Fistful of Flesh: Young Boy Dancing Group Hits Japan

In tenth grade, my best friend stuck a candle up their butt. An advent candle, in fact (couldn’t wait to get their stocking stuffed). We giggled about it at the time, then never spoke of it again – one outlandish grab at pleasure lost to the tide of experiments with intimacy that swell in adolescence. Young Boy Dancing Group has a reputation for similar types of play: human candelabra dominate their promotional imagery; grainy snapshots of surprisingly placed laser pointers circulate on perplexed Reddit pages. Yet, on the Japanese leg of the group’s ‘Dance Together Alone’ tour, such penetrating moments of spectacle were similarly engulfed by a larger project of experimentation. Here, dancers toyed with the tension between collective intimacy and personal rapture. 

The second of two performances in Tokyo was staged at BUoY, an ex-bowling alley and bathhouse turned art centre in Kita-Senju. The show sprawled throughout the large concrete basement for more than two hours. In fact, the performance was already underway when the audience funnelled into the room, the anticipated wax play having begun behind closed doors. Candles melted to the knees and backs of performers lit the way into the space. Dancers tugged and shoved each other into place with the churlish, non-verbal frustration of a child awoken from a nap. It preluded a performance in which performers were caricatures, feverishly narcissistic, enraptured by their own internal worlds to the point of near possession. They wrestled and made out as though unaware of each other’s presence, their gazes rarely met. Their audience witnessed the eerie propositions for contact and intimacy that unfolded in this state, as they indeed danced together while seemingly alone.

Dancers gondoleered up and down a tarp drenched in a river of lube, as beautiful as any swan boat.

Each phase of the performance was an experiment in new formations of the bodies in the room. Many of these emerged as vehicles of sorts, used to navigate the space and engage with the objects strewn throughout – early on, one dancer tucked their fingers into the assholes of two others and puppeted them around the room. Later, a heap of ass-up grovellers became a step-stool, falling to pieces time and again before finally being used to reach and plug in the austere strip light that slashed across the ceiling. The intense 100-or-so minutes culminated in a tangle of dancers being manoeuvred with a massive stick – gondoleered up and down a tarp drenched in a river of lube, as beautiful as any swan boat. However, the intrigue of these assemblages was not witnessing their uncanny final forms but seeing them learn their own structure – machines built of intimacy that engineered, repaired and discovered themselves in real time.

During their two months in Asia, the Young Boys found themselves on a plethora of stages – from art spaces, to dinner tables, to dance studios. However, of their two shows in Tokyo, an earlier, reduced performance at the Nakameguro nightclub HVEN felt most synergistic. In the dark, pulsating cavern of the club’s dancefloor, the group’s props hid in plain sight: condoms inflated with mystery substances and battered, abandoned loafers seem inconspicuously at home amongst the revelry. Their vocabulary of gestures, too, took on new resonance in the low, strobing light; less of a movement experiment, closer to the ecstatic, embodied dance that might seize you during a life-changing bender. 

The inescapable stream of content is a foundational building block in the lore that surrounds the Young Boys.

Moreover, at HVEN, the question of eroticism that dogs responses to the group’s work seemed to come into focus. Of course, the yearning sensuality of the erotic is an important guiding factor, always in the sweaty air around the performance, only sometimes allowed to condensate on the performer’s bodies. The work isn’t exactly sexy, managing to resist descending into burlesque for people with full carts on SSENSE. However, neither does it permit the bodies that make it to truly flirt with becoming repulsive or ugly – experiencing in their ecstasy any of the abjection implied by subversive bodily play. It never strays that far from fashion. This is partly in collusion with its relentlessly fashionable audiences, and the tension between them and the inevitably hot cast of performers that rotates from city to city. Like a final dancer, this audience eagerly pressed into the cracks left by the performance with cameras out, editorializing the bodies in front of them, before scurrying away from the mess. The inescapable stream of content is a foundational building block in the lore that surrounds the Young Boys.

Perhaps it’s through this parasocial relationship with the stylish mythos that lingers around the work that some of the more sinister ideas within the performance revealed themselves. At one point, dancers enlisted onlookers to help them heave a performer across the room by pinching and tugging at their skin. When dropped, they collapsed into writhing gesticulations of agony and anguish, reminiscent of butoh. Despite this unsettling display, participants scrambled for fistfuls of flesh three, four times in a row – like some kind of ketamine-addled Stanford prison experiment. 

Yet, in the face of the varied interactions it incites, the work remains neutral throughout – simply a space for feeling the way through a sequence of encounters. Never does it comment; never does it moralize the peaks of elation or the trenches of suffering that its performers journey through alone as they dance together. Indeed, this resistance to commentary in favour of feeling seemed to be a defining ethos – when handed the mic on the last night of the tour, Manu Anima, convenor and director of this troupe, closed the show simply with ‘Touring in Asia? It’s been nice… What more is there to say?’ 

^{Main image: Young Boy Dancing Group, performance documentation, BUoY, Tokyo, 2025. Courtesy: Young Boy Dancing Group}