In this presentation, I examine the choreographic enterprise of the 21st-century all-female performance collective KATHY, who create tableau-vivant, which they bring to life with their pop-ritual dancing, ballet, tea ceremonies, and environmental, object, and audience interactions. KATHY's kawaii mixes and twists the traditional kawaii culture of Heian women's writing and Edo kabuki musume with the spectacularly contemporary Hello-Kitty-pink-globalization, anime, and J-POP. I argue that KATHY is part of a (gendered) (false) (post-3/11) (avant-garde) movement of Japanese artists who deploy kawaii shôjo (cute girl) iconography as a radical weapon to skewer the current social, political and economic malaise.

Katherine Mezur is a freelance dance, theatre, and performance studies scholar, dramaturg, choreographer and director. Her work focuses on transnational East Asian performance practices, histories, and theories. She writes on Japanese traditional and contemporary performance, girl cultures and their live and mediated performances, and gender technologies from kabuki to J-pop.