Süddeutsche Edition: 104 08 de MAY de 2005
S?ddeutsche Edition: 104
Berlin, Germany
08/MAY/2005
By Arnd Wesemann
A BONDAGE BALLET AT THE WOLFSBURG ?MOVIMENTOS?
In Berlin, they nearly ran into each other: the best bondage master in Japan, Osada Steve, and Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker, who two years ago rehearsed her bland ?Her? at the Komischen Oper, to the score of G?recki and Ravel. Deborah Colker was running the Berlin club circuit. Meanwhile, Osada Steve, editor of a magazine in Tokyo, was standing in his long robe in a field in K?penick, and was showing to a film crew how to tie a woman in such a way, that one must pull a single red string: soon the defenseless tied-up body dances all by itself. Ropes fall, knots untie, the artfully bonded woman twirls like a rope doll. Hanging from a bamboo tower, she moves with the grace of a doll. The whole thing has very little relation with old childhood tie-up games of cowboy-and-injun. With bonds and ropes the Shibari king conjures choreographies of desire that do not regard sex as procreation anymore, but rather as the pouncing of a spider on a web.
Jungle gym on ropes
One day, Deborah Colker decided she wanted to do a bondage ballet. But who could teach her the art? To the sound of G?recki and Ravel she created ?Knot?, at the Movement Festival in the automobile city of Wolfsburg. The game play, in origin out of a study in domination, became respectable: wholesome art for the whole family. 120 ropes drop from the top of the stage; rolled up in them is a beautiful woman, who actively plays on a jungle gym made of rope. Colker tries to suggest that the rope moves the body. But in general it’s the other way around: the dancers move the rope. There’s no bondage similar to the Japanese knot-master’s art; for that, years of training would be needed. Thus, frolic around seventeen handsome ballet dancers under a huge knot tree; they twirl midair and dance like Tarzan.
In Brazil, it seems that these onstage vines are quite in fashion. Cristina Castro, from Salvador, Bahia, for instance, climbs on jute ropes. In Colker, a huge wig falls from the top of the stage. Hair, handcuffs, rope - associations cheerfully multiply through the woods of the psychological. Beautiful dances are pranced to the sound of Pan flutes, which Berna Ceppas wove to European music like tiny flowers braided in hair. We’d rather dedicate but a passing glance at these innocuous things, at the dancers in fashion designer Alexandre Herchcovitch’s latest beachwear, once their sex is marked in red. But they dance so hauntingly well, that we’re spellbound, left staring at them like a spider at dusk. There are marvelous combinations of steps and rope games, duets and pair-dances never seen before. But everything is only hinted at, nothing’s tied down. Colker binds her dances loosely, like camp boots in high summer. When she goes onstage herself at the end, in a glass box, and wants to show how ?beauty was trapped?, we believe she bound and imprisoned desire; we glimpse at the fascination of bondage. But her irreproachable band of dancers takes off like a swarm of tiny nimble flies dashing unharmed right through a spider’s web.
