La Monnaie Parsifal | Shibari Interview

When I first found out Castellucci was using "bondage artists and contortionists" in Parsifal, my jaw nearly hit the floor. I thought I had seen everything that could possibly be done in the Bieito production.

I was very wrong.

Every great once in a while you meet performers so far out of your life experiences and usual circle of friends you just have to get to know them. Trying not to look like a complete backwater boob, I sidled up against them during rehearsals and have found the conversations enlightening. Most of my questions were actually complaints on what the regie was doing to my back. There is so much standing still in this production that I wanted any help I could get in addressing that pain. All ladies are extremely fit and were doing things with their bodies that I knew they'd have some helpful suggestions. And it basically boiled down to one thing: Stop thinking so much. It's your body fighting against itself.

Body Awareness work with Frances and Dasniya

The implementation of that was challenging. As I'd mentioned, I had a big fit one day in rehearsal. And most of that fit stemmed from confronting my own fears of being judged and not being seen at my best. I was losing control and it was uncomfortable.


This entire rehearsal and performance process can be summed up thusly:

Lose Control. And gain it back.

Now that I know people well, they feel comfortable coming up to me and saying things they wouldn't normally say. And there is one comment that is said to me over and over: "You changed. Somewhere in this process, you made a significant change." Roméo said it, my singing colleagues have said it, dancers and figurants have all said it. And yeah, I feel it.

Dasniya working with dancer, Ana Cristina Velasquez

Most of this change has come in talking with the Sirens of Parsifal, our Ladies of Shibari. All three of these performers are interesting folk. They seem meditative, calm and deeply connected to emotion and to each other. To me, they exhibit a body awareness that is remarkable.

The world of Shibari poses some ideological questions I hardly knew I had. Questions about relationships, intimacy, performance, play and objectification. While some readers will find some moments of Act 2 challenging, I would refer you to the opening line of the Financial Times review. "… its not particularly shocking." Thankfully, there is more to good theater than shocking. There is thoughtful usage of mediums, and Roméo's genius found a way to give Act 2 some of the most arresting moments of the evening.


And on the day when Slate Magazine categorically states Americans are the most stressed out people on the planet (causes: 1. Loss of community; 2. information overload; 3. falling prey to "feel good-ism, vilifying negative emotion), I think possibly these ladies who live "outside the norm" have something important to say.

Here is Part One of the Shibari Interview

Dasniya Sommer, Gala Moody, and Frances d'Ath

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Ok, I'll never complain about a costume again. After today's Shibari workshop I found out what you guys are doing kinda makes my job look easy. What have been some of the challenges?

Gala: A big challenge of the production period was the director instructing us to be "natural" throughout our scene. Communication is about 93% paralinguistic and when a performer comes onstage they bring on all their little messages about themselves that the audience can read.  For myself and my colleagues, who work fundamentally with the body and it's language, the instruction to be neutral is not one that is easily understood and carried out.  Although we look something like dolls in the scene, in our wigged albino states, we didn't want to be without a certain quality of expression, one that was important within a scene that show woman as objects of desire, to present another perspective, to show a human side, somehow with subtlety.  After observing and playing with these ideas in our rehearsals we decided on the idea that our performance would be a state of complete immersion in the enjoyment of captivity, in the abandonment towards our positions as guards of the castles.  That our attention would not be on the Klingsors or the sorroundings but would stay internal, like we our whole reality is this sort of sensational enjoyment.  In this way, we are neutral to our sorroundings, without reaction to the goings on around us in the scene.

I think most people can easily understand how a person might become an opera singer. Kids sing. Join church choir. Go to college. Apprentice. Hopefully get work. Something tells me your path was a bit different.

Dasniya: Learning Shibari today is so much easier than about 20 years ago not speak of the time before. There is information on the web, books, workshops and in my environment activists networking between Europe, the States and Japan. 

Berlin's Shibari culture is somewhat pioneering I noticed, and me being one of the people who enjoy analyzing the complexity of this art in great detail. I am coaching lots of female artists who want to use Shibari as body work method, combine it with traditional japanese dance Butoh or with music, or simply take it on personal explorations.

When I retrace my own path I find a lot of unexpected cornerstones, and still this current map seem to match logically at this moment. I roughly marched 3 decades with yogic precision, danced ballet for two decades and discovered Shibari in 2006. My current style and  working method is influenced by people like Osada Steve, Arisue Go, and Kinoko who I met in London. Lots of self-study and my first Shibari performance in 2008, a trio.  Especially the project work takes place in diametrically opposed subcultures and is an anthropological research in itself--from the deep underground scene to Opera culture.

Frances: I found a dvd of nobuyoshi araki in guangzhou in the pirate dvd store opposite the local police station near where i lived. Even earlier, somehow falling over the idea of rope and bondage when i was making 'extermination', in 2003. It tried to find a way into every work i made since, but always not enough time, and in australia there was no one who did this kind of thing. 

Coming to berlin in 2008 I decided I wanted to live in Europe and narrowed my choices to there or Brussels. I decided on Berlin because i'd heard of a choreographer who was doing some quite intense performances, and friends thought i'd really like what he did. Turned out it was Dasniya who worked with him. I was quite nervous about how her classes would be, and it wasn't until early 2009 that i first started going along. From there, we began talking more, attending workshops with Osada Steve and AriSueGo from Japan, and eventually working together.

I've noticed you are are very down to earth people. Calm, collected and yet artistic. In my world, opera singers are usually not so balanced. We tend to be explosive and larger than life. And often not very physically fit. Any suggestions?

Gala: Walk through a forest.  Soothes the mind, gives you time to think, and you get exercise without really noticing!  Although I must say that we probably seem more balanced then you singers because we don't have such wonderfully fit vocal chords to shout at people with.

Frances: Yoga! i've been doing yoga on and off since my late teens, mostly astanga and iyengar. I tend to go through phases of it depending on how my body feels. Sometimes it's not so important for me, other times i need to do it every day. I was talking in 2009 with some friends about writing a book called 'black yoga'. there is this perception of yoga being light and raising the self to a higher plane, all tanned skin and open smiles and hearts. i found often when i'd do yoga there was a darkness in it, fear of falling is the obvious one, or strong emotions, crying, anger … i noticed this stuff was always brushed over – if ever talked about at all – as something one might move through on the path to enlightenment. i thought it was something maybe to consider more, that perhaps it's an inseparable part of a person.

At the moment my attention is more to rock climbing, cycling, and hiking. All have a certain mental attitude i like, experiencing exhaustion, fear, a stark sense of self, joy. These are perhaps more meditative for me than actual meditation, which i'm not very good at. I like the after effects of physical exertion, When my thoughts are quiet, my body calm and feeling the weight of recent exertion, the simplicity things are reduced to, eating, sleeping, perhaps watching the light change across trees outside. It keeps me grounded.

Dasniya: For me "Play" is my balance beam. Though to arrive at a depth of playfulness, it takes some time and a lot of trust to internally grow backwards and at the same time forwards to develop a self-conception which makes one able to be in a public context in such emotionally and physically exposed ways. It means to become more and more childish on one hand, learning to fool around with ropes and myself, learning to explore fine facets of stupidity and to formalize and constitute them so that it becomes legible in stage works. In terms of real time I can take distances and become a bit more quotidian. Life and art, experienced through playing. 


Next Time, Part Two. The Darker Side