Faces of Kinbaku

Faces?

I’ve been saying to students and anyone willing to tolerate me for more than five minutes¹1 Honestly, more people than I would have thought… on the topic of rope a conceptual framework for what you might consider are the major contexts in which we tie. They are:

Pedagogy

Rope in class, for the purpose of learning. There are lots of practices in a lesson that shouldn’t²2 If I can change your life in only one way, its that I deeply, deeply encourage you to critically assess what unconscious habits you’re bringing from the classroom into your play. necessarily be carried into other contexts. For example, the model usually stands, and does various things to assist the student top like positioning limbs and body. The top may tie by walking around the model to get the easiest access or to see what it is they are doing. The flow of rope is functional, we tie a bit, untie a few steps, try again, realise our tensions are now lacking and opt to restart.

Theres a time pressure, we can’t give the model time to process an internal experience because its a 2 hour private lesson at great expense and you want to cover as much material as you can. Theres constant dialog between the model, top, teacher, other students, that probably wouldnt be welcomed at other times. The rope is often kept to an ‘appropriate for class’ level, ie the teacher might give tips on how this may be used for the models pain or pleasure, but it’s understood thats an activity for later rather than class.

It’s businesslike in a lot of ways, its goal oriented, its practice. The person being served or prioritised is the student and to some extent, teacher and classmates.

Photography

I would almost argue this could be the most common face, but I’m told there are an incalcuable amount of domina’s in japan tying clientelle every day, so perhaps not. It’s tying for the purpose of getting ‘the shot’. The point is the media produced in the end. We are tying with priority for the viewfinder and screen.

The model’s headspace is usually not a concern, even though I personally find the more interesting photography does consider this carefully. There’s all sorts of trickery, sometimes that crazy suspension has someone just out of frame who is holding up the model, ducks out of the way for a few seconds for the shutter, and then is back in supporting, because the tie is unsustainable or unsafe otherwise. If it’s an elaborate setup, it might have taken a team of people tying. In my own experience with Naka sensei, he noted that he often will tie a rope on, realise the rope he picked is perhaps a little too short or long, and he will untie the rope, find the right rope, and re-tie that section again. The point, is the end result on an sd card or cellulose, less so the model’s experience in the process, or any kind of communicative experience between bakushi and ukete.

Sometimes, we play, and the camera is an incidental or an aid to the play³3 I personally love using the camera as a kind of pseudo audience to build feelings of being percieved, exhibitionism, voyeurism etc. That shutter click in a quiet room with her slightly tortured breathing, bliss., and we get photos as a bonus, rather than the primary reason. This i would say is more the Play Face.

Play

Play is for us, the people inside the scene. Our experience as bakushi and ukete are priority.

So often, we try to inhabit this face of rope and find ourselves less equipped than we would like. Play is about creating feelings and experience, about communicating between bakushi and ukete, about creating space, time, tension, implication, desire, avulsion, and so much more. All this is a specific skillset, and often it requires us to learn how to shed the unconscious habits from the classroom. Walking circles around a standing model is great when learning a gote, but gives us nothing for creating a power exchange, a feeling, or is very useful for communicating any kind of idea through tension. (At least if we do so in the same fashion as the classroom).

Play doesn’t prioritise perfect placement, ideal aesthetics, the perfect framing. It’s about skin on skin, holding the line of tension until you feel them melt, or fight, or ‘say’ something. The rope always moves forward, its flowing and creating a feeling which is more important than perfect correctness. If for a photo we would change out a rope that was a little too short or long, here that would be crazy. Our goals⁴4 Most play rope goals can be boiled down to ‘dont let them think about the cat food’. If your tying partner is so disengaged from what is happening that they have the brain and time to consider their shopping list for the trip home, perhaps you should pull the emergencies and deploy matanawa. are totally different so our values and approach are different, and we use different tools. If we took the play approach into the classroom, our classmates might find us disrespectful of space, time, level of dress, noise and other boundaries.

Performance

Dynamic, big, flashy. It might have a stage, or an audience, or be for a video. It understands that the point is to be viewed and so we make choices like ensuring our orientation to the audience stays correct. Going through twelve suspension transitions in uv reactive rope while a techno sountrack reverbs through a warehouse for an audience of leather and latex. It’s sometimes referred to semi affectionately by people as ‘Circus Rope’.

In my opinion, for whatever it is worth, the best performance rope is one that manages to communicate some kind of story through performance rope as a medium. I find when it lacks this, it feels a little bit like a demonstration of technical skill rather than a show.

Not all performance has to be big and flashy, I’ve done intense Yukimuran style ties on a stage for an audience more than once, and it can work. But the difference that makes it not like Play, is that my priority as the performing bakushi is the audiences experience, rather than my model’s. Any internal experience I manage to create in them, is for the purpose of showing that to the audience, rather than as part of our own relationship and gratification. I have done many Play sessions with an audience, and used that audience presence to play on the experience of my model, where they experience a feeling from being percieved, and I’ve done so with no interest in the audiences experience. Its a subtle, but key difference.

In performance, like play, we try to keep moving forward always. It doesnt sell well to an audience to watch you decide you don’t like a rope, take it off and swap it for another⁵5 A friend of mine about a decade ago was performing in one of our local clubs, his rope got tangled in a knot as he was finishing some body harness component, badly enough that he just cut it off on the spot and tied off, to a big gasp from the audience. The show must go on folks, let nothing consume the cadence or upset our beat.. These faces share attributes but they are overall, clearly distinct.

How Faces can inform your practice

Language is a framework for thinking, and how our language works, what we have words for, changes our worldview and experience. Until we had a word for Orange, that colour was considered to just be a part of Red. But now, we interpret it as distinctly its own thing.

In the same way, giving language to name these different contexts for Kinbaku helps us refine our practice in each space. It helps us negotiate more clearly for what kind of experience we are creating together. Maybe you can think about how you might be bringing in tools that work well for Pedagogy into your Play, and being able to think in those terms helps you identify what you value in Play, what practices are valuable there, what practices need to stay and remain in other faces.

I often explain faces when working through consent and negotiation, to ensure we all understand clearly why we are here, what is our purpose and reason for tying. Try it some time, you might find that the cutie who you thought just wanted pics for the gram is actually more interested in play with you, and we just used this language to cut through some assumptions⁶6 You lucky dog, you ;). If you perform, thinking in this way might help you refine your choices in the performance, thinking about how you can tune for the audience experience.

What behaviours can you identify in your own practice, can you place them into a Face? And are you expressing the right behaviours in each one, or do you think cleaning up the lines might help?