So Cute, So Creepy

Abstract

Performed by thirteen, thirteen year old girls and one adult male bodybuilder, Het Hamiltoncomplex by director Lies Pauwels (2016) uses the live presence of child performers and adult spectators to challenge a normative adult gaze on the child. Juxtaposing them to an extremely strong and large adult body, the dramaturgy of this performance uses the presence of the thirteen year old bodies on stage to foreground their place in the visual field as bodies that are anomalous, strange, unfinished and that stand in a relation of difference to the adult body. This article explores the potential of an interdisciplinary approach to childhood, combining performance theory, critical childhood studies, queer theory and a disability theory perspective on embodiment and vulnerability, to contribute to an understanding of the relation between images of childhood and the subject position of the adult spectator. Central to the way this specific performance addresses the fears and expectations of the adult spectator is the modern Western ideal of childhood innocence. My analysis traces the implicatedness of the notion of childhood innocence in the modern Western ideal of the subject, to show how this notion imposes a specific temporal logic on our understanding of childhood that constructs childhood and adulthood as mutually exclusive categories, and supports the idea of the adult subject as finished, stable and definitely separate from the inhuman. This context brings to light how the temporal structure of Het Hamilton Complex’ dramaturgy subverts both the child's and the adult's assigned places in the temporal logic of the co-construction of childhood and adulthood, structured by a linear progress narrative and an opposition of the child as natural and timeless yet paradoxically also unfinished to the adult as finished and ontologically stable.

Notes

1 The title of this performance translates as ‘The Hamilton Complex’ and refers to photographer David Hamilton, known for his portraits of young naked girls. Images such as those made by David Hamilton invite a voyeuristic gaze, creating a duality between the subject looking and the girl as object. The translation of extracts cited in the text is mine.

2 In the past two decades the European theatre and dance landscape has seen a number of performances in which children perform for adult audiences in professional productions. Performances that stage children, and do so in ways that challenge the way we see, or fail to see, children, include: Moeder en Kind, Bernadetje, Iets op Bach and Allemaal Indiaan (Alain Platel, 1995, 1997 and 1999), Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, Tragedia Endogonidia and Inferno (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, 1999, 2002 and 2008), Übung (Josse de Pauw, 2001), That night follows day (Tim Etchells and Victoria, 2007), Candyland, Kind, Nature or Nurture and Mona (Alexandra Broeder, 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2016), Before Your Very Eyes (Gob Squad, 2011), Enfant (Boris Charmatz, 2011) and Five Easy Pierces (Milo Rau, 2016).

3 See, for example, Susan Kaiser and Kathleen Huun for an overview of what they identify as anxiety–led publications in the fields of developmental psychology and childhood studies, and Kerry Robinson for an analysis of societal debates concerning the vulnerability of children in the case of ‘the gay teletubbie’ (Kaiser and Huun 2002; Robinson 2008).

4 Read reacts strongly against the ubiquities of theories of the ‘other’ prevalent in the discussion of the politics of performance. He points out that in this theoretical genre and its evocation of minorities the ‘really other worlds’ of infants and animals are largely absent. His affirmative answer to what he diagnoses as a conservative focus within identity politics on marginalised others is instead to ‘exoticize the domestic’. I take Read's plea to exotisize the domestic as a challenge to examine the everyday, the seemingly included, obvious and unquestioned. Read points out that family, ‘that most majoritarian power’ (Read 2008, 160), is largely absent in theoretical debate and philosophical discourse. Childhood is also vastly overlooked in theoretical discourse and especially interesting in light of its ambivalent status as other to the category of the human yet at the same time normalized and contained in the privacy of the family. The current interest in child performers by theatre and dance practitioners, I would say, provides a fertile ground to examine childhood's complex relation to the production of normalcy and strangeness regarding the human.

5 Daniel Cook confirms this essentialism, observing that adults view themselves as more thoroughly specified and diverse (gendered, raced and classed) than children: ‘Any particular child “stands” for childhood in ways that any particular adult doesn't represent adulthood’ (Cook 2002).

6 Developmentalism is the idea that childhood is a biological reality that involves a linear development towards mature adulthood. This idea was already implicit in Rousseau's conception of childhood and was developed into a comprehensive theory of cognitive development by psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget's developmentalism long remained unquestioned but is currently criticized within childhood studies for its problematic discourses of normalcy and its adult–ist, able–ist and heteronormative biases (Burman 2008, Slater 2013, Robinson 2008). Disability and youth scholar Jenny Slaters’ analysis of critical discourse in childhood studies for example shows that developmentalism constructs the adult as autonomous, rational, stable, knowing, strong, authorative, masculine, able bodied, white and heterosexual (2013). Developmental psychologist Erica Burman draws attention to the performativity of this concept when she shows that developmentalism not only heavily impacts our perception of childhood today, but also produces actual children whose behaviour meets the standards of linear development marked by stages Piaget described (2008).

7 I loosely draw a connection between the construction of subject positions in theatre dramaturgy and theories of enactive cognition here. For more on visuality in the theatre and subjectivity, see Bleeker (2008). For more on enactive cognition and the relation between the perception of the world and the production of a self, see Alva Noë (2004). For more on the relation between visuality in the theatre and enactive cognition, see Bleeker and Germano (2014).