Dark lighting combines with booming music. With naked torsos shining, artists Daniel Kok and Luke George slowly, carefully, bind each other in rope. They string themselves – and later audience members – from the ceiling, like colourful trussed chickens. Placed on stage are everyday objects, including a kettle, table and mop bound by neon string, lending a playfully surreal touch.
So sets the scene for the boundary-pushing installation Bunny, which premieres in Sydney this month. Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Bunny explores the ancient Japanese knot-tying technique of shibari, but also taps into bondage and rock climbing.
“There is a great art to the act of tying,” says the softly spoken George, 37, stirring his coffee in a Sydney Potts Point cafe. “It is this incredibly ascetic experience.”
“It can be very gentle, as well as really hard,” agrees 39-year-old Singaporean Kok. “There is a whole range of emotions that are as flexible as the material itself … a sense of communication through rope.”
The pair learnt shibari in Australia (George divides his time between Melbourne and Brooklyn, New York). The underground erotic art remains largely clandestine in its native Japan; finding teachers was tough.
Shibari originated from Hojo-jutsu, a method of restraining captives and a form of torture, before morphing again into the erotic bondage Kinbaku (Kinbaku-bi literally translates as “the beauty of tight binding”) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Central to the art is creating patterns that contrast and complement the natural curves of the (usually female) body. The beauty lies in juxtaposition: bare skin against rough rope, strength against exposure, a sense of calm against the knife-edge of risk.
“Yes, the work is a little bit sexual, but we haven’t made it our focus. I never feel like I become this cruel master – I’m still trying to find it in myself,” jokes Kok, his black raincoat zipped all the way up to his shaved head, a thick silver chain around his neck.
The son of a courier, Kok is a former army officer and was once Singapore pole dancing champion. Living in a country where “pseudo democracy” is practised and where money is thrown at the arts but censorship still reigns, politics is an important part of his work.
In Bunny, Kok poses an ethical question: “When a group of people gather, how much concession, agreement, how much of a common denominator do we share?”
More than eroticism, gender and sexual representation is the focus of the durational piece – it runs for two and a half hours. In shibari the “bunny” is tied up by the “rigger”.
The former is typically a petite, small-framed woman. However, in their production of Bunny, both rigger (Kok) and bunny (George) are male and gay. As a teenager growing up in rural Tasmania, George came out when homosexuality was still illegal (it was only decriminalised in 1997), when connections with men were secretive, when the only choice was “having dodgy hook-ups in strange places”.
A bunny conjures up images “of a small helpless creature”, notes Kok. “We want to mess around with [the word]. [The title] Bunny is a campy reference to, I dare say, queer culture – we offset the regular binary between masculine, feminine, strong and weak.”
The repercussions for the performer, he says, are huge. “The kind of person we spend our daily lives working on improving might temporarily need to be shelved. It becomes a sublime and massive task for me as an artist.”
To start the process, the two men went back to basics: learning how to tie a knot. They became acutely aware of heightened sensuality and an amplified attention to the body, to each lick of rope, each tightened boundary.
It is “about giving permission, about taking power,” says Kok, who now dabbles with bondage for pleasure, shackling up friends, attending parties on a leash.
When someone shows signs of resistance or discomfort, “our job is not necessarily to be kind or to give in, because of the contractual agreement of the game,” he says. Instead, sometimes, they push that individual further.
The delicate rules of submission and dominance – how much to take, how much to give – was explored in previews that were held in Singapore and Norway last year. Audience members not only watched but were invited to join in.
“We found pretty quickly that people want to get tied up – or they want to see someone else get tied up,” observes George. He thinks that urge can be explained by two things. “One is the element of danger that comes into the room, not necessarily in a physical sense, but in crossing over audience boundaries. The other, I think, is a desire for spectacle [and a] desire for intimacy.”
Of course, it can be risky. In one preview, the pair tied up a male volunteer in his early 20s. Afterwards, a viewer chastised them for supposedly abusing the trust of someone young, someone gullible. “I found that very intriguing. Who is to say a 21-year-old doesn’t know what he wants, what he’s open to?” asks Kok. George adds, “We make ourselves pretty vulnerable, we are the ones tied up to begin with.”
For Kok, shibari is a practice imbued not only with heightened power but also humility and responsibility. “Since becoming an artist I’ve tried very hard not to feel the need to have the last word, to not think that I’m most important; to gain a full understanding of what it means to be responsible to something.”
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Bunny is at the Campbelltown Arts Centre on 22 and 23 January
