self-suspension and finland

The last self-suspension workshop consumed all of Sunday and even before it began there was talk of another, so happiness is to say it will be happening on Saturday 11th February.

Also unexpectedly one of the places I’ve long wanted to visit has fallen into my lap, and I shall be wandering north- and eastwards in three weeks with Dasniya for a workshop in Helsinki.

Self-Suspension Workshop in February

Am Samstag den 11. Februar von 14-20 Uhr.

In diesem Kurs behalten alle die Seile in den eigenen Händen. Wir üben quasi Aerial-Multitasking. Dazu gehören Seil- und Atemtechniken mit physischen Intensitäten, Entspannungsmomenten und Kraft zu koordinieren… Knotentechnisch verwenden wir traditionelles, und unseren liebgewonnen Anarchostil*.

Kosten 40 Euro.
Anmeldung und Info: email hidden; JavaScript is required
dasniyasommner.de

On Saturday 11th, 14-20 h.

We will take apart the complex act of self- suspension. Coordinating rope technique, strength, breath, relaxation and physical intensities in the air.
Using traditional knots and our beloved anarchic style*.

Costs: 40 Euro.
More information and registration: email hidden; JavaScript is required
dasniyasommner.de

yoga + shibari regular berlin classes for february

Sunday, Thomas’ last day in Berlin, and post-breakfast a soup was prepared. By 1 o’clock, up-and-down stairs was occurring, on our way to the Alte Kantine for an afternoon and evening of Shibari and self-suspension. With only five rings (until we drag ourselves upwards to drill more), the dozen of us was a perfect number. Happy to see some faces returning from the end-of-year pause also, and two coming all the way from Sweden.

Dasniya started with some (gentle) bootcamp warmup, and then spent the first two or three hours teaching basic tying and harnesses for hips, legs, torso, then going on to full-suspensions and showing some more painful possibilities like the single-bound-leg inverted hanging. Dinner was all us around the table, which is why Alte Kantine is so perfect for these classes and workshops, with much talking about philosophical, social, feminist and gender issues in BDSM and shibari.

And so on to February, more yoga and shibari classes every Wednesday evening in the Alte Kantine, and a trip for Dasniya at the end of the month north and east to Finland to teach in Helsinki.

Jeden Mittwoch Yoga & Shibari im Wedding.
1., 8., 15.,22., 29.  Februar, 19-23 Uhr.
Ort: Uferhallen Kulturwerkstatt, Alte Kantine, Teatris, Uferstr. 8-11, 13357 Berlin,
U8 Pankstr/U9 Osloerstr.
Kosten 20/15 Euro
Workshop Text Deutsch

Every Wednesday there will be Yoga & Shibari in Berlin-Wedding.
February 1., 8., 15., 22., 29.
Location: Uferhallen Kulturwerkstatt, Alte Kantine, Teatris, Uferstr. 8-11, 13357 Berlin, U8Pankstr/ U9 Osloerstr.
Costs: 20/15 Euro
Workshop text english

新年快乐!— Hoping the trains run on time

It’s 春節! Time to eat Jiaozi and other yummy street food (mmm… luobogao!) and sit on a train for 24 hours.

Pankufer Weeping Willow

What the fuck is it with fucking men with chainsaws in Wedding the last year or so? Firstly they try and chop down a 100 year old huge and beautiful Plane tree. Thwarted! By a bunch of deadbeat artists and activists who chained themselves to the boughs.

I suspect this thwarting unleashed some kind of psychopathic need to fell anything arboreal within view of Uferhallen.

About a year ago, they returned and lopped two trees opposite us. ‘Not so old, in the way of the pipes’, said Berliner Wasserbetrieb. And for good measure, they repeated the act further down the road. Just to rub it in, once all the digging and filling of trenches was complete, they left two squares of sandy Berlin dirt to be placeholders for the local’s affliction with having their dogs shit anywhere horizontal.

Not even getting warm, in late-autumn, they (I suspect the same chainsaw-wielding philistines) returned, and began at one end of Uferstr and continued till the street ran out. Outside my window, what was once a charming youngish thing reaching above the 4th floor roof was reduced to an amputated caricature. Oh, I suppose it grows back all bushy in spring, but what the fuck? Do these guys get paid by the branch? And looking at the black chopped up mess out my window throughout a typical grey and dim Berlin winter doesn’t do much to alleviate seasonal slash-the-wrists syndrome.

Late last year, I could hear chainsaws and tree pulverisers at work across the road, and hoped, like the plague, they were receding into the distance. Not bloody likely.

This morning, in a direct line from window through aforementioned tree butchery and across the Panke canal, a beautiful weeping willow eight or so stories high was the latest victim of the serial killers. It’s possible it too will grow back all bushy in spring, but for fuck’s sake what was the point in this pruning?

It’s not as though it’s old or rotten. The way they’ve been hacking through the streets, I think these tree trimmers take pleasure in fucking over huge old trees like this. It’s some kind of jerk-offery to reduce something majestic that gives so many people and animals pleasure to a sad stump and a truck-full of wood chips in a single morning.

(and yes, blah blah, danger to public, pollarding, willows are hardy etc, fuck off.)

Reading: Seung-Joon Lee — Gourmets in the Land of Famine: The Culture and Politics of Rice Consumption in Modern Canton

The last of my first stack of books for 2012, and one that has been on my list for a long time, which finally became affordable, Seung-Joon Lee’s Gourmets in the Land of Famine: The Culture and Politics of Rice Consumption in Modern Canton. Once again a book thick with endnotes, and covering such a specific topic — rice and its role in southern China during the Nationalist and revolutionary era — that it likely won’t grace many bookshelves.

In a quite sporadic and unplanned fashion, I’m managing to read my way into Canton and the south of China, which I hope eventually will cause me to arrive at a book or books that does justice to the history and culture of Canton and Lingnan. Starting with rice seemed like a good idea.

Reading: Shi Naian — The Water Margin: The Outlaws of the Marsh, Trans: J. H. Jackson

This is one of the classics of Chinese literature, and me being the philistine could only gawp over how thick it was when I picked it up yesterday — and this is the translation with only 70 of a possible 120 chapters. I keep thinking a useful comparison would be Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was written around the same time, as while Chaucer’s work has several possible orders it can be read in and its completeness is uncertain, The Water Margin has had a number of additions, annotations, commentaries, re-assemblings in that distinctive Chinese approach to writing.

So I, without knowing all this until I read the introduction, have found myself landed with Jin Shengtan’s 1641 version, with his commentary and missing the final 30-50 chapters (depending on which previous version one might refer to), by way of J. H. Jackson in the ’30s, who prudishly omitted some of the more creative language, which was then re-edited by Edwin Lowe. This translation though isn’t as well-regarded as the Sidney Shapiro one (something I wish I’d bothered to find out before carting it home).

Reading: Paul A. Van Dyke — The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845

Continuing my return to reading China, as with my focus on women in the history of China, so too is there a strand which pays attention to the south, Lingnan, Guangdong, Canton.

So much of what is written on China is in fact only a small part thereof — Beijing as China, Shanghai as China, the eastern core. Other parts of the country are so distant as to be other countries, and despite the ongoing Han homogenisation programme, these other parts still retain their individual histories.

Paul A. Van Dyke’s The Canton Trade seemed like a good place to continue, after reading Julia Lovell’s The Opium War a few months ago, and now, more than half way through reading, I can say he hasn’t skimped on thoroughness.

Christian & his Verdienstkreuz

One of the first freelance jobs I got in Berlin was salvaging a website for Christian Ender. Over the past three years, I’ve looked after imdialog, taken care of two other sites for Christian, and he has become one of my good friends here. A couple of weeks ago he called me and explained he was being awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz for his work that these websites document over the past years.

Last Friday, he was awarded the medal by the Staatssekretär, and following that, a long lunch and many drinks with a large group of friends and family.

I am very happy for Christian to have all his work recognised — for Werner Bab and “Zeitabschnitte”, for Gunter Kroemer and “Bedrohtevölker” — and for him to receive the recognition he is due.

And at the end of the month, he departs for South America with a camera.

SOIT/Hans Van den Broeck – Messiah Run

One of the best performances I saw last year, and that was only in development while in residence in Uferstudios was Hans Van den Broeck’s Messiah Run. It premieres in a couple of weeks, and it’s unlikely I’ll be there to see it, but …

It premieres on 26th January at Vooruit in Ghent.

Daniel Jaber – Reassessment

Daniel is performing!

Presented as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s inSPACE:development Program, Reassessment examines concepts surrounding Self-Worth, perception and the consequences of being seen as “unworthy”.

WHERE: Rehearsal room 2 – Adelaide Festival Centre (meet 15 minutes prior at the foyer of the Dunstan Playhouse)
WHEN: January 26 at 4pm and 27 at 7pm
COST: Pay what you can donation

RSVP: email hidden; JavaScript is required

ARTISTS:
choreography and performance: DANIEL JABER
soundtrack: DJ TR!P
texts: GABRIELLE NANKIVELL
animation: MATTHIAS WALDT
lighting design and production: DANIEL BARBER

** CONTAINS NUDITY AND COARSE LANGUAGE

Hope to see you there!

Daniel Jaber

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