Babyface
Babyface is a performance and installation combining dance and robotics that responds to feminized tropes around innocence, servitude, cuteness and spectacle. Centering a "cyborg" performer who was designed to be perfect, the work uncovers tension between humans and machines through original sound, choreography, and interaction with a pair of large-scale, robotic, breath-activated angel wings.
// interaction design
// installation design
// choreography
// human robot interaction
// robotics research
Babyface is a dance performance, a study in robotics engineering, and an interactive installation for audience-participants.
The work invites audience members to activate a pair of large scale robotic wings with their breath and motion. The wings augment each audience members’ body, simultaneously serving as a magical, otherworldly spectacle and a physical metaphor for the outsize expectations placed on feminine bodies via technological design and social pressure.
The wings simultaneously create an effect of grandeur and awe, and a rigid, limiting characterization that becomes burdensome over the course of the performance. The performer is a revered spectacle because of this affect, but also cannot be different than her container; this tension between aspiration and limitation fuels this work.
Kate and Lab members are responding to an unfortunate circularity with deep historical roots. Technologies (from corsets to social media) pressure women to look and perform beautifully, effortlessly and non-threateningly, feeding a culture that expects less of women who conform while simultaneously punishing those who do not. This translates into newly created technologies (i.e. Instagram algorithms that prioritize and highlight promoters that perpetuate these stereotypes, the voice of Siri or Alexa, and Sophia the Robot) that inherit those same patriarchal prejudices.
This collaboration uses technology creation and embodied practice in tandem to exploit these prejudices and reveal the emotional impact of this harmful circularity.
“Babyface is blunt with its spectacle as a pathway to its own subversion. An essential motivating question throughout our process was: how do we get audiences past the initial moment of, “oh my god, it’s a robot on stage!” and therefore able to engage with our higher level concepts? Our answer was to fully embrace this moment. If we can first confront audiences with a familiar, predictable stereotype (robot barbie with segmented motion and a fixed smile), we can then reveal the shortcomings of that stereotype (the struggle against aesthetic restriction and the vulnerability that comes with being on display).”
Babyface: Performance and Installation Art Exploring the Feminine Ideal in Gendered Machines
in Frontiers Special Edition The Art of Human-Robot Interaction: Creative Perspectives from Design and the Arts
Credits
Choreography by Kate Ladenheim, with Amy LaViers
Machine by Amy LaViers and Wali Rizvi, with Kate Ladenheim
Costume by Reika McNish Christy Hauptman, with Kate Ladenheim
Music by Myles Avery, with Kate Ladenheim
The work was made in collaboration with The Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab, and began during a residency at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana.
Photos of the Dance NOW Joe’s Pub Festival by Yi-Chun Wu. Photos & Video of The Performance Arcade by Colin Edson, featuring dancers Olliver Carruthers, Sebastian Geilings, Rosie Tapsell, & Cheyanne Teka from Footnote New Zealand Dance.