Last month Dasniya returned to teaching Yoga + Shibari in Berlin. And a new workshop / experiment: Staging Shibari. Dasniya’s been working a lot in theatre and on the edges of performance / installation art (works coming regularly from dancers) in the last couple of years, with Das Helmi, Angela Schubot & Jared Gradinger, Markus Öhrn, Veit Springer, I forget who else – as well as working on her own. All this has percolated around shibari and rope, ballet, performance on stage, that’s unfolded ideas present in her earliest work (both the ridiculously famous MA, and not well-known at all but so what, G4), and seeing there’s been a steady stream of dancers and theatre people banging at her door, she decided to start a workshop / experiment thing called Staging Shibari.
The first one was a month ago, the second, later this week (7pm Thursday, March 31st in Uferhallen Wedding if you wanna know), and I’ve had photos from that first one on my laptop waiting to be blogged for weeks now. So here they are!
As with Yoga + Shibari, it’s a 4-ish hour process, starting with some light yoga warmup for an hour and a bit, as a group all in Dasniya’s studio (which now has a forest of hanging points drilled into the ceiling). Then some talking, what ideas we’d like to mess around with, who wants to do what (tying, being tied, hanging/not-hanging, outside doing lights or sound, photographing), what happens where and when, what we’re wearing (rubber dog hoods! – if you’re lucky…), what needs to be prepped, generally a structure and plan to keep an eye on, so we can individually pay attention to each other and impel things along. Basically we’re rehearsing. Not everyone has worked in theatre, though many if not most have performed in some context or another, from playing in bands to bondage/shibari performance, so the actual thinking and planning through as a group is as much a part of the thing as the doing, and takes a while before we’re all up and ready and the go button is pushed.
And then there’s this (in no particular order). Much fun. Certainly theatre.
