Bondage might seem an unlikely interest for a choreographer — tying up a trained dancer makes about as much sense as putting oven gloves on a concert pianist. In fact, as kinks go, it’s practically tailor-made. Shibari, or ritual Japanese bondage, can be seen as a way of sculp-ting the body like human bonsai — and what choreographer doesn’t, however secretly, long for that sort of power?

The Brazilian Deborah Colker, whose latest work to visit Britain, Knot, features a spider’s larder of bound and suspended bodies, says: “It is interesting to deal with bondage in art. It talks about control — of pleasure, and pain — and art is about control. Dance especially is about many of the same controls, of motion, technique, breathing. People may think it is perverted, but there is a clear contract between who will dominate and who will be dominated. This is not perversion. Perversion is to pretend you are a couple and equal, when really one person has all the power, and probably all the happiness.”

In the specialist world of bondage, the binder and the bound hardly ever swap roles, and both may be horrified by the suggestion that what they are up to has anything to do with pain. For all the loose talk about sexual “experimentation”, fetishists generally know what they want. In a sense, they are the triumph incarnate of style over fashion.

They certainly hold a strong appeal for the hip, stylish and sexy Colker. “That world is exciting because it is so intelligent, and the aesthetic is so precise. When I went to fetish clubs in Hamburg, what I loved was that they could do things with so much intensity, but so cool. It is not a heart thing, it’s about the mind, and I like this because my art also is cool.” She says it, like she says everything, with conviction, but cool is not the first word commentators reach for when describing her work. Quite the opposite. Colker’s dances are renowned for the risks her perfor-mers have to take, and for the casual, athletic eroticism they exude while taking them.

She formed the Companhia de Dança Deborah Colker in 1994, after an early life divided between piano studies, ballet, jazz and tap classes, working as a movement director in Brazilian theatre, taking a psychology degree and playing volleyball for the Rio de Janeiro city team. Her first work, Vulcão, highlighted the Cariocans’ semiprofessional devotion to feeling good and looking better. Her second, Velox, saw her dancers swarm all over a climbing wall. To those of us who feel that the Brazilian bum, on its own, justifies the 5m years of evolution that our ancestors spent learning to walk upright, this is a masterpiece.

For all their sweaty physicality, though, Colker’s dances bear out her claim to be a cerebral choreographer. The stronger the concept behind a show, the richer the movement she creates for it. In Knot, her subject is the commerce of desire, and she obviously found the research as stimulating as the performance. At home in Rio, a professor of philosophy, Fernando Muniz, was invited to give talks to the dancers on everything from Greek pederasty to Nietzsche’s lust for power. More practically, while performing in Hamburg, Colker organised a workshop with a world-famous bondage master, the evocatively named Matthias Grimme.

Although author of The Bon-dage Handbook and The S&M Handbook, Grimme is a caring kind of sadist. In an advert for one of his bondage classes, he advises: “Wear comfortable clothing.” When Colker told him that she was interested in domination but not pain, he was happy to oblige. “Different people get different things from the experience,” he says. “A passive model may want simply to be held secure, like in a hammock. Another may enjoy the pattern the ropes make on her skin. I always look for accomplices, not victims.”

“The power is with the person who chooses,” says Colker. Where there is discomfort in Knot, it is portrayed as a willing surrender and, in this sense, ultimately empowering — even when the El Greco-eyed Thalyta Oliveira is hoisted up in an attitude of twisted martyrdom, or the stoical Olivia Secchin allows herself to be blinded by the last coil of a thread that has been used to wrap her like a parcel. Dozens of ropes, ranging in thickness from cords to ship’s hawsers, hang over the stage, at first gathered into the shape of a tree canopy, but gradually unravelling into an obscuring jungle of lianas.

“The ropes came before the bondage,” says Colker. “I was simply fascinated by how they moved.” There is also a suspended, Rapunzel-length torrent of hair for the dancers to bathe, caress or hide themselves in. Colker wanted this section to be “primeval”, and a strange innocence pervades it. This is how Lucifer would have built his Eden.

The second half is meant to be harder, more urban. A giant open-topped Perspex cube serves in turn as Reeperbahn window, mock aqua-ballet aquarium and arena for a game of human-body Ker-Plunk!. Most of all, though, it is a fetishised void — a space made unbearably fascinating for those outside, denied access. Colker remembers one of the seminars that led to Knot: “We were talking about happiness, and I said that this is not the human condition. We have only happy moments. Now in this company we have dancers from 18 to — I am in my forties. One of them came to me in tears and said, ‘Deborah, I must tell you, I am happy.’ I thought, next year, we will talk again. This is only the beginning, my dear.”

Knot is at the Barbican, EC2, April 25-29, then touring