TBA:17

BUNNY

by Luke George & Daniel Kok

Dance provocateurs Luke George and Daniel Kok exploit the physical properties of rope and knots to unpick the boundaries of desire, trust, consent and communion between artist and audience. In order to unravel shared lines of connection, to suspend tension and to unleash collective desires, Kok and George look to macramé, sailors’ knots, Chinese knots and rope bondage to weave together an interactive experience of collectivity. Bunny is a nickname given to the person being tied in rope bondage. In this work, we ask ourselves this question: What if everyone (in the theatre) is a Bunny?

Luke George is a Melbourne based artist who was raised in Tasmania. George creates new performance work locally and internationally/culturally, through experimental creative processes with collaborating artists. His works Lifesize (2008), Now Now Now (2010), Not About Face (2013), Erotic Dance (2016) and Bunny (2016) have been presented extensively throughout Australia, and internationally in France, Germany, Norway, Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, and U.S.A. Since receiving his B.A. from the Victorian College of the Arts, George has collaborated and performed in the works of many acclaimed dance and theatre companies, queer clubs, music and social justice projects. George was recipient of Melbourne Fringe Awards (1999, 2013), Asialink Residency (2005), Russell Page Fellowship (2007), Greenroom Award for Best Male Dancer (2011), and commissions: Sydney Opera House (2006), Keir Foundation (2008), Lucy Guerin Inc (2010), Phantom Limbs (2013), Chocolate Factory Theater (2014), Phillip Adams Balletlab (2015) and Campbelltown Arts Centre (2016). George is also a massage therapist and practitioner of Kinbaku (rope bondage).

Daniel Kok is an alumnus of BA (Honours) Fine Art & Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College (London), MA (Distinction) Solo/Dance/Authorship (SODA) at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT, Berlin), and the Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies (APASS) in Brussels. From 2005 to 2010, he was Associate Artist at The Substation (Singapore). In 2008, he received the Young Artist Award from National Arts Council (Singapore). His performance work deals with the relational politics in spectatorship and audienceship. Q&A (2009), Planet Romeo (2011), Cheerleader of Europe (2014), ALPHA (2014), PIIGS (2015) and Bunny (2016) have been presented across Asia, Europe, Australia, and the USA. Kok is currently researching queerness and a notion of trans-individuality. As a pole dancer, he won the SG Pole Challenge (2012) and represented Singapore at the International Pole Championships (IPC, 2013). He also identifies as a bondage practitioner and Thai masseur.

Bunny was originally commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre (AUS), co-produced by The Substation (SIN), with support from the Playking Foundation (AUS), Australia Council for the Arts, Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, the National Arts Council (SIN), Singapore International Foundation, Abrons Arts Centre (NYC) and Tanzfabrik (BER).

"Two hours disappear quickly in BUNNY, a bondage-performance event in which desire hums beneath explorations of trust, consent, collective responsibility, spectatorship, sexuality and power... BUNNY is a momentary explosion of questions. It is a temporary community. I leave abuzz with an emergent sense of my own place in those questions; with a new sense of my own desire” –Real Time

“The artist-audience relationship is a consensual one as both have permitted themselves to be in the same space, but who truly gets to dictate artistic content? Is the artist serving the audience's needs, or is the former merely playing with the latter? Bunny as a work asks all these questions and more. It is a bold, evocative work, and (if you allow yourself to be un/restrained) great fun as well" –Centre 42, Singapore