In June the workshop ‘Yoga & Shibari’ was invited to be the keynote lecture at a conference about interdiszplinary teaching. What an honour! With 20 ropes, a couple of video excerpts from performances, and a stack of vintage shibari photography, I arrived at the Center of British Studies of Humboldt – University in Berlin Mitte.

The preparation for this talk was most interesting fot me. Stepping out of the practical teaching, taking the describing perspective, and explaining to theorists what the workshop is about, was more challenging than I thought.
Speaking mostly from experience, the guts and a funky mixture of philosophical training, how for example performing on stage influences the teaching performance, how teaching ballet is a totally different universe, or how my cultural backround inspires the concept  on a deeper level since years.
The group of 20 lecturers were more than happy to strech with ropes, listen watch shibari photos, which caused amusement for some, and irritation for others, especially when it came to the nude photographs of tied men. Some asking questions about how to include the body more in the academic class room, and one of them talked about a seminar in which students are allowed to walk around while discussing and pondering, very nice!

After the 90 minute talk the group went for dinner. A sweet restaurant by Paul – Linke Ufer. With Sonja Dolinsek and Erik Spindler we had an enlightening talk about non – normative relationship, different forms of sex work nowadays, and all sort of interesting topics, which are nice to discuss with people, who have studied and even taught gender topics in depth, and bridge the in-between-things, so that it can be exchanged in personal ways, with people who meet for the first time.

After this experience I am thinking of working out a lecture performance, a format to tour easily, ..possibly have guests and spread a little more of this kind of crazyness and fun ;)
My biggest thanks to Erik for inviting me.

Announcement

‘Yoga and Japanese Rope Bondage: Nawa Shibari ‘ is a workshop concept combining two seemingly mismatching practices. How does a purification practice fit with porn? Why doing the latter at all? And what can be extracted from those popularity gaining Asian rituals? The separation is obviously more blurry. Such questions tease my artistic research and have inspired many performances from subcultural events to choreographing in opera. During this process with my colleagues we use these practices as neutral tools, theatrical form and try to strip the techniques from there original context. We use them in an almost naive technical way, and by doing this the preconceived meaning falls away, and many parallels come to the surface. I approach ballet and other dance concepts in a similar way.

Teaching plays a crucial part in this research. A workshop situation is also a field to develop basic ideas and structures together with workshop participants. People with different backgrounds encounter, explore and discuss rope work in a group. Besides learning the rope technique or working physically with a partner, we talk about performance codes, finding an easy language for complex things, or testing power dynamics gently. Or talking more theoretical for example about identity or feminism in Shibari. The speciality is that these complicated topics can run from the head into the body and can be traced there in physical and playful ways.

In this 90 minutes I talk more about teaching experiences of different stages, we watch video excerpts of performances, and do some basic rope work.
Disciplines involved: anthropology, ballet, philosophy, dance, feminism, choreography, yoga, shibari, bondage, sexological body work.

Program