REVIEW: Bunny
Review Date: 5th June 2026 @Battersea Arts Centre
REVIEWS
Kassy Fang
6/8/20263 min read
©️Photo by Bernie Ng - Matter Era Creative Development
Presented as part of Queer East Festival in collaboration with Battersea Arts Centre, Daniel Kok and Luke George's Bunny begins before a single knot is tied. Taking its title from the term used for the person being bound, the work uses rope as a way of thinking through intimacy, spectatorship and the subtle negotiations that shape how bodies meet one another.
The performance space is anchored by a soft blue-coloured foam floor, suggestive of a rehearsal room, a training studio, or a place of recovery. An atmosphere of care is established before the action begins. Everyday objects - a table, a Henry vacuum cleaner, a fan, a fire extinguisher, a basket, and a hanging potted plant - are staged across the space, each bound in ropes and differentiated through varied tying techniques. The resulting landscape is faintly uncanny, transforming the familiar into something newly charged and uncertain. Within this environment, Daniel is suspended in mid-air at the centre of the stage with Luke’s assistance. Luke subsequently ropes his own legs before asking audience members to tie his hands together.
Matthew Adey’s lighting design gradually transforms the scene. As darkness gathers, the fluorescent ropes begin to glow in vivid pink, yellow and green. Their luminous outlines sharpen the contours of objects while bodies recede into shadow. Faces, muscles and identities become secondary to the tensions connecting them. The ropes redraw the distinction between object and subject, tracing lines of attachment, support and restraint. Forms become newly legible through these forces of binding and support.
This aesthetic choice reflects the artists' desire to move rope bondage away from familiar associations of erotic charge, taboo, and control. There is humour here, playfulness and delight. Rope becomes colourful, mischievous and unexpectedly generous.
The two artists met through a two-week artistic exchange programme in Sydney in 2014. Their conversations revolved around spectatorship, collectivity and participation in performance. Rope offered a way of making those ideas tangible. Over years of practice, they developed a shared vocabulary of knots, suspensions and physical negotiations. Their research was shaped by conversations about love, sex and dating, nights spent dancing in clubs, Daniel's training in pole dance, and Luke's practice in massage.
The audience participation is progressively introduced. Volunteers are invited to be tied, always with careful attention to consent. The performers repeatedly checked in, asking whether participants were comfortable and whether they wished to continue. Their voices often dropped to a whisper, making the exact words inaudible to the rest of us. We could only infer the conversation from gestures and expressions. This partial visibility heightened the sense of intimacy. During these sequences, time itself seems to change texture. The process of tying demands patience. There is waiting, watching, and anticipation of what might arrive. Attention gathers around the smallest actions: a hand tightening a knot, a pause before the next instruction, a glance seeking permission. The power dynamic never settles into a fixed hierarchy. It is continuously negotiated.
One particularly memorable image comes when Daniel uses a rope knot to climb the lighting rig above the stage. The action takes on an architectural quality, measuring the dimensions of the room through the body itself. Space becomes something physical, something traversed and tested rather than simply occupied. Later, an audience participant is suspended in the centre of the stage and slowly rotates for several minutes. The scene is strange and mesmerising. The suspended body appears objectified, transformed into part of the installation. At the same time, there is an undeniable beauty in that state of suspension, time temporarily arrested, forming an amber-like stillness. The figure hovers between sculpture and person, between vulnerability and transcendence.
Throughout Bunny, tension and trust remain inseparable. Rope binds bodies together, though the work is ultimately less interested in restraint than in relation. The spectacle of knots or suspension gives way to a heightened awareness of the invisible threads connecting people, glowing in the dark.
★★★★
For more information, please visit: https://bac.org.uk/whats-on/bunny/
Credits
Creator and performer: Daniel Kok and Luke George
Dramaturg: Tang Fu Kuen
Lighting Designer: Matthew Adey (House of Vnholy)
Technical Stage Manager: Gene Hedley
Part of Queer East Festival 2026, a cross-disciplinary festival that showcases boundary-pushing LGBTQ+ cinema, performing arts, and moving image work from East and Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities.
Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre.
Co-produced by The Substation with support from the Australia Council for the Arts, the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, Abrons Arts Centre, the Playking Foundation, Singapore International Foundation, the National Arts Council (Singapore), and Tanzfabrik. International Distribution Something Great
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