In contemporary society and pop culture, there is a weird double standard around feminine youth and innocence. On the one hand, paedophilia is rightly reviled, and the sexuality of teenage girls is policed by schools and parents. But at the same time, grown women are routinely infantilised and the schoolgirl is packaged as an acceptable erotic fantasy (think Britney Spears in the …Baby One More Time video).
This is the paradox that Baby Face tears into. Katy Dye’s solo performance art piece is fierce in its attack on the trope of sexy innocence, spitting rage even as it simpers. It is uncomfortable and confrontational, as perhaps this material should be. Moving between targets – from cultural scripts that cast women as damsels in distress to the empty advertising that sells youth in a bottle – Dye simultaneously regresses. Beginning as the 27-year-old woman that she is, she transforms into schoolgirl, child, and finally baby, stretching the fetishising myth of innocence to its logical extreme.
Dye never provides an explicit analysis of the infantilisation of women, but her images are eloquent enough on their own. She performs a series of grotesque duets with a highchair – twirling it in the air, climbing on to it, burying her head in its seat. Singing of feminine helplessness and devotion, her body folds in on itself, collapsing to the floor. At the end of a nonsense monologue of marketing speak, the bottle of moisturiser in Dye’s hands squirts in an ejaculatory arc across the stage. And most strikingly and disturbingly of all, she mashes up sexualised movement and childlike gestures and sounds, making it clear just how disquieting society’s worship of feminine youth really is.
It is a performance of utter, terrifying commitment. Dye has a forceful and uncompromising stage presence, intensified by Zac Scott’s unsettling – often even painful – sound design. Baby Face is certainly not an easy watch, and at times it feels a little too intent on attacking and alienating its audience. But then again, our deepest and most problematic cultural norms are not easily confronted.
At Lawrence Batley theatre, Huddersfield, on 6 March. Then touring until 30 March.
