Tag Archives: BDSM

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Archeypical Encounters in Shibari

A weekend of workshops – two days of only ropes from lunch until deep into the night. After the Saturday self-suspension workshop, Sunday was for a completely different group, with a correspondingly different focus. A group of seven from a Berlin Tantric massage organisation wanted to see what of Shibari would come together with what they did. More knots and learning, some figures I’d forgotten, vats of chai tea, suspensions, Dasniya and I tying Lewis, another great pot of soup and more post-rope eating around the long table … The theme for the next monthly workshop might be Shibari and Food.

In the meantime, Dasniya hauls over to Helsinki in a week and an half, for a workshop at Todellisuuden Tutkimuskeskus. For those who are interested in doing her workshop, all the information is below.

Archeypical Encounters in Shibari
A performative rope research in Helsinki

When: February 23th to 27th, 2012
Schedule:
Thu 17-21h
Fri 17-21h
Sat 12-18h
Sun 12-18 + Showing
Mon contemplation + future planning

Where: Todellisuuden Tutkimuskeskus (Reality Research Center) / Suvilahti / Puhdistamo 6, II krs / Helsinki, Finland

Costs: 100 €, max 12 participants
Contact: Julius: email hidden; JavaScript is required / 050-537 4244
Dasniya: email hidden; JavaScript is required
More information: Todellisuuden Tutkimuskeskus , Dasniya Sommer

Utopia
What goods are at stake in a Second Life age of global mega bit exchange? Among billions of personal and more anonymous data, identities get suspended. If things were simply upside down, or inside out it would be an easy trot. But affairs seem more intricate. Seizing chaos literally. Rooting bodies airwards, floating into the world wide void.

Incompatible archetypes form patchwork communities and trench warfares. On the scout for oneness, traveling meditative galaxies, individuals become partially ascetic. Is the social task to transform and reduce archetypical existence to zen-zero?

The Method: Atheist Yoga & Un-Shibari:

Traditional Shibari settings operate with binary constellations like active-passive, men- women, dominant-submissive. One person taking control over a second person, by restricting and decorating them with ropes. Or: The Good and the Evil, The Beauty and the Beast.

What questions are needed, in order to move beyond these (gender insensitive) concepts?

-what archetypical behaviour do we find, and identify with, within the normative Shibari practice? why disidentifying with these figures? why are they enjoyable/can be problematic?
-towards what dynamic do specific type-constellation lead?
-how can rope technique be tailored, so that it becomes compatible with performative role models?
-what archetypical sensual/sexual patterns do practitioners decisively or unconsciously experience, copy, manifest or challenge in relation to their (sub-) cultural context?
-what concepts for semi-intimate relations allow for these kind of experiments in real life? (between romanticism, polyamory and asexuality)
-which other socially informed practices, like reading, dancing, massaging, tea ceremony, food can be combined?

Generating performative material:

-investing into stupidity, non-rational primitive actions -combining these with ropes
-self-suspension as subversive strategy
-adding archetypical performance to the rope work
-learning the traditional technique and finding new approaches -rope improvisation
-deviating dramaturgies within a rope situation: self->partner->self suspension

More meta-material to generate tasks/for Mondays reflection:

-avoiding second nature-shibari patterns or their (semi-)conscious reproduction -unjudging, indulging and exploiting them
-transforming the archetype
-talking about (care-) ethics
-being critical on Shibari/BDSM practices?
-finding formats for non-/participatory performances

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after the self-suspension workshop

Hours of suspension, sun and blue sky and freezing outside, chai tea by the tureen, leek, potato, grünkern soup (with special additions from Régis) … ropes and talking and hanging ourselves up, lowering ourselves off, warming up fingers and bones and lungs, eight or nine or so hours of all this from when the sun was around its zenith until far into darkness.

Many photos also, though the combination of dimness in Alte-Kantine and not such a large sensor in my camera made for extended runs of blurriness. Much happiness nonetheless to have beautiful Lewis come all the way from England for the weekend, as well as others who are not always in Berlin.

Tomorrow, with a different group, we make something of the same. Well, to say something with ropes. Perhaps not so much of suspension, and more of floor and other things.

The photos, then …

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 1 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 1

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 2 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 2

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 3 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 3

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 4 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 4

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 5 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 5

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 6 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 6

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 7 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 7

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 8 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 8

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 9 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 9

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 10 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 10

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 11 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 11

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 12 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 12

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 13 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 13

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 14 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 14

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 15 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 15

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 16 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 16

Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 17 Self-Suspension Shibari Workshop – 17

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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

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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

dasniya self-suspended and reading dasniya self-suspended and reading
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Yoga + Shibari in Berlin, January

Yoga and Shibari begins again this week in Teatris from this Wednesday evening. Also becoming a monthly regular is the weekend workshop, this month doing self-suspension. Much fun in ropes! Details are below, and you can also email Dasniya for further information.

Weekly Yoga & Shibari

Jeden Mittwoch Yoga & Shibari im Wedding. 4., 11., 18., 25. Januar, 19-23 Uhr.

Ort: Uferhallen Kulturwerkstatt, Teatris, Alte Kantine, Uferstr. 8-11, 13357 Berlin,
U8 Pankstr/U9 Osloerstr.

Kosten 20/15 Euro

Every Wednesday there will be Yoga & Shibari in Berlin-Wedding. January 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th.

Location: Uferhallen Kulturwerkstatt, Teatris, Alte Kantine, Uferstr. 8-11, 13357 Berlin,
U8Pankstr/ U9 Osloerstr. 

Costs: 20/15 Euro

Workshop text english

Self-Suspension Workshop

Am Sonntag den 22. Januar 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

Self-Suspension Workshop in January, on Sunday 22nd, 2pm-8pm.
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

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the n+2 dimensional space for n>1 — day 9

The last proper day of rehearsal, where we have the entire time to ourselves. Tomorrow we find our way through a couple of tech runs, make something of light and sound, and have an approximation of a dress rehearsal. Friday is dealing with the detritus of that and fixing whatever remains for the evening showing.

I spent some time on my own, working my way through Gala’s notes, trying to change things into something I can feel comfortable with, analysing each scene to define the changing relationship to the ropes, getting stuck once more on the only scene without ropes. It wasn’t until around 2 o’clock, schedules for the coming days written up, all the impedimenta between us and Friday evening accounted for, that we began rehearsing.

Yesterday in the last time before our first run-through, we played through a scene of tying each other together, which ends on the floor and somehow became tormenting each other, savaging nipples, lips, nostrils with pinching toes. We worked through this again, from my self-bondage (for some reason I think of Ophelia and Gertrude, or more precisely of what I imagine Daniel Schlusser’s recent performance looked like), to paired humiliation (which is really not the right work, it’s more of causing discomfort with rope), and through this scene of shame.

I’d found a video of Osada Steve tying Madame Butterfly, and this roughness, along with some videos we’ve watched a while ago of Japanese Shibari masters grunting and muttering as they tie fell into this scene today. It’s a little rough, also painful, and has sometimes for me a disturbing air about it.

Dasniya and I swapped roles in the final scene in darkness. Now she ties part of the room into an installation while I am outside untying the remaining ropes. She thought this scene should go for around half an hour or more, depending on the first half.

I find myself spending much time disentangling nests of ropes that are the leftovers from each scene and run-through, coiling, laying them in order … We began a run-through around 6 o’clock, this time taking 45 minutes. I’m not sure if we were much slower, or if all the scenes together now last that long, or if yesterday we were just fast with nerves. It’s a lot for only a few days rehearsing.

Questions of music remain. We’re using André Jolivet at the beginning, and some Ligeti also – both wind chamber music compositions. Throbbing Gristle also make an appearance. This is, along with lights, something for tomorrow to sort out. I find it difficult being on the inside to hear the music; it’s not like we are counting to it, so it rapidly leaves my attention. Everything is reducing to technical questions, transitions, where to go when so it works with what comes later, all the usual arrangements of objects in space over time. What it looks like by this time tomorrow is probably mostly what it will be for Friday.

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the n+2 dimensional space for n>1 — day 5 & 6

Too fast go the days from Friday to Saturday and now the unexpected one day off. I go to the market in St Gillis Vorplein and buy bread, cheese, fig jam, fruit and vegetables for the week. A day of not thinking about what we’re doing, to let it settle and rest a little.

Dasniya and I have spent much of the last two days working on the repetitive, exhausting leg rope ideas. These ideas are a little like the tide, it comes in, pauses, retreats; sometimes they seem like they’re really making sense, other times wondering if they will also be assigned to the list of ideas that went nowhere.

Last night, after we’d finished and while angling towards bed, Dasniya played the video of us working through this section, into and out of the humiliation stuff, along with some music Michael in Guangzhou had sent — André Jolivet’s Pastorales de Noël for Flute, Harp, and Bassoon.

Trying to find the singular discussion in an idea, also without distilling so much it becomes reduced and tends to wards nothing, finding how it fits together with itself and with other ideas (here I mean the above-mentioned presenting the representations of humiliation), and finding where the air leaves the room in this, where the idea is empty or has an overwhelming lack.

This music, on its own I would not have expected to be something I’d use, but seeing the video with this overlaid, somehow it worked. Perhaps it won’t work when we try it again … nonetheless … It’s not a case of the contradictory and opposing creating a complimentary milieu.

The first week is finished. We have some ideas, hopefully they will evolve in the coming week, as well as be met by some other things we haven’t worked on. Having a pause, even for a day, is a welcome occurrence. We’d planned to rehearse every day, but Bains is closed on Sunday, and towards the end of last night I was feeling decidedly unable to coerce myself to be inspired or creative.

the n+2 dimensional space for n greater than 1 – 7 plant arm bondage

the n+2 dimensional space for n greater than 1 – 8 unshibari and unsuspension

Whale Skeleton whale skeleton

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the n+2 dimensional space for n>1 — day 4

It helps to remember that what is seen in a small studio with green dance floor, big windows, and other distractions, with two people in rehearsal clothes, would look very different and have a commensurately different weight were it to be seen on a stage of sufficient volume to make visible the emptiness around us, and us being clad in something appropriate. Or, it helps me, anyway.

We have some stuff now. End of day four. We worked on the unshibari messy tableau, kind of a still life, or corpse-tying for some time; lso on the Japanese Kyudo/tea ceremony walking, forward and back – better in socks; and on the leg battery/repetitions. A short time on my self-bondage. There is enough now to say we’ve made a start, and to say there’s a lot missing. It’s a delicate thing, only two weeks and to wish to have something concrete by the end, though of course not finished, and yet what is lost by rushing through everything in a matter of days when months would be more suited?

What is this work then? We talked about post-modern feminism. I wasn’t sure of what a definition of this would be, though my guesses were more-or-less in accord with what I later read; I simply never described it that way. It feels slightly odd, though also it makes sense. (I remember a lecturer hawking along about Habermas and the others, Lyotard and Modernism, Late-Modernism, Post-Modern versus Postmodernism …)

We are obviously saying something about something here. If it were a performance I was making on my own, I’d likely have a text I’d be working from, whatever philosopher I was currently in bed with. Once I made only dance; I choreographed. Then came theatre until it was more-or-less performance art that I made. Lately I can only seem to do the former if I have the latter in mind. Maybe to read some theatre or a play?

dasniya un-suspended dasniya un-suspended
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the n+2 dimensional space for n>1 — day 3

Experiencing a little fatigue today – I haven’t done yoga for five days in a row since such a long time. We started a bit late also, detouring to watch a Kraftwerk and history of Krautrock documentary in ten minute chunks before wandering over to Bains.

We had a long discussion about what we are doing before the lunch-ish break – no dinner break it was already 17h – which resulted in a final couple of tasks where things started to coagulate.

On Saturday we talked with Ivo for a while about dramaturgy, or the perceived necessity of having an external dramaturge. I had been trying various things from Dasniya, and finished with an un-shibari experiment that had something worth repeating, yet was also empty. I think the issue is neither one of dramaturgy, as we are both well-versed in the milieu within which shibari, bdsm, and all the other facets of rope resides, nor is it one of direction – as in stage direction. What isn’t clear is what this work is about.

We have a lot of ideas, topics of research, small things that have become entire processes for working with rope; we’ve discussed from feminism and identity theory to physics and knot theory along the way, and obviously these things somehow fit into the work, along with the specific Japanese aesthetics of traditional shibari and so on, which we also play with. The question of what the work is about is perhaps better understood if this was a theatre work, if there was some text to work from and characters who must arrive in the room. Coming from working with Daniel Schlusser on Ophelia Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, also with shibari, possibly my thoughts are a little this way.

It’s also for me the need to have something to hang on to, that helps in pushing a work along; that I can use as a reference point to criticise and justify my decisions. Obviously working in a collaboration changes this and might even make it the not-possible way to continue. So, we talk, maybe for me to be able to make sense through words what is allowable so I can do things with conviction.

There are some almost formal things – flicking to uncoil ropes, the sliding walk of the tea ceremony or kyudo archery … – that will probably recur throughout, and cause a rupture in the mess of ropes. Other things – at least in what might be construed in my head as the section we’re working on at the moment – need a day or two refinement before I suspect they can be deemed coherent enough to make a remark on.

It pulls between an abstract, close to formal dance or movement and another that is perhaps a metonymy or representation, and yet another, lurking beneath, that is … neither of these. Maybe corporeal, sensorial, coming from rendering a character as much as an own internal emotion …

It seems likely we’ll be working all weekend. After all, it’s only two weeks, so twelve days instead of ten counts for something.

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the n+2 dimensional space for n>1

Once more going west, we take the ungodly hour flight from Schönefeld to Brussels. Dasniya and I are having a two-week residency at Bains Connective to work on pretty much everything we’ve ever talked about to do with Shibari and ropes. It’s heading towards something I’ve been slowly working on for some time, which is a return to Guangzhou.

Michael Garza –the principal Bassoon in the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and one of the first people I met when I landed in that city close to ten years ago – and I have been talking about doing something there with a chamber music wind quartet. This led also to thoughts of taking ourselves south-west to Bangkok. So, Dasniya and I will spend two weeks working on some ideas, and making some kind of performance for the last Friday.

We also hope to wander up to Amsterdam to see some of Cinedans next weekend (no Lewis, sadly), and on the final weekend we have a Shibari Bondage workshop in Bains.

In the meantime, here is some text for an idea of what we may be doing.

The anarchy of knots or the n+2 dimensional space for n >1 or the rope was a plant

By Frances d’ Ath and Dasniya Sommer

The two week residency at Bains Connective in Brussels is the first phase to work on raw material based on the following ideas.

The cultural history of ropes goes back to the Mesolithic. It is a tool for binding, tying, restraining, lifting, fixing or lashing. It can lift cargo onto a ship, or a person off the ground. We tie our shoes every day, and bind damaged limbs or bodies with cloth bandages. At whatever level of consideration, our relations towards, and knowledge about this material, exist in thoughts in countless quotidian moments.

In topology knots are mathematicised. There is knot theory and tabulation itself, which leads to braid theory and physical knot theory, relating more practically to the real world. Back in abstract calculations there are ‘unknots’. A string with its ends joined together, creates an un-undoable loop. Or a wild knot, which is not tame, because of its so-called ‘pathological’ behaviour.

Rope is for justice. In tug-of-war games a collective has to act in concert. If they do well, an inch may decide their triumph. In Japan during times of war, prisoners were suspended and tortured with horrifying rope techniques. The status of the prisoner could be signified with the colour of the rope, and the degree of artistic ornament. Medieval rope was used for similar injustices. Ariadne’s thread, in contrast helped Theseus to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

Neuroanthropological thoughts invite us to perceive the rope as a tool, like a hammer is, or a pair of chopsticks, or a musical instrument. There is a dexterity added to the ability of the hand by it which it is not simply an addition. That is to say, ‘I’ am not merely ‘using’ a tool, but the ‘I’ that gains familiarity with an object, ceases to delineate between ‘me’ and ‘that’. These objects become part of us and in turn we extend ourselves into them.

In this way, the rope is my fingers, or perhaps to say the rope is my tactile organ, somewhat prehensile also. I do not merely feel through the rope, acting as an intermediary, with sensation being communicated along it towards or from me; I feel through the rope as its qualities are to touch what my skin is also.

It is almost as if we do something close to forbidden by taking this object of use and turning it to (sensual) play. Shibari, Japanese rope bondage does that. Because of its origin as a strand in martial arts technique, it needs to decisively dissociate from real methods for punishment. Instead it goes with consenting intensities of BDSM play or contemporary performance.

Between two people the rope allows for a degree of deferral, both for and against communication. Depending on the actions and intentions at either end however, the deferral in itself is somewhat neutral. It causes a possibility of communication that, by its tangible intermediary status, is not what or how one would commonly interact with another. It instigates a pause in thinking, a space for interpretation.

We work into an improvised dismantling of traditional tying rules and the logic behind these. While tying the body and the room, we bring in theories of Taoism, ‘Wabi-Sabi’, ‘Ma’, which allow us to be slightly less perfect, and impermanent. A rather european analysis of bodies, gender identities and role assignments in Shibari culture accompanies our experiment.

Musically, we are collaborating with Michael Garza, principal bassoonist of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. This is for a performance/installation with his wind chamber music group in Guangzhou and Bangkok in 2012.

Tea Ceremony Shibari tea ceremony shibari