Eric Bossick