On April 30, 2023, me and other artists from Luckypot were invited to participate in the event “Dance for the Sky” at Canalway Cavalcade, curated by Nadir Tharani.
The IWA Canalway Cavalcade, organized by the Inland Waterways Association, is London’s most influential annual waterways celebration, aiming to celebrate the best of life on the waterways and its community. This spring, Canal Dream, last year’s winner of the Marcus Boudier Trophy, will return to the festival with Slash Arts. The Inland Waterway Association is a charity, and the IWA Canalway Cavalcade is a free festival open to all. Visitors are welcome to go to the moorings to participate in the events.
In this intervention, I portrayed my own monster incarnation, incorporating elements of rope bondage. Over two hours, we built a symbolic “sail” on the boat roof, representing the driving force, flag, and communal goal for the onboard community. The process of building a “sail” was vague, not necessarily smooth, always pulling and holding back within each other.
This marked my first intervention, and I felt nervous as I had never tried performance art before. Unlike my previous experiences with rope bondage, this was the first time practicing it in an outdoor, open space with a massive crowd, which posed a significant challenge for me.
I hadn’t determined my audience for this intervention, considering whether everyone could try rope bondage. The audience consisted of British citizens attending the festival, with some merely glancing and moving on while others stopped to watch and take photos. Combining rope bondage with performance art seemed to normalize it for the audience, as observed by their nonchalant reactions to the use of ropes. Due to the large crowd, I couldn’t reach out to collect feedback from the audience, hoping to gather their responses during the intervention.