Can BDSM aesthetics and rope bondage be used to explore performer-audience dynamics? Frey Kwa Hawking finds out
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USA -By Frey Kwa Hawking
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Standing on The Mall one Saturday afternoon in mid-May, besides the constant tourists grinning at the royal splendour, you’d notice more boorish police than usual and plenty of St George’s cross bearers, blearily wending their way home from uniting the kingdom. You’d also spot the odd queer, Asian and otherwise, dressed mostly in wisps, picking their way towards the ICA. Inside, looping for hours in the dark of the tiny Cinema 2, are mountains made of gay cowboy asses and grinning teenagers in the back of a speeding truck showing off their tattoos. Accompanying this shorts programme, a lot of performance.
Founded as a film festival in 2020 by Yi Wang, Queer East is a genuinely multi-disciplinary affair, showcasing queer work from East and South East Asia and the diaspora, via expanded programmes from readings to nature walks and exhibitions. It arrives at London venues each year – including the Barbican, Museum of the Home, the BFI and more – as well as touring some of its programme regionally and internationally. Since 2024, Queer East’s performance strand has grown keenly more ambitious.
This year features the debuts in this country of No. 60 by Pichet Klunchun Dance Company, and Bunny by Daniel Kok and Luke George, besides DAYTRIP, the all-day takeover of the ICA comprising a short films programme, performances and workshops, curated by Bart Seng Wen Long. I took part in Queer East’s first emerging critics’ scheme in 2024 as a theatre interloper and have been in its orbit since. This year I caught more performance than films, finding old movement, new pain, and miles and miles of rope.
Queer East has never confined itself to straightforwardly representational depictions of same-sex love and attraction – and 2026’s performance strand was no different, with a lot of solo work about desire but also about bodies, power, tradition and ways of knowing things with your body. BDSM aesthetics and big time rope bondage (colloquially known as shibari, more accurately as kinbaku) provided ways to think through performer-audience dynamics.
I’ve had little patience for rope bondage historically, but my position now is it’s permissible only when it’s in public where everyone can see it, rather than the privacy of your own home, where it becomes nerd shit. Better the nerd shit you know – performance, live art! Out of the bedrooms and onto the stages.
DAYTRIP’s programme kicks us off, a stone’s throw from the fascists that afternoon in May, filing in and out of the ICA’s Theatre from the afternoon until a rave curated by DJ Princess Xixi (“female diogenes of uk rap”) at night. Highlight: Shamtarctica, a collaboration between producer Nammy Wams and M.I.C. – The Master of Inane Conversation – about loving the winter and hating global warming.
I first catch The Application, the debut performance piece by CD3 Project’s trio of artists: having recruited a willing victim via an IG advert very reminiscent of The Sluts, boihugo (aka Hana), Willian Zhou (aka Zoe) and Nicolas Tian (aka Nicole) are approached by a white man (Alistair Wroe), who they strip and inspect, drawing a microphone down the length of him, taping it to his arm, threatening him with a candle. It’s ambiguous as to whose glam fantasy this could be, all silent, solemn ceremony, though a little tentative.
Next Osamu Shikichi’s Crucified Stars on the Tongue is a flowingly erotic, falling-over-itself piece of choreography: inspired by how Japanese sufferers from leprosy learned to read Braille with their tongues as their sensation in their fingers failed, Shikichi seems to be all joints, discovering lines in the air with their long hands. They fold a piece of paper with Braille on it around their face like a mask, wrap it around an audience member’s shoe and their own arm like inverted tefillin, pressing against it with their tongue. I can’t think of many attempts to express the process of reading, though I wonder if any reading is actually taking place, or if the performance slightly mysticises it, or if Shikichi is trying to embody the information we constantly receive through touch.
There’s a welcome humour to a double bill by Hong Kong-based dance company Unlock Dancing Plaza, Good Boy, Bad Girl: first, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Joseph Lee keeps us waiting as he skips with a rope alone onstage before starting to address us. Frankly, he dances rarely now he’s the company’s artistic director, there’s too much paperwork. When does he dance and what does he want from it? When is his body desired by others – in the gym? In the club? He starts to lose himself jubilantly to techno, weaving his way through a cloud of seated, still people, looking great, but lonely: erotically entwining himself with the skipping rope and one ever-so-wary audience member.
The second part is the actually kinkiest performance of all, Paula Wong’s Come close, go deeper!. She cheerily, calmly demonstrates her intimacy with what her body can do, bent beyond splits, then leads us in a raucous stretching lesson, fighting for space with our legs in the air. Her oft-repeated, hastily explained rules for stretching are:
- Don’t be a dead fish!
- Are you in?
- Master it!
I can only speak to the first: stillness hurts more when stretching, so put on a show and move. “It’s not meant to feel good,” she tells us – the most definitive tip off that we’re being crushed between the muscular thighs of a tyrant.
In Untitled, looping harp and singing underscores the sight of Riven Ratanavanh on a table like a sacrificial victim, turning on his knees to display the candle burning at both ends dripping onto his skin, and sealing the heavy collar around his neck. Despite Seng Wen Long’s whispered encouragement at the start to move around the space, we sit still until Ratanavanh’s captor-carer gives us dried flowers to scatter on his stretched out body. It feels like the end of a ritual, the divination of which is kept completely private from us when Ratanavanh leaves the room immediately once the candle snaps in two. It’s an almost furtive, abrupt end to a meditative forty minutes, uncharacteristic of the BDSM scenes or offerings it resembles.
Last year shibari performer hua hua was part of a fantastic shorts programme for Queer East, curated by Seng Wen Long again, about material fetishism. It was a surprisingly frantic, funny performance with a catsuited victim freed from a pre-set cardboard box only to be tied up at breakneck speed (before tech problems at the Rio Cinema put a halt to things). Reanimated is set to mellow then intense music, rather than the sound of rope on rubber alone. hua hua suspends a different, this time dreamily compliant collaborator, Kazumi Nishimura, from a bamboo pole and creates a breathing bouquet by weaving peonies and bird of paradise flowers through the ropes. She makes a show out of considering her next move, trailing her touches, burying Nishimura under loose ropes and flowers at the end, perhaps lost to her now. It’s less disarming, altogether more dignified.
Like with Ratanavanh’s piece, though our presence involves us to a point as witness, I think we watch wanting to be inside these images somehow, to see ourselves restrained or restraining, wondering how they relate to us. All that sensuality, firmly over there. Kink provides a useful structure for durational work, playing a peeking game with tension and boredom, how outside yet complicit we are as spectators. But it’s not until Bunny, a few weeks later at Battersea Arts Centre, that I feel our function as audience is more dynamically exploited.
Daniel Kok and Luke George have developed their rope practice together since meeting and starting their international partnership in 2014, and have suspended athletes on their bikes, with their teammates in a scrum, made installations with ropes, with plants. In Bunny, the two make a temporary neon-coloured encampment for and with us, charging it with our acquiescence and reluctance. Bunny starts with George looking at us serenely, with warmth, wearing a wig made from ropes tied like friendship bracelets, and Kok hanging bound from a ring in the centre, surrounded by everyday items which are themselves tied up: a bistro table with a banana on top of it, a Henry Hoover, a traffic cone.
Only a few audience members even touch the bright ropes over Bunny’s two hours, but as George and Kok start to ask things of us, we’re lightly collectively implicated. We watch as George is tied up at his own request, and shake our heads when Kok is flogged half-heartedly.
Kok and George have a sharp sense for when to puncture the curious, intense atmosphere they create by using a fire extinguisher to make a fart joke, or to suddenly break into joyous ballroom-inflected choreography, or to start abseiling. Who was expecting that kind of rope practice? A tipped over, beautifully bound desk fan makes a ticking noise for a long stretch of the show: the tying enables such a playful slide between objectification and subjectification, and I feel great fondness towards that fan and my fellow audience members alike, being aware of each other.
Unplanned moments communicate mismatched expectations of trust: unbeknownst to one man, while he’s bound and blindfolded, being led carefully around the space on a lead by a stranger, his partner goes to the loo, leaving him there. The built-in checks don’t prevent someone needing to untie their own arms from their chest.
I’m back the next night, drafted in last minute to host the post-show Q&A, and sit on their big blue mat while we all fiddle with the rope. Kok is asked about the moment when he takes things from an audience member’s bag while they’re immobilised and tied to some cushions, making a trail out of their belongings ending in their phone which he uses to take a photo of them. Kok explains that he tells them they can shake their head for no at any point, that he keeps looking back, and has been stopped before, but that usually the person smiles when he takes a photo of them with their phone –and that generally helps to tell everyone else in the room that things are alright.
George points out the cushion-tied person whose bag was rifled through tonight is still present, and then there’s an unexpectedly raw moment when that cushion person shares that actually, they feel complicated about what happened. As someone who takes part in scenes with rope, they generally feel consent to something new and unaccounted for mid-scene isn’t genuine. But they did trust Kok, the person says, and they did know how to get him to stop. They’re still thinking about it, they say.
We all sit in silence for a bit. George thanks them for their honesty. Doing this work is confronting, he says. He reconsiders whether to do it sometimes. When this cushion person responds by asking George a new question, it feels as if it does the same thing as when Kok receives a smile back when he takes the photo: it affords us a way through a moment with an edge to it, smoothing over some awkwardness though not entirely rewriting what happened.
I’m currently making a show which features some irresponsibly executed kink, and our intimacy director debriefs with me on the way home after the Bunny Q&A. In our room we’d talked about Posey Mehta’s Asking For It, a work-in-progress in which Mehta, a masochist sub, asks the audience to hurt them in technically illegal ways. I’m yet to catch Asking For It, but our intimacy director compares the show’s approaches to Bunny’s; Mehta emphasises how hurting them can be an act of care, and in the Q&A, George and Kok describe how their rope practice is about responsibility. More immersed in shibari practices, my friend notes how an experience like this might be the most transformative – like it seemed for the cis dude-seeming audience members who were suspended at the end of each of the performances we saw – for those perhaps not already habitually occupied by these kinds of dynamics and questions.
In Kok and George’s booklet accompanying Bunny they note that they’re interested in manipulating and cajoling, rather than coercion, but these often sit on top of each other. These moments of negotiation between performer and audience are how Bunny works. I find thinking about the responsibility of constructing this piece overwhelming: sometimes it feels hard enough to be at your own helm. I think about how I ask, trample others, and half-agree to things all the time: moving down a tube platform, in sex, with my friends, in the rehearsal room.
Pichet Klunchun Dance Company’s No. 60 at The Place shares a concern with the construction of performance – at less close quarters, but no less complicated. My early childhood was spent in Thailand, and classical Thai dance feels familiar to me, but Thailand’s foremost contemporary choreographer Klunchun is here to make the familiar strange again. No. 60 imagines a sixtieth movement to accompany the 59 classical positions making up traditional Khon dance (the Mae Bot Yai), and starts by breaking it down into six distinct elements (energy, circles and curves, axis points, synchronous limbs, external body spaces, shifting relations). Each has distinct sound designed by Zai Tang, which grows to become urgent and colossal later: at times the music soars and hurtles, sometimes it’s industrial, ticking, or sounds like the screech of insects.
The two dancers, Klunchun himself and his student Kornkarn Rungsawang, seem arch, sometimes martial – like rival siblings, partners, or like proud animals, not always together or close, but often fixed with intent on something. Under a huge, low-hanging sequinned cloth with a hole cut out from its centre, first they precisely demonstrate each of the elements against projected diagrams indicating what part of the body moves, where, in what order. Then they take on the 59 positions of Khon, and give us the numbers and names, and we see so immediately what they are. 24: A Walking Deer (using fingers for antlers). 48: A Chinese Man Pulling Out His Intestines. 57: Block the Sun.
Set up by No. 60’s first part, you can appreciate the presence of the different elements in the composition of each, even if you can’t remember them all. They go further, iterate again, overlapping positions. They leave and re-enter as intensity builds and the shining cloth ceiling is lowered to half mast, obscuring all but their legs if they’re too far upstage. This cloth is like an inverted disco ball, or, Klunchun suggests during the post-show Q&A, the mirror tiles of Thai temple roofs, blinking all across Bangkok.
Against drumbeat and bleedy-sounding bass, composer Tang – until now confined to the tech desk onstage – is suddenly up too, running and shouting into a megaphone, and then all three have megaphones. The dancers stagger and finally shiver against the floor. They’ve achieved something: position number 60? Quiet reasserts itself when Rungsawang dances alone, precisely again, the positions’ diagrams under her feet this time: we see her movement differently. She seems strengthened by her familiarity with the past, equally capable of tradition and innovation.
It’s not as simple as rejecting a set of rules for another. They failed to find position number 60, Klunchun tells us. Thai traditional dance is inextricably tied to religion, to learning by rote, to a fixed and unchanging idea of Thai national identity, but every Thursday, his company trains again in traditional Khon. In this way they bring the past into the present, he notes: examining what was always there, and questioning what to take forward. Upending expectations and reimagining futures, it’s Queer East’s outlook down to the ground.
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