Eight female-identifying rugby players, including player/writer Alice Soper and founding Black Fern Nina Sio-Milne, will be tied together this Easter weekend to form a living sculpture on a grand scale.
Former Black Fern Rochelle Martin, Auckland Storm player Kelvery Longopoa, and Black Ferns Vita Dryden along with Sio-Milne and Soper have been roped into the project. While they’ll be held together by rope and knots inspired by rope bondage, there’s nothing salacious about it. It’s all in the name of performance art, exploring the connections between art and sport, and the tensions experienced by rugby players during the game they love.
Part of a series called Still Lives, it’s created by international artists Daniel Kok and Luke George, who met a decade ago through dance. They took a weekend workshop in rope bondage and were attracted to its artistic potential. Since 2016, they’ve tied Australian rules footballers in Melbourne, high net-worth social influencers in Singapore, a gondola and gondolier in Venice, a 130-year-old fishing boat and bugle player in Fremantle, and, in Florence, a Renaissance sculpture. Local artmakers Julia Croft and Nisha Madhan are producing Still Live: Auckland.
Just as in a rugby game, a live audience is vital to creating an atmosphere, so the public is invited to arrive (and leave) at any time and sit where they like to view the “knotty negotiation of bodies”.
Alice Soper, why have you signed up for Still Lives: Auckland?
In part, it was just pure curiosity. It’s not like the opportunity to participate in this type of thing comes along very often, so I thought it would be one heck of an experience. Plus, I am friendship-targeting Black Fern #15, Nina Sio-Milne. What better way to strengthen our relationship than to be physically bound together?
Sio-Milne is one of the legends of the game I had the privilege of meeting during the Rugby World Cup. She is a stalwart of Auckland club rugby but also a member of our 1991 Rugby World Cup team, who each paid $5000 to represent our sport on the world stage. It was the investment made by these players to attend this tournament that kicked off the modern era of the women’s game that eventually led to the finals’ sellout at Eden Park.
So, when I was asked to take part in this project, I roped her in. It was important to me that if I was coming from Wellington, that we also had someone who was so influential to the Auckland women’s rugby story. To pay respect to those who carved the path internationally that our Black Ferns now follow.
How are you feeling about it? Do you know what to expect?
Fizzy. I know theoretically what to expect in that the artists and crew have taken great care to walk us through the intention and practice ahead of time. So we can get a handle on what it is we are signing up for. It’s one thing to understand the concept and take part in a practice, but quite another to take part in the performance. That’s just like the game of rugby itself, though. You can know your role, and have your team practice, but you’ll never know how it really feels until you step onto the field to perform.
How do you think the ropes and the binding are representative of art and sport, tensions experienced by players?
First, the language of rope is already there at scrum time. The referee will take you through three calls during setup, the second command being “bind”. So, we are tying ourselves together at every set piece, just this time, we will have the ropes to physically represent that connection.
There is a lot of overlap between the women’s sports world and the art world. Both are spaces where members of your family or friends might be surprised at some point that you are still actively pursuing this dream. Both are spaces where a great deal of persistence, dedication and skill are not necessarily met with financial reward.
In terms of the message of this performance, at this moment in time for women’s rugby, well, I think it is very telling that you will have a pack of women, from all ages and stages of the game, giving it their all but with their opposition absent. That represents what it feels like out there for many in the sport. They are giving it everything they have, but the other half of the sport is yet to match their effort.
Daniel Kok and Luke George, why are you making Still Lives: Auckland?
Still Lives is a series where we create place-responsive performance installations. For each iteration, we locate something of that place to tie up, be it a moment in time, a cultural icon, or an artefact. Our intention is that through the tying, the complexities of the local social fabric and the deeper and pertinent socio-political issues may become more visible.
Why rugby players?
We were drawn to the intense physicality of rugby, in particular the choreography and bodily engineering of a scrum. A fleeting moment in a game, the scrum is a manoeuvre that requires the precise teamwork of all eight players per team to interlock and bind their bodies to each other to form something like a human tank. With all 16 players almost horizontal to the ground, pushing and surging towards each other, a scrum is the meeting point of intense physical energy and the embodiment of the teamwork required by a rugby team. We were also drawn to the fact that the rugby team is often comprised of diverse body types/builds, where there is a position and role for everyone on the field.
I’m going to be blunt and say some people will associate “rope bondage” with sex. Have you ever had anyone turn up expecting to see something of a sexual nature?
Very rarely. Of course there are many preconceptions, perceptions and associations around bondage, and we are highly sensitive to this. When we perform the work, we pay a great deal of attention to how we relate to and collaborate with the rugby players whom we are tying.
In this iteration, where we are working with eight women’s rugby players, we are keenly aware of the fact that we are two cisgender presenting men, albeit queer men, and the potential interpretations that intersect around gender and power relations. The performance will highlight and focus on aspects such as teamwork, collaboration, communication, respect and achieving a collective goal -- the scrum.
Nisha Madhan and Julia Croft, why are you producing this?
In 2022, both ourselves and Luke and Daniel featured in Melbourne’s Rising festival, us with our feminist futures show Working on My Night Moves, and them with Still Lives: Melbourne, in which they tied and suspended five culturally and gender-diverse Aussie rules players in the National Gallery of Victoria. We were lucky enough to catch the last few moments of the performance in the flesh. We then approached the artists and suggested that a version with rugby players would go down well in Aotearoa, given our obsession, history and love of the sport.
We wanted to show audiences that sport and art actually have a lot in common. It’s important to us to provide experiences for audiences that break down the barriers between these two worlds and allow an understanding between them to bloom.
We know that some sporty audiences might find art boring or confusing or intimidating -- and the same is true of art audiences toward sport. But, in fact, they can work hand in hand with each other. Through this piece, we can capture the beauty of our women athletes and place their stories centre stage in a way that might bring these two types of audiences together in a way that has never before been experienced.
As you watch Still Lives: Auckland, your mind might make associations between the struggle for women’s rugby to be taken as seriously as men’s rugby, you may observe these incredibly strong athletes being celebrated in their place by being adorned in beautiful and intricate knots, you may think about how gender stereotyping can hold us back, and you may realise that sport is an art and art is a sport.
Do you think NZ audiences are “brave enough” to come out and see something like this?
We know, through experience, that NZ audiences have a thirst for adventure and that they love to revel in the pride they feel seeing our athletes celebrated. Of all our work, Still Lives: Auckland has had the most immediate buy-in and effect on audiences because the sport is so dear and close to the heart for so many in Aotearoa. Audiences for this work are simply asked to come and observe some of our most incredible athletes being celebrated. Aotearoa is great at doing that. So, we reckon this experience will be a breeze for them.
We hope audiences leave with a sense of pride in our women athletes, we hope they leave wanting to know more about what it takes to be a female athlete in a male-dominated sport, we hope they leave with respect, in awe of these larger-than-life mana wāhine, and that they leave utterly inspired by the mana these women possess.
Still Lives: Auckland is free and is at the Concert Chamber, Auckland Town Hall, Saturday, March 30, 5:30 - 8:00pm.