Skip to main content

Baby Face

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars

 The high chair that sits to the side of the Tron’s up close and personal Changing House stage is the first clue about live artist Katy Dye’s ferocious solo dissection of the infantilisation of women. With a plastic sheet on the ground, when Dye enters what is effectively an emotional playpen, her introduction comes with a piercing white noise soundtrack. Through this, she lays bare the ever reductive reactions from a man’s world that isn’t shy about pointing out just how much the grown woman she actually is resembles what they used to be able to get away with calling jailbait.

This opens up a fearless critique of the sort of fetishisation of pre-pubescent imagery which has been normalised through everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Britney Spears, both referenced here. Such stereotypical cover girl styling has previously been subverted by the riot grrrl wave of bands, and here Dye picks up the baton over a breathless fifty minutes, in which she shouts, screams, stamps her feet and pretty much everything inbetween. This makes for a wilfully provocative expose of patriarchal values and the sort of iconography that has been sanctioned by mainstream pop culture for decades.

Baby powder, baby lotion and plain old baby love are hurled into the mix of a show first seen on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year. Dye isn’t being cute when she does this, and things get messy. As she throws herself into her performance, it becomes a rapid-fire and very necessary attack on received values which challenges notions of complicity and conditioning.

Innocence, experience and the correlation between the two are at the heart of things here, as Dye unflinchingly plays games with the audience in a whirlwind of a performance which is explicit in its intent. While far from subtle, it is nevertheless a timely primer on an increasingly discomforting form of everyday sexploitation, the proponents of which would rather things stayed forever young.

The Herald, February 11th 2019


ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Post a Comment
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more