Theatre of disobedience / Cat’s play with a ribbon

Theatre of disobedience / Cat’s play with a ribbon

This video takes the sofa: a site coded as female laziness and uselessness,  and turns it into a stage of refusal. In a culture that demands productivity, I choose regression and play: not strength or mastery, but softness, waste, and disobedience.

Referencing Utamaro’s print of a courtesan with a kitten in the marketplace of pleasure, I shift the frame. The courtesan is there as commodity; the kitten is a prop. I regress not into her, but into the cat -  elusive, uncatchable, unfit for consumption. The ribbon replaces the kitten, mediating between body and space, exposing how society “plays” with women’s bodies.

The sofa itself is loaded with history. In 19th-century Europe it was the “hysteria couch,” where women’s idleness was medicalized, punished, mutilated. In Japan the okiya was a house where play and labor blurred. My sofa bridges these codes: suspended between stigma and autonomy, pathology and artistry.

Play, as Winnicott argued, opens a transitional space of freedom. I reclaim this space against both patriarchal discipline and neoliberal “wellness” culture, which sells idleness as lifestyle. My play is useless, risky, political. 

This work is disobedience through regression. I refuse to be productive, legible, or useful. The female body here is neither commodity nor pathology: it asserts itself as the subject of purposeless, autonomous, autoerotic play.