I hope this reflection on my attempts of teaching ropes can inspire someone else who teaches or who would like to teach to take a closer look on what they are doing and what they would like to do.
INTRODUCTIONS TO ROPE
I started teaching rope last year here in Stockholm by giving a couple of workshops in Wish (women, trans* and intergender night club) and setting up a women, trans* and intergender separatist rope jam once a month. Over the years, I received some curious questions about rope from my queer community friends, so I did it partly for them, but also for me – I wanted a frame in which to explore rope the way I personally like in an environment that would be safe for me and where I could set the rules and conditions I would have wished for myself when I started. What follows here is an account of some aspects that have been important to me in these introductions to rope, and a little about what I wish I could have done better.
- Experiencing from the inside
I have been busy with the sensory aspect of rope – pressure, friction, giving/taking weight with or without ropes, the different layers of skin, fat and muscles in the body that are put in motion through the rope. I have wanted to supply tools to improvise with ropes and make meaningful sensory discoveries also for those who are absolute beginners and who feel to insecure to even tie a shoe knot. I have been trying to make the body and the physical interaction more important than rope patterns, also working with movement meditation, massage, muscle tone and balance. I have enjoyed this – I think it is a good way of developing a sense for if you like ropes or not and what you could do with it. However, it does not make people develop their tying skills so much – even if I show a basic knot or two, people need time to practice in order to find the self assurance to tie it in a situation where they also are responsible for the person they are tying with. I would like to give people a clear incitement to practice while also maintaining a more integral perspective on physical activity in ropes.
- Facilitating switching
I have tried to structure my introductions to rope in a way that facilitates switching. Of course, I don’t force people who don’t want to tie to tie or vice versa, but when I do warm-ups without ropes, I aim to say “now switch roles” reasonably often when it comes to who touches/receives touch, who takes/receives weight from someone off balance, who opens/closes their eyes and so forth. This is not only because I think there is a risk people end up in certain positions by default rather than by desire, but also because I think it is easier to understand what the other person is dealing with if you have a feel for both positions in an exchange.
At some points, I have encountered groups where a majority wants to get tied by others and are not at all interested in tying, not even themselves. I have been wondering how I can approach these groups in ways that activate them and gives them something of what they are looking for. Since they don’t come for a rope bottoming class, but for getting tied up, we have a problem. Maybe I should either announce a different kind of class, or start asking people to hook up with someone who ties if they don’t want to switch at all. Or I should invest time in fostering more rope tops in the queer scene.
Another thought I have about switching – though it does not apply so much to the queer groups I have been working with – is the culture of switching or not switching partners in rope cooperations. Since rope work demands a certain level of trust, it is completely understandable that people often want to work with someone they know well, especially on advanced levels. However, I think there can really be learning benefits in trying out the same thing with different people. I would thus like to find good forms for proposing partner switching within a pedagogic frame.
- Caring for safety and trust
– It has felt very important to me to establish a culture where its perfectly normal to leave or to say stop, and where people always say something about their desires and limits before they initiate something. I think this is crucial, but it would be nice to find more ways of not always being so verbal about it, but instead intentionally establishing this kind of respectful communication through a consistent practice.
– If I meet beginners, I always say something about what kind of physical risks there are with bondage and what one can do to prevent injury. Here, the challenge is to not scare the shit out of people. On one hand I would feel guilty if people hooked up with someone who suspended them in a club without knowing that they can get nerve damage, on the other hand I think the alarmist discourse of rope bondage is not necessarily adequate at all occasions.
– In the separatist groups where many people might have a trans history or ongoing trans processes, I make space for stating preferred pronouns in presentation rounds. The people who don’t have so much experience with thinking actively about what pronoun they use and why can get a bit confused, but they usually get the point fairly quickly. However, it is a concern for me if and how I could take these politics of gender with me into more cis dominated spaces. If everyone seems very obvious in their gender identity and never thought of it as something that needs further explanation, pronoun rounds just don’t work. There are several things I always do anyways, such as not using gendered pronouns (and especially not gendering the positions of being tied or tying in a generic way, which is quite common otherwise: “when I do this to a model, she has to do this”) unless I am pretty sure I use the right pronoun. Another thing I do sometimes when I have the energy is to out myself as queer. It would be nice to have even more tactics when it comes to dealing with gender politics, though.
TEACHING COOPERATION
I continued teaching ropes in the company of BergBorg during the spring of 2014. We developed two half-day workshops on the theme of cooperation between the two roles in rope couples. We presented them first here in Stockholm, then at Eurix 2014 in Schwelle 7, Berlin. The workshops both use improvisatory floor work, and demand an intermediate experience with ropes. The intention in both workshops is to address the respective activities of tying and getting tied. One of the workshops focuses on physical cooperation, and especially how the bodies can work to get down to the floor together and move on the floor together. We use a lot of basic movement analysis from contact improvisation and martial arts. The other workshop focuses on language and fantasy as a part of cooperating in rope. We try to explore what is in our heads when we are tying or getting tied and what that make us capable of doing and feeling together. We use different games and scores. In both workshops:
– We try to demonstrate and name different things that both the person tying and the person getting tied is actively doing in order to make the tying possible and interesting.
– We ask both the people tying and the people getting tied to describe their physical and mental activity.
– We play with changing the conditions that make the dynamic between the one tying and the one getting tied in different ways.
I could say a lot more about these workshops – I think they are really great, I enjoy teaching them and I hope we will do more workshops in the future. But what I most of all want to say is that it is very useful to have a partner in crime when it comes to setting alternative norms for interaction. Teaching alone does not completely allow for becoming the majority unless you have a very generous group. Being two is already massive if you are in it together. How would it be to be three?
In the future, I would love to develop workshops that could appeal also to the people who think they want to practice mainly suspension and classical forms. It would be nice to find and give tools to approach also that from a slightly different angle, and allow for a more in depth discovery of not only the pattern but also the activities of cooperation between the one who ties and the one who is getting tied in suspension.
PEOPLE WHO INSPIRED ME
Before I throw myself into describing physical activities that I think is useful to facilitate being in ropes, I want to say a few words on who taught me what I think I know for the time being.
First of all, I have had a mutual and very intense almost three year long process of inventing an amazing and ever changing rope practice with Bergborg, who is one of my closest persons in life and a regular rope partner ever since we met. Without our common encounter with rope and our conversations about it, ropes would have been another thing entirely for me. The things I have learned in that relationship and rope practice cannot be summed up here, but it is still important beyond measure to me.
This said, I will from now on stick to mentioning the people who tried to teach me something about being in ropes from a more traditional teacher’s position.
The question of what an experienced rope bottom actually know sort of clicked for me when I was having a knowledge exchange with Bergborg and Butterfly Bondage in the autumn of 2013. The first BB was suspending me and the second one was guiding the both of us through the suspension. She told me basic things, like to activate my abdominal muscles in a specific lift, and when I panicked because I couldn’t feel my hands, she told me to breath and take it easy, and that I could still move my fingers the right way. This set off a wish in me to explore rope bottoming from a less emotional and more technical perspective. I got the distinct feeling that there was something I could learn that was not only about getting myself in the right mood for being tied up and to trying to give the right instructions for the somewhat slack wrap tension that usually works for lifting me in a TK.
When I think back, Dasniya Sommer and Frances d’Ath actually gave me some clues on this already back in 2012, and I have been revisiting their classes at several points also after that because I think they have a very open, caring and inventive approach to both ropes and students. Actually, Dasniya was the one who wisely told me that it is a good idea to stop before you are completely exhausted in the ropes, since you have to last on your way out, too. I think this is a super important advice that stopped my macho endure-all-attitude from kicking in in these early days of rope practice. I also think Dasniya and Frances have a rather hands-on approach to the physicality of being in rope, without necessarily talking so much about it. Since their classes are usefully combined with yoga as a warm-up, there is an approach to breathing, core work and and pain management already on the floor.
The first time I came to a rope event explicitly looking for ways to not only tie/get tied up, but also ways to actively be in ropes was Eurix 2014. There I met MarikaRope, who recently opened Resonance13, a movement studio with the ambition of making more events specifically for and about rope bottoming, using inspiration from for example aerial acrobatics. During Eurix, I attended her movement class, which was a lot about core stability, stretching and mobilizing the spine. I enjoyed this a lot, not least because I was dying for a workout. Rope can be so slow sometimes. I also like that it gave me an occasion to think of how physical practice on the floor can become meaningful in relation ropes.
Since I had this longing to pick up more knowledge about rope bottoming, I also attended a couple of model discussions, one of them ending in a very hands-on experiment that I will soon get back to. However, I first want to say something about model discussions.
I would love to see more model exchange in practice rather than theory, but also, I want discussions and panels about modeling to be more structured. I want someone having a plan and taking responsibility for not letting the conversion drift. As long as that is not happening, a lot of the time will disappear into anecdotes about traumatic nerve damage and about what riggers should and should not do. It is completely understandable that people have a need to discuss those things, but then maybe a collective write up on accidents would be a more appropriate format, or a course on rigger safety and communication. If we want models to really learn something from model talks, then someone needs to know what they want to teach and keep focus on that, especially since we have this tilt towards giving riggers priority in the rope community.
This said, I was writing frenetically during these model discussions, trying to distinguish and gather all things that could work as applicable knowledge. And I think I learned a lot. The following two posts in this series about learning and teaching being in ropes – Communication in Suspension and Breathing in Suspension – are pretty much based on what people said during these discussion (and a bit on things I figured out for myself). I think what I wrote down comes a lot from Gorgone, Gestalta, MarikaRopes and RedSabbath, but most likely also from other voices in the crowd.
About the hands-on part: I asked to be coached by Gorgone and Gestalta in two positions that I have different problems maintaining sometimes – face down because my hands fall asleep and head down because I get dizzy. Gorgone tied me, and she and Gestalta observed me in the suspension and told me what I could do to maintain the positions more efficiently. I will get back to my physical epiphanies in the later post about muscle and position work, but I also want to share some reflections about learning and teaching being ropes starting from the social conditions for this experiment:
– We had a little discussion on whether someone else than the models giving feedback should tie me or not. I didn’t want to, and I think there was something useful in getting feedback from someone who knew exactly what they had tied, so there was no question of what the ropes did. Also, to get tied by someone who knows very well what it feels like to be in a good suspension is for me quite reassuring. However, I think there would be benefits with the other solution as well. Having someone who is not your rigger giving feedback on your position is more time efficient in a traditional class situation, and it is a good way of avoiding discussions between people tying and people getting tied in sensible situations. I know from tango classes that it can be a big relief having someone from outside telling what your problem is. That is what teachers are for. If you and your partner are not super experienced, you might both make assumptions that are faulty, and then you begin working in the wrong direction. And on the occasions that you know that the feedback from your partner is true, you might still not always be able to handle it. Maybe other people have more easy-going personalities than me, but to have someone that is pretty much on your own experience level correcting you can be difficult sometimes. And in none switching rope couples it is often even more asymmetric. To take advice from someone who knows even less than you about what you do is a real challenge. That is why teachers rock.
– There is no question whatsoever that there are rope bottoms out there fully capable of giving useful advice to other rope bottoms beyond the level of basic safety. Gorgone and Gestalta had very precise ideas of what I could do to make things easier once I was up in the ropes, and still I had a feeling that we were just scratching the surface. It was like finally getting the long overdue suspension intro for rope bottoms that I should have been given back in 2012.
– A couple of people told me afterwards they thought it was brave of me to ask for help to work out something that I was scared of when others were watching. The thing is, I was not scared. I was just eager to learn. Maybe there was something I did that made people jump to the wrong conclusion – maybe I did a scared face or whatever – but my suspicion is rather that it is so uncommon that models ask for help to practice something and get help with working it out that the mere fact of me asking to do that invites for the interpretation that these positions must have been troubling me a lot.
– I again thought of how much more models help riggers than vice versa. In classes that are really only about how to tie a pattern, models hang around and wait for getting tied, calmly and nicely. Sometimes this dynamic is so explicit the rigger pays for the class and the model is getting paid to work. While that kind of market is getting out of style in Europe, riggers are still absent to a quite high degree from the little amount of explicitly framed model work that actually does happen, including self-suspension classes. Also when riggers are there and try to help, they sometimes do it from a perspective that comes only from their own rope practice and knowledges, not really from understanding rope bottoming as the set of complex skills that it is, independent of the rigging. I could make several examples of this, but let me stick with a fairly polite one: In the middle of our hands-on experiment, a rigger passed by without much previous understanding of the situation and proposed that instead of actively trying to identify what I can do to make things easier for myself while I am suspended face down, I could just have someone suspending me daily in a less and less steep inclination until I was horizontally face down, and then I would have learned how to work with my body from the experience. That would indeed be helpful in the sense that someone would put a lot of their time at my disposal, but it is still not what I would consider an advice coming from a clear understanding of the activity of being in ropes. I truly believe in the power of practice, and maybe I would even like to be in a more or less steep suspension for ten days in a row – but just like when I rig, I want to have a developed and speakable language for my activities. A TK for suspension can also be invented from only experience – that is how this shibari stuff developed in the first place I imagine – but it would be slower and more dangerous than taking some initial advice from others.
SANSBLAGUE AND BERGBORG 