This December 2019, at KOTES – Booze Cooperativa, the AthenShibari team presented an unusual bondage night, consisted of 3 different shows.
The local artists WisDomme, Psychopsis and Elle Mcleon (as a rigger for the first time on stage) presented a fusion shibari show, where 2 riggers and one model participated all together. The
opening of the night was done with an uncommon show, based on trust, communication, experience and improvisation, and was done by the local rope artist WisDomme and the lovely Orionette, who was picked up from the audience.
This night was also dedicated to the Spanish shibari scene,which has a very special element: it’s common to mix shibari with different arts, like theater, singing, dance and visual arts.
Angela Nawa came to Athens in order to introduce us to this mix of styles. For her to go on stage is something very important, like a ritual: it requires time to prepare beforehands, think about the timeline, the sound / setting, the costumes and the message she wants to convey.
As a multidisciplinary artist she reflects each of her passions in her work with ropes:
She is a singer, a songwriter, a poet and educator, she views the Shibari from two complementary points of view.
On the one hand the artistic (performing, visual, photography and plastic arts), as she has been working in different artistic rope composition (both as a model and as a rigger) that later has been materialized into photo shoots. She has aslo been collaborating with different drawing schools/proyects, mixing these two arts.
Her performance is titled Quejío: translated in the Andalusian dialect “scream torn and felt”. Where flamenco meets shibari, in a show where dance, song, and ropes intertwine to cross the boundaries of emotions.
With her, we saw on stage her model and partner Transfomario from Jaén, Spain. An experimental artist, dancer and dance teacher and artist specializing in the creation of thematic events.
In Quejío, she wanted to express the similarity that she feels it exists in arts apparently so different as Flamenco and Shibari. She is from Andalusia, so flamenco is something that she had in her life since she was very young. Both arts share a very deep feeling, of liberation through pain, of the expression of the purest element within us. Intertwinrf with this, music helps her to go to a subspace, despite being a rigger and causesher model to have a trip where the music guides them. She mixes visual elements from Flamenco and costumes, and then there is also poetry, lyrics and deep feelings.
She herself is into Quejío, as a tradition mixed with free creativity and always with deep respect to these two types of art.
All photos by Manos Chrisovergis