Kennedy Theatre Late Night Series Presents BABY SHAMPOO

Late Night Theatre Company, UH M noa's student theatre organization, presents Baby Shampoo, an improvised ensemble dance performance, in the Earle Ernst Lab Theatre on February 2nd, 3rd, 8th, and 9th. The Friday and Saturday performances begin at 11:00 pm with the Sunday matin-eve beginning at 7:30pm. Tickets range from $5-10 and are sold at the Kennedy Theatre Box Office one hour prior to the start of the performance.

Baby Shampoo invites audience members into a world of absurd creation to explore the subjectivity of the inanimate, specifically the intimate inner lives and unexplored identities of soaps, detergents, and cleansers. These Soapy Identities appear onstage in a cast of wacky and exaggerated characters, including toothpaste, Comet cleaner, Dial bar soap, and more. Asking the question what is it like to imagine yourself as soap? the seven performers investigate themes of containment, escape, soapy conversations, filthy encounters, and dissolution from the perspective and corporeality of common household cleaners.

Through the exploration of Soapy Identities, Baby Shampoo seeks to challenge the notion that through performance, actors or dancers can access another individual's experience or subjectivity, or know what their life is like, and then, in turn, represent them on stage. The performance investigates this problem by working on an intentionally impossible task: knowing the inner subjectivities, feelings, embodied movements and identities of the inanimate. The absurdity of this task creates a metaphor for the performer in their process, who seeks true representation, and yet is always essentially bound by their own particular lens of personhood and experience and doomed to struggle with these politics of authenticity.

Baby Shampoo is an original work from choreographer and UHM PhD Performance Studies candidate Maria Teresa Houar, and was originally developed as a culminating Practice-as-Research project for UHM's Dance Ethnology Seminar in the Department of Theatre and Dance. Late Night Theatre Company brings Maria Teresa and dancers back to the stage, extending the original shorter piece into a full evening-length work. At times silly, intimate, satirical, wild, minimal, and most of all slippery, you're sure to laugh, cry, bubble and leave either feeling squeaky clean or completely dirty.

The Theatre and Dance Association is a student organization whose mission is to offer artistic and academic support for students of the Department of Theatre and Dance at UHM by providing performance opportunities and supporting independent student projects.

Tickets for Baby Shampoo are available at the door beginning one hour before the curtain opens on performance nights.

 

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