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Anna and the Annadroids: Shop, shop, spend, spend, dance, dance
By Richard Ades
Anna was trying to describe the T-shirt dresses she and the other Annadroids modeled in the window of G&Co. during Saturday’s Gallery Hop.
“They’re…long enough to be a dress but not very long at all, if that makes any sense. Pretty risqué,” she said. “It’s a specific name brand—I can’t remember it right off the top of my head.”
Wait a minute. Anna, leader of the Annadroids—those plastic-carrying, fashion-conscious icons of continuous consumption—couldn’t remember what kind of dress she was wearing?
“I know,” she said, laughing. “Don’t tell anyone that I didn’t know the name brand.”
Anna the Annadroid would have known, of course, if only because she’d have pulled out her credit card and taken an armload home. But the Anna on the phone was actually Anna Sullivan, the 27-year-old dancer who created the Annadroids troupe four years ago as a way to critique consumerism, conformism and other elements of society that she finds oppressive and, at the same time, annoyingly seductive.
“I’m also part of it,” she said. “I’m not pointing a finger, where it’s like everyone else that consumes, (they’re) wrong or something like that, because I’m right in that world with them.”
Sullivan honed her dancing skills during her last two years at Groveport Madison High School, leaving at noon every day to learn new steps at Otterbein College, and later at Ohio University, where she studied Africentric, hip-hop and jazz dance forms. But it wasn’t until 2004 that she began creating the white-faced, robotic dance troupe that became known as the Annadroids.
“It was basically like a concept where we were dolls and we were kind of robotic, and we wore makeup…really exaggerated makeup, and fun costumes.”
For those who don’t speak Annadroidese, “fun” apparently is a synonym for “strangely sexual,” as in the troupe’s “Plastic Pleasures” costumes of Saran Wrap and tinfoil.
“So we’re literally plastic,” Sullivan said. “And underneath that, we (wear) used bottle caps on our, you know, nipples and bottle caps on our underwear, with tubes coming out so we look like test-tube dolls.”
All of which adds up to an R-rated, satirical way of saying some of the same things being expressed in a much more staid way by green, granola-flavored groups such as the Columbus-based Simply Living, which promotes consumer constraint.
The Annadroids also are promoting consumer constraint, but in a humorous way, Sullivan said. “We’re kind of showing the exact opposite so that people understand how ridiculous it is, how just totally overindulgent and ridiculous is it.”
And consumerism is only one of the issues the Annadroids address, Sullivan said, pointing to the social satire of The Clone Zone, a mixed-media show from 2008 that will be repeated early next year.
The show’s targets include “the concept of socializing, like the clique—who’s cool, who’s not,” said Sullivan, who stressed that she was too involved in her dancing to worry about whether she was one of the “cool girls” in high school.
“Then there’s the concept of the kind of mania that…leads people into medication,” she said. “And the fact that doctors will just hand medication out. Like, ‘Oh, you’re not feeling good? Here, take this anti-depressant.’”
Boiled down to its essence, she said, the Annadroids’ No. 1 target is even more basic than consumerism or conformism or drug abuse.
“All of my work is based on human fear,” Sullivan said.
“You’re afraid of not fitting in, so you go out and buy clothes to fit in. You’re afraid of yourself, so you have to medicate yourself.”
“I think it all starts with the fear.”
Whatever motivates Anna and the other Annadroids—Kaitlin Cutler, Jessica DiBattista, Louise Eberle, Megan Lynch, Cate Owens, Shelby Lafrinere, Jenny Howard, Jenn Agnew and Kashmira Asnani—to don their whiteface, long eyelashes and provocative attire, they’ll be doing a lot of it in the upcoming weeks and months.
Tonight, from 9 to midnight, the group will present “Quirkfest” at BoMA along with the dance troupe Backspace and the noise band Queen Mae and the Bells. The three groups will perform vignettes, videos and musical numbers to help fund Anthro(pop)ology, a joint show scheduled for Jan. 16-18 and 23-25 at Columbus Dance Theatre.
Dec. 19, the Annadroids will hold their second annual Birthday Bash and Burlesque Show from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. at the former High Five, now known as Circus. It also is a fundraiser, supporting a repeat performance of The Clone Zone that will be presented Jan. 30 through Feb. 1 at the BalletMet Performance Space.
Then, in May 2009, the Annadroids will present a new show and release their first music CD.
Through it all, the dancers will continue ridiculing conformism and other societal ills while wearing clownish makeup and decidedly sexy costumes. In an e-mail she sent as a follow-up to her phone interview, Sullivan said her goal is simply to reflect reality as she sees it.
“My work is extremely conceptual,” she wrote. “Although it may seem ridiculous and overtly sexual, the world we live in is ridiculous and overtly sexual.”
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