About this event
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, aiming to train the nation's body and spirit. 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. Hayakawa’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 stage becomes a space to experiment with visibility; ways to draw attention are sought yet remain evasive, operating within form without being captured by it. What interests Hayakawa is the mercurial body: the body that arises in the relationship between what is seen, its agency, and the frameworks that seek to define it. The work engages bodies with the gazes and inscriptions projected onto them, turning them into possibilities for playful, self-directed ways of moving that subtly disrupt structures of domination. • Hanako Hayakawa (b. 1995, Nagano) is a dancer and artist who lives and works in Berlin. Building on her experience as a dancer and performer, her artistic practice focuses on the concept of the ‘mediatic body’ – the body that sees and the body that is seen. Through this lens, she illuminates perspectives and relational dynamics within social power structures. Her most important works include Lurker, presented at TOKAS, Tokyo (2021), DESINGEL Antwerp (2024), and Sophiensaele, Berlin (2025). As a dancer, she has collaborated with international artists including Tino Sehgal, Leiko Ikemura, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe, Miet Warlop, Emmilou Rößling, Simon Van Schuylenbergh, Kazumichi Komatsu, and Tetsuya Umeda.
