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.

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

This is the coffee of Giacomo, who has been in Brussels the last week and an half while Gala finishes some weeks of rehearsals in a single performance at Ivo’s Volksroom, along with Anuschka von Oppen, who was showing Nearby Buffalo in Brussels after a short season in Berlin.

Gala and Giacomo haven’t been sleeping so much the last week; long nights working on the set, lighting, rehearsing, rewiring, trying ideas and pre-show amendments (a whole scene vanishes, and the sound from a previous one also). Coffee is in abundance, as is beer and cigarettes. A calmness across the days also.

I found myself in the place I am happiest: a theatre, making performance. I do mundane things such as taping things, hanging things, adjusting things. This is not a review, though perhaps can be taken as one.

Throughout is a stillness, waiting attentiveness. For a dancer who has found home in companies where movement is the heart, she makes nothing that could be said to be dancing. Perhaps the floor on which she rehearsed is responsible, but equally, there is no inconsistency between one being a dancer who dances and the same one making performance far removed from this. At the end (less than thirty minutes), had she continued the room would have gone with her.

Rope bondage and suspension. Gala hangs sideways from her waist and abdomen. Giacomo dresses her in a sheet of emergency orange latex. She is in a box inside a room, walls of opaque or transparent plastic, floor reflective Aluminium. Lights stutter and tremble.

Giacomo illuminates the performance with perhaps twelve or so sources, some recognisable as theatre lights, others fluorescent tubes, others common household lamps. At times, a fan pushes the plastic sheeting, undulating and filling the space with sound.

She is naked until the end. This also is a change; before she was naked the whole way through. In the end she is talking, in jeans and a t-shirt. A story, autobiography? A poem. She is swimming, no water, no, definitely water, water goes in, goes out, polluting a little. In ten years, twenty years, only a photograph left. I am paraphrasing here.

Earlier, she is running. On the spot. Endlessly. Throwing dirt or dust or ashes, which haze in the aura of light. Giacomo … his lighting is as music, classical music perhaps. Deeply artistic and romantic, and also precisely technical. Without being obvious, it fills the room, gives not simply form and colour, but emotion, movement, sense, time. He says we should come to the Gorini home, to eat rabbit and drink coffee.

I spend Friday with them watching this, light and performance, trying to find some settings on my camera that will not balk at the conditions. Low light is one concern, and ultimately the difficulty I can’t surmount. The plastic sheeting between Gala and I, the other; the camera resolutely focussing on any light reflecting off the sheet, making her even more unfocussed.

This morning, more coffee. Then a failed trip to the markets for crëpes, arriving too late. Anyway, it was beautiful, poignant. Some photos.

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)

For all these workshops and classes, email Dasniya below.

i) Regelmäßiger ‘Yoga und Bondage’ Kurs in Kreuzberg:

Jeden Mittwoch von 20 bis 23 Uhr.
Institut Unzeit
2. Hinterhof, Aufgang B, 4 OG
Erkelenzdamm 11-13
10999 Berlin
U8 Kottbussertor
Kosten 15 Euro

ii) Wochenend Workshop Berlin am 28.,29. Mai @ nameless

‘Yoga und Bondage’, Samstag -Sonntag 12 – 18 Uhr
Max 20 TeilnehmerInnen
Kosten 120 Euro/ 100 Euro Studierende/ Geringverdiener

Kurse in Brüssel: Yoga & Bondage, Shibari Technique July 2011 @ Charleroi/ Danses:

iii) Yoga und Bondage:

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

iv) Shibari Technique Advanced

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

Costs for both workshops (iii&iv) 180 euro.

Mehr Infos: www.dasniyasommer.de
Contact Dasniya at email hidden; JavaScript is required

Yesterday was the opening of nameless, not far from Uferhallen, in an old factory. In darkness later, with lights burning behind glass once more, it felt as if life was returning. The past weeks, nameless, along with many others have been taking advantage of this emptiness … an entire Fabrik, empty! One building – the smallest – with three floors and an attic, the other with four spread along two sides of the yard, then more single-storied buildings including the beautiful, wooden-roofed Embassy Room.

For summer, or at least until September, this will be a place for art, and with their histories in opera, it might be the only artists’ Fabrik of its kind in Berlin where performance is close to the heart.

So we made noise with the gantry – not as fast as the one in Uferhallen, but higher and noisier – and over some days made a thing. We performed this last night, sliding in after the fourth number from Berlin Art Orchestra, who accompanied us for the binding and suspending.

A video might appear soon, until then, a photo.

Also, Dasniya and I, separately and together, and with others will be having workshops, classes and works there. More on this soon, except to say for now, I’ll be teaching yoga in the mornings from later this month, and Dasniya has a Yoga+Bondage workshop on the 28th and 29th.

There are Some photos from last year’s workshop at La Raffinerie, and video / photos / text is on Dasniya’s website. If you know people in the area who are interested please let them know.

More details below:

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.

(A description of the Shibari Technique Advanced workshop will be here in the next days.)

Yoga & Nawa Shibari

The workshop combines principles of Yoga with the tying technique Nawa Shibari. This Japanese term is usually translated as winding, knotting or binding a rope. It refers to the classical Japanese practice to tie up a person and was originally developed by Samurais in the 16th century. Today it is a technique to play physically, to perform or to experiment with the body and restriction. The styles in Shibari are noticeably versatile, yet one can say that there are basic figures to use ropes effectively.

A crucial aspect of this is the combination of functionality with aesthetic rules. There are particular shapes and angles to tie rope, which create a certain look and a sense of solid limitation at the same time. This is comparable to a moment of embracement, which supports the body and enables the tied person to relax into the ropes. In this sense the material can be understood as an extension of arms. A firm hug.

Then there is the Kinbaku side in Shibari which is more concerned with the biochemical or psychological effects. In Japanese tradition they speak of capturing a persons heart, to connect to the partners spirit or to touch them soulfully. This experience of fragile intensity can happen in both directions. The tying person and the person being tied can direct the scene from their individual angle. The notion of power shifts within the constellations and is often not as straightforward as it appears from the outside.

To guide the mind in an enjoyable way and to bring it back on the ground is a matter of sensitive touch with ropes and care. To shape the figure from inside is an equally minimal and a seductive task. Beside the serious and almost orthodox way of Shibari technique there is an utterly playful and animal like experience in ‘play’.

By starting the 6 hours with a 90 minutes Yoga session, the perception of the body gets refined before we engage into partner work. The Asanas (Yoga postures) focus on the efficient use of muscles or on alignment of the torso, head and limbs. Rotation of the spine or balance exercises can be tried in variously challenging postures. The levels in both practices can be mixed, so that everybody works within their personal and anatomical realm.

Dasniya Sommer Biography

Since the age of five, Dasniya Sommer was taught in Yoga and Abhidhamma Buddhist Philosophy by her family. She received her dance education at the Ballet Academy Hans Vogl in Berlin, at Dance Space Centre in New York, and performed with the Staatsballett Berlin. Among her dance and Yoga teachers were Susan Klein, Risa Steinberg, Daniel Lepkoff, Julyen Hamilton and the Labor Gras collective.

During her early 20s, she worked as a model for Vivienne Westwood, Sonia Rykiel, and Howard Schatz, and trained at Reha Akademie Berlin in Physical Therapy. Between 2007 and 2009 Dasniya founded and developed the venue Schwelle7, an experimental project space in Berlin, with the Choreographer Felix Ruckert.

The present focus of her choreography and performance is Shibari, (Japanese rope bondage), which she has studied with practitioners Osada Steve, Chanta Rose, Arisue Go and Kinoko. She teaches workshops combining this with yoga in Berlin and across europe. Her work gained wider recognition in contemporary dance through her solo performance MA√ 15 { idiosyncrasy } || sin x = ly – fx²¯, using ballet, meditation, and self-suspension techniques, presented by Tanztage Berlin 2009 and Arte.

In 2010 the Museum of contemporary Art “Kiasma” in Finland presented a participatory Rope Installation as part of the “Theatre Now” Festival.

Most recently, she performed with the Helena Waldmann Company, and was part of the artistic team in Roméo Castellucci’s staging of the opera, Parsifal at La Monnaie | De Munt in Brussels.

Dasniya’s research is strongly influenced by her philosophical studies, which she undertakes at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She reflects on questions of body concepts and ethics in her stage work as well as her teaching.

In her current artistic collaboration with the performer and choreographer Frances d’Ath she examines structural aspects of Shibari, without following traditional notions of gender roles or the traditional fetishised aesthetic.