Many people within the kink world believe that you must choose a given role on one side or the other: top or bottom; dominant or submissive. If you don’t, you are considered not to know what you really want. There is, however, another school of thought that argues that one should cultivate the ability to enjoy all sides. From this point of view, growth consists not so much in going ever more deeply into a role that would somehow represent one’s true self, but in one’s openness to all the possibilities one can dream of.

For me, if you are absolutely unwilling or unable to switch, it’s a problem. It means you are overly attached to a particular emotional and/or psychological pattern. If, on the other hand, you are open to switching, you become in the end, arguably, a much better lover, because you have the possibility for a more empathic understanding of your partner and a greater understanding of the energetic dynamic as a whole.

This workshop will propose switching scores adopted from dance. They are designed to stimulate your desire to play different roles and to increase your awareness of how roles change from one relationship to another. The scores will also permit you to explore creatively the different physical and spatial ways one can communicate dominance and submission, and how from one moment to another the roles can flip.

The opposition dominance/submission is at the limit not really an opposition. There is dominance in submission and submission in dominance. Cultivating an awareness of that complexity can only be to everyone's benefit.

Dr. Peter Banki is a scholar, artist, festival producer and teacher. He publishes and teaches mostly in the fields of sexuality, French and German philosophy and literature from 18th Century to the present.

He is currently an associate member of the Philosophy Research Initiative at the University of Western Sydney, where he has also lectured and tutored in the School of Humanities and Languages

He holds a Ph.D from New York University (September, 2009). His book The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical is forthcoming with Fordham University Press.

He is also founder and director of the Sydney Festival of Death and Dying and the Sydney Festival of Really Good Sex. He has been the host of Schwelle Sydney since 2011. From 2011-2013 he was the artistic director as well as producer of the Festival on the Art of Lust – Xplore Sydney.