More information is on her website, and also here.

Yoga & Bondage, Shibari Technique July 2011, Charleroi/ Danses

1) Yoga und Bondage:

July 11 – 15, 2011, Monday to Friday 12 – 18 pm
Max 20 people
Costs: 120 Euro

2) Shibari Technique Advanced

July 16th & 17th, Sat&Sun 12 – 18 pm
Max 12 people
Costs 100 Euro

Costs for both workshops 180 euro.

Contact Dasniya at email hidden; JavaScript is required

More infos at: www.dasniyasommer.de

Download the Yoga & Bondage workshop description: Yoga + Shibari Text.

In the generator hall an installation artist was working on his project for an upcoming exhibition. It is a TARDIS. The hall in itself is vast and high-ceilinged, and the late-evening light sent a warmth and glow through what in winter is as oppositely cold and grim. In this sat a square wooden cube, about the size of a large, high-ceilinged room.

On the far side was something that played such delightful havoc with my perception; a slit perhaps half a meter wide exposing the innards. Whiteness and light so uniformly even and depthless as to confuse me to think I was staring into something infinite. An optical illusion yes, but on a grand scale and one that subtle enough to not be aware of.

The paint was drying and I found, once I entered, that by covering my eyes so as to desensitise them to light, the effect was magnified. As was it by blinking exaggeratedly, or moving around, holding a hand up. I became a little silly in there, once even thumping into a wall I had no idea was so near. Dr Who would love it, I think – though he has his own ‘bigger on the inside’ box.

The photos can’t convey the perceptual weirdness of it, a physical dislocation almost like being drugged, still … photos …

Dasniya and I went to see Nicolas Bringuier play Schubert and Liszt (as well as a Mazurka) on Friday night. The second half, 6 Etudes d’execution transcendentes was something special, almost meditative in its intensity.

Also I thought, while taking some photos, about the place where I spend so much of my time. Uferhalen, the various artists who make something of a home here, the tree-filled corners, the ateliers, all of this special place. I think perhaps if circumstances allow to document the mundane side of here.

Through an upheaval of new inner-city apartments (as if Berlin can ever be anything but inner-city, yet still …) before turing a bend and arriving at the river. Which will be on one side until we cross and leave it at the far end of Museuminsel.

It’s always peaceful this way, no cars and few people. Arriving at Unter den Linden and passing through the heart of Berlin, at night on a bicycle, the Dom, Fernseherturm, the pit of the Palast, all the museums … I often think what a joy to live here.

Leaving the Spree, over Oranienburgerstr and winding through the small streets near Sophienstr, up into the industrial and public housing parts of Wedding, alongside Volkspark Humboldthain and home.

More night construction along the banks of the Spree beside Neues Museum…

We are not alone, of course. Each day something happens here; a concert, a performance, people sitting in the sun, a Gaggia espresso machine … wandering people look through the windows or open the door, to see us in ropes, or with tea.

Yoga to start as always. Then ropes. Dasniya makes some attention for Arisue Go’s methods of the basic chest harness. Visually, it’s subtly different from Osada Steve’s, but practically in how it’s tied and in the methodological understanding behind the tying, it’s quite a different thing altogether.

We make small floor suspensions. This is in fact the perfect way to learn how to suspend, as there is no panic or need for haste when someone’s weight is largely remaining on the floor. It also gives room for improvising with other ropes, as well as being in itself a very enjoyable way of tying.

I’ve been thinking about … perhaps to call it contingent shibari. What happens when the rope turns up in your hands in a spaghetti bird’s nest mess? One could simply pause, reassert some order on the rope, and continue with the previous path. I wondered what would happen if I skipped the first two parts, and continued as though nothing was amiss.

It is a visual aesthetic similar perhaps to when one finds rope of miscellaneous diameters, lengths, colour and material washed up on a beach, perhaps with some netting or other assorted detritus; a knotwork evolved from accumulation. It turns out also that shibari ropework, dependent as it is on friction and an absence of knots, lends itself well to this.

Hartmut turns up shortly before 4pm, with small kettle and the implements of Japanese tea ceremony. We sit in the sun of the windows as he whisks the green powder into froth.

We talk about what a perfect place this is, with the light in the afternoon, the derelict buildings turned to something that sits so lightly upon their skin, it will hardly notice when we all depart for the last time. For now, spring, summer, some of autumn, this will be where we make some performances, workshops, classes … will be found in deep discussion near the black sofas of the bar …

Some photos.

dasniya sweeping

rings, suspensions, hammock

window, tree

chairs, trolley bearing food

shibari + tea

hartmut matcha

floor suspension

this would be me

We have been in nameless today preparing one of the spaces for a weekend Yoga+Bondage workshop and future adventures. Me with scrapers and a breathing filter, Dasniya with power tools; me trying to rid the wooden floor of the least resistant of the worst mess (resin, latex, paint mess, pigeon shit), Dasniya cutting holes, kicking down walls (really!), drilling at stuff and setting up some suspension points.

Yesterday we looked at another room, this one with large hooks bolted to the iron ceiling beams. The light there is different, and it feels tranquil. Perhaps in there to lay some kind of foam padding and dance flooring, to make use of these hooks.

The room is decked in years of pigeon droppings though, and cleaning would be a big job (my preferred method would be to waterblast the entire space). Also there, the cartwheeling pigeon, caught forever mid-tumble, bejewelled in the carapaces of long-hatched maggots.

I thought also of Fujohkan, and discover Manabu Yamanaka is exhibiting at Trollwerk Potsdam. Tomorrow more cleaning, preparing.

Morning Yoga – Wedding, Berlin

morning yoga at nameless

We begin with finding some calmness, paying attention to our bodies and preparing for the work ahead. Continuing, we move through a simple series, repeating and adding to this, at first gentle and slow, and as we warm up moving into stronger, more intense cycles of movement. The flow of movement is bound to the breath, which brings our concentration into ourselves.

From here, we go into a series of standing postures and balances, finding these through spiraling, counter-movement, and rotation, and attention to fine detail. After this into deeper floor postures, opening our bodies up, before finishing with breathing and internal focus.

We attend to coordination, stillness, calmness in movement and exertion; understanding balance and weight and how it shifts; concentrating on breath and breathing.

Frances d’Ath

Frances began yoga at the same time as dance, and has returned to practicing and teaching many times in the past fifteen years.

Her class combines the flow and movement of Astanga with the attentiveness and longer poses of Iyengar, integrating elements and ideas from kinesiology, Alexander Technique, Pilates as well as classical and contemporary dance.

She has previously taught yoga to dancers of ADT Australian Dance Theatre, and Leigh Warren Dancers in Adelaide, Australia; Guangdong Modern Dance Company in Guangzhou, China; as well as to people of all ages and experience in these cities and in Zürich, Brussels and Berlin.

Class Details:

No linger taking place

Other Info: byo yoga mat (some will also be available)
Level: Beginners / Intermediate
Language: English & German
Cost: 5,-€

Contact Frances:
email: email hidden; JavaScript is required
mobile: +49 1522 63 53 740

For some reason, I’d saved a link to his site, and while cleaning my folders, and seeing what all the links were, ended up there. A list of works. One caught my attention: Knotunknot.

“Knoten sind gut, sie halten Dinge fest, damit sie nicht wegschwimmen. Knoten sind schlecht, denn sie fixieren Gedanken, die weiterlaufen sollten, oder sie bedeuten Krebs.”

Further looking … Suspense. An work from a couple of years ago. Forsythe bound and suspended in film.

I was talking with Gala last night about the messy tying Dasniya and I have been doing lately, so thought also to make some small notes about what is interesting for me at the moment in this. A question that occurs immediately is, where is shibari in all this? I think about formal tying figures, the social and gender aspects of traditional shibari and BDSM, the tropes they engage, how does my interest tangle with that?

No clear answer, these things are still there (I tried to remember Hojo Hishinawa a couple of nights ago), but not ascendent. Well perhaps formal figures are, as I’m certainly thinking about everything else in relation to this. In its simplest manifestation, this would be a question of: what constitutes a formal figure (any or one) that could be said to be understood as an expression (part-expression?) of the set of all possible figures?

From topology, the first obvious stop is knot theory, which goes to physical knot theory, being more practical in the real world – though ideas about knot description, (also invariants, and groups), equivalence and so on are at some point I think necessary to apply. Also adding knots together (or subtracting), particularly when knot tabulation is incorporated. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to messy tying, which I’ll come to later.

Braid theory turned out to be especially applicable in messy tying. Though I have nowhere near an even simplistic idea of how to formalise these theories in not just an analysis of what we do, but in some kind of system to determine what comes next.

On a somewhat unrelated side, there is a couple of words Lewis said recently about wabi-sabi. I can’t remember when the ideas of messy tying began, but by Parsifal, with the tying of Tamara, and around the same time with what I was thinking of for abjection, there was a definite point of clarification.

Messy tying seems a unsatisfactory name, but it suffices. Some of this was about needing a line of flight from the hegemony of traditional shibari; some of it was practical – tie and untie quickly, what’s the minimum necessary to do with a rope and be able to hang from it?, what can be found to be pleasing in playing with rope so? Starting to read about wabi-sabi, I also find aspects of Chuangzi’s Taoism.

Then also the practicality of rope as an object of use, its history and philosophy (on which I don’t think much has been written; history yes, maybe some anthropological studies on rope use …). Around a workshop recently, where I wrote on this briefly, I read someone interviewed who’d been in Guantanamo, who said, “… but every time I see a rope I remember …“

Physiology of pain and suspension also. Something about the the inner life of a rope. Yes, also in the play of rope the erotic, sex, relationships between people; the visual too, which is necessary in regarding this, not just thinking about it.

Merely some thoughts, nothing especially coherent, my interests at the moment in rope. Some images to break the monotony.

Nearby Buffalo & A Body

20:00, Saturday, May 21
Volksroom
Chausée de Mons 33B
Anderlecht
Brussels
(Inside courtyard, right)