Bunny by Daniel Kok and Luke George comes to London as part of Queer East 2026

The word bunny, in rope bondage culture, refers to the person being tied. Daniel Kok and Luke George have spent the better part of a decade asking what changes if that word applies to everyone in the room.

Bunny opened at Battersea Arts Centre last night as part of Queer East Festival 2026, with two performances remaining: tonight and tomorrow, 5 and 6 June at 7:30pm. It premiered in January 2016 at Campbelltown Arts Centre in New South Wales and has since played Venice, Shanghai, Taipei, Montreal, Portland, Utrecht and Bruges. It received a Green Room Award nomination for Best Production in Contemporary and Experimental Performance. People have walked out. People have wept. The accounts of both tend to describe the same show.

Kok is a Singapore-based choreographer and shibari practitioner. George is an Australian multidisciplinary artist whose practice sits somewhere between performance, installation and craft. They met through an artistic exchange program in Sydney in 2014, matched by Campbelltown Arts Centre with no particular outcome in mind. They spent two weeks in conversation before they agreed to make anything. The rope came later, almost by accident, as a way of continuing that conversation physically.

The performance draws on macramé, Chinese knotting, sailors' knots and shibari. Audience members are invited to participate, some will be tied, some will watch, and the distinction between those two states turns out to be less stable than it sounds. The show runs for two hours and is deliberately unhurried. Kok and George read the room slowly. They notice who sits close to the performance carpet, who makes eye contact, who responds when someone near them says yes. They are looking for people who are curious rather than certain.

They distribute a booklet to the audience called Knot Notes, which pairs technical descriptions of each knot with fragments of personal essay and philosophy. The Prusik, for example, is a friction knot that holds under pressure without damaging what it grips. The slip knot is a starting point, easy to undo. There is something in that doubling, the functional and the metaphorical sitting side by side on the page, that tells you more about what this performance is doing than most descriptions of it manage.

The conventional power dynamic in rope bondage is heteronormative. The person tying is usually a straight man. The person being tied is usually a woman. Kok and George, both gay, were drawn to the question of what queering that structure might actually mean. Not just inverting it, but opening it up. Their answer, practically speaking, involved buying colourful cord instead of natural fibre rope, mixing macramé with sailing knots, and choosing to work in brightly lit spaces rather than the candlelit environments that tend to frame this kind of practice. They wanted something that felt more like cotton-candy than like a dungeon. That description came from an interviewer and they did not correct it.

After a show in Bruges in 2018, George said they had received one refusal the previous night. He said it was actually useful. It showed everyone else in the room that no was possible.

The show has changed over time. They added a conversation at the end, an open space for anyone, tied or not, to talk about what they experienced. George has described this as a care practice, both for the audience and for himself and Kok, who find the show physically and emotionally demanding in different ways. He has also said it is getting less tiring. Kok has said it has made him a better listener.

Bunny is pay-what-you-can at Battersea Arts Centre. Two shows remain, tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm.

Tickets through the BAC website.

Photos by Christopher Frape, Zhang Yuan, Bernie Ng

Creation and performance: Luke George and Daniel Kok.

Dramaturgy: Tang Fu Kuen.

Lighting design: Matthew Adey / House of Vnholy.

Technical stage manager: Gene Hedley.