Play-practice: fun with science!

I think one of my obstacles is that a general lack of tying opportunity means that every time I tie, I both want to practice and to play, and to practice playing. Balancing my competing needs as a rope top sometimes proves challenging, as I end up planning scenes based on something I want to practice or try out, with varying levels of success. 

On Sunday night, it was Shut Up and Tie, the local rope-centric play night. It tends to be a quiet night at the best of times, but it was really slow this week, due to everyone being at DomCon. Fortunately, M and A were there, so I asked A if he wanted to tie. 

While they tied, I did some self-tying, as this is the one party where I can do so. I tried Kinoko's hip harness on myself. Possibly I loaded it incorrectly, or didn't compact the frictions enough, but the lines from the center to the legs shifted in a fairly alarming way, threatening to tighten on the thighs. Clearly more work is needed, 

After this, I tried a Naka-style hip/thigh mermaid tie, with moderate success. It needs careful loading, and I don't think it would be a favorite for self-tying, as it really limits what I can do. But I want to try it with a chest harness so I can work on torsions. 

While self-tying and coiling afterward, I debated a few ties I might try with A, going back and forth between something simpler, like a yoko tsuri, or working on one of Kinoko's ties and a transition. I finally decided to try Kinoko's pinwheel tie transitioning into a yoko tsuri, all kept close to the ground so we could play more. 

Overall, it went pretty well. The two of us always have fun, an enjoyable combination of sexy rope and silliness that always leaves me smiling. The pinwheel suspension went okay, but the transition didn't quite go the way I hoped, as I didn't properly adjust the attachment to shift him from facedown to side, but the concept behind was solid, he said later, so I'm pretty happy about that. One I get him down from the mess I'd made of that, we kept playing in the partial. As I untied, he tried to kick the rope off his ankles, prompting me to throw my tangled rope back on him with a cry of, "SUBMIT TO MY ROPE! ACCEPT IT!"

(As it says on the Devil Mask shirt, "Way More Seriouser Than You.")

This ended up being a pretty successful combination of practice and play: I had fun, tried something, and learned how it might work better. 

There's another play party this Friday, so I'm going to try to set up some scenes for that. In the meantime, try to get a rigger study done this week and try to figure out where I went wrong on the Kinoko harness. 

Kinoko Intensive, Day 2

The second day dawned bright and sleepy, after the late night at the performances. Energy was flagging all around.

So of course we did transitions!

Running man into pinwheel into gyaku ebi; it's not a lengthy sequence, though with eight tying couples that's probably for the best. It required a TK and his suspension hip harness, plus a thigh cuff and ankle cuffs.

I tied it, got through it pretty okay, though there are a few details that I need to remember. It's a pretty sequence that can transition into a double ankle inversion or hip-harness inversion, which is actually what Kinoko uses it for in his cyber rope show. Double-ankle inversions are a little tricky for me, the tiny rigger. Kinoko admonished me to put my ring as high as I can, so I'm almost on tiptoe reaching for it, but is something my bad ankle and I will have to discuss. I am not going to put my body at risk of injury or failure (and by extension, my bottom's safety) to get my ties a little higher and prettier. Some ties just won't work unless I have either a box to stand on or a very, very small bottom.

During this sequence, one couple had been having a little trouble, or at least Kinoko thought so. The couple was a female rigger/ male bottom, with the bottom being taller and bigger than the rigger by a significant amount. As a result, we were treated to Kinoko tying this bottom (G) and putting him through the transition sequence, while giving us advice about suspending larger bottoms (some of which was: don't.)

This is interesting for me. Most of my regular bottoms have been bigger than me, some more than others. I have tied and suspended people a foot taller and 50-70lbs heavier than I am, and I disagreed with some of Kinoko's advice.

He said to tie them low to the ground; kneeling, not standing. I've tried this, and I've found it usually results in me trying to pull their weight up, rather than just tipping them into a suspension and removing a leg, as I would if they were standing. Why give gravity an advantage?

It was... satisfying watching Kinoko struggle a bit at something I have done for years. Not always perfectly, but an activity that I don't really blink at. It's just part of my tying experience, and it always has been.

So after lunch, we came back to do his chaos rope, or ami-ami; the wild suspension webs that he's used for art installations. They're simple, in a way. Just wrap, hitch, construct a supportive harness with no particular pattern, make it pretty, and start attaching to your frame in a pretty way. Put on some music to help the artistic inspiration. He stood his bottom on a box to get her higher up, and then just tied her in place before taking the support away.

This ended up being a lot of fun! Everyone tied, and we were all ensconced in a huge web connecting all the bottoms and all the frames. I want to play with this style, literally; it would look great in the cage at Threshold, and I think the flowy style would really suit a scene.

Once we were disentangled, we took a break, and then we were down to the last hour or so, and Kinoko asked if anyone wanted to learn something else. People asked for more about transitions, for teppou (which was a fairly straightforward tie that he said he never uses for play), and for a transition into agura, which actually ended up being really pretty, though not an agura -- swan pose, he called it. He finished by tying and explaining what we ended up calling "dirty old man kidnaps girl from the street" style, highly reminiscent of Naka Akira in the form of the TK. It's less structured (so more dangerous) and has a certain je ne sais quois in its deliberate messiness.

At the end of the weekend, I was pretty happy, but also felt like I hadn't quite got what I was looking for. I don't know if I wanted some revelatory insight into Kinoko's style, his handling tricks, or something else. What I sense is that simply learning someone's ties in a top-down way is going to interest me less and less, or at least not feel so much like worthwhile investiture of money and time. One-on-one lessons, where a teacher can look at how I'm tying and teach based on that, feel like a more valuable insight for me right now.

Kinoko Intensive Day 1 and Performance

Last weekend, I attended a weekend intensive with Hajime Kinoko. I have admired Kinoko's speedy tying, efficiency in rope handling, and creativity for years. The opportunity to learn from him was very exciting for me, as well as being somewhat nerve-wracking. This was also the first intensive I had attended as a rigger, having previously bottomed at a Kanna workshop and audited at Otonawa. So going in, I had a good bit of imposter syndrome.

Bottoming was the lovely V, who I nearly dropped a few weeks prior but was game to carry on regardless. All weekend she was tough, enduring, positive, and a lot of fun, and I'm really grateful for what I was able to learn thanks to her.

The first day started as, I have learned, all intensives start: the TK, in whatever way is unique to the teacher. I picked up a few tricks, but there weren't any major design departures from what I'm used to.  It's a clean tie, with small changes made for efficiency in tying and added structure. He has a greater emphasis on neat-looking ties, which I may start to adopt. I came out of the morning feeling fairly solid about my tying thus far.

After lunch, we learned two hip harnesses, both the one he uses for suspension and another one that is more for play and making butts look good. General consensus: we all like butts; making them look good is definitely a worthy goal. The one he uses for suspensions is tied pretty much exactly the way it looks like it's tied. I quite like it; it's not too fussy while being one of the sturdier Japanese- style hip harnesses I've come across.

In the last few hours, we tied the first suspension of the weekend. Kinoko calls it a "pinwheel;" it's a running man with the back leg rotated and fastened to the side. Kinoko designs his ties to look attractive from all angles, providing interesting shapes or patterns. There are some details in this suspension that I need to remember/nail down, but when Kinoko said, "Good job," I believed him.

We had an hour to spare at the end, and the translator had gone home, so Kinoko did a Yukimura-style tie/scene with L. He explained the reasoning behind the style: that Yukimura was an older man, not able to get up and down a lot, so he tied on the floor with low points, and used rope to move his models around. The tie emphasized exposure of the pussy, with the model's face on the floor and legs tied open.

(I am super into this, and also I want to do it to a guy.)

He demonstrated "punching with rope," and the teasing slowness of some of the style. It was one of the hottest demo scenes I've ever witnessed.

End, break for dinner and some relaxing time before the performances that night.

My general takeaway from his two cyber rope performances:

1. I will never tie that fast. From getting on stage to getting her in the air in a hip harness and TK took less than ten minutes, and that's with some non-tying time at the beginning. Good goddamn.
2. Everything is better if it glows in the dark and lights up.
3. I will never be that cool.
4. Kinoko seems to have a set of 5 or 6 transitions that he rearranges in different orders for his cyber rope performances. None of them are tremendously complicated; he just appears to do them so effortlessly that they seem more technically imposing than they actually are.
5. It's a sequence with a lot of sympathy for the model. The transitions really move the weight around, changing the load from TK to ankles to harness one after another, allowing relief and rest.

Order vs. Chaos

I don't always know what style of rope I am most drawn to. Sometimes I admire clean, spare lines and ties. They craft elegance out of simplicity. But these are the ones that frustrate me the most, eluding my understanding despite how straightforward they seem.

On the other end, I adore messy, chaotic ties, twisting bodies into grotesque dolls thrown about in a storm of rope. Webs and tangles, yet a sense underlying all of it. I marvel at seemingly sloppy ties that coalesce into function. My messiness, on the other hand, falls apart without form to guide it.

All I can do is study and practice both. It is not enough to tie (not that I tie enough, at all), but I think I need to study, the same way any artist or craftsman would: by looking at their inspirations and analyzing them.

So, one rigger or video a week. Take an hour or two to pick through their Fetlife, take notes, really look at what's happening in their pictures. I want to watch performances so I can analyze transitions as they happen (since so many performances are suspensions). Observe, annotate, maybe imitate, and somewhere along the way, my own style will come forward a little more.

Current goals:

-- Transitions. Want to do a facedown-torsion-inversion transition, possibly ending with a futo tsuri.
--Work on suspendable lotus tie.
-- Experiment with unusual positions in partials for play -- where the weight is, the pressure, the tension, how to play with their balance for effect.
-- Go out and play!

Accepting Your Strengths

It's easy for me to be hard on myself. I get imposter syndrome, compare myself to others unfavorably, and focus on my mistakes, letting my strengths fall by the wayside in the process. My self-deprecating humor about tying has become a reflex; every practice session ends with, "Yay! You're not dead!" or profuse gratitude for "putting up with" my TK drills.

Is it possible that I have become so fearful of developing the dreaded rigger ego that I've gone too far the other direction? I see it in my friends, too, this hesitation to acknowledge what we're good at and focus on what we're not good enough at. At what point have we diverged from a healthy attitude of lifelong learning and fallen into false immodesty, or damaging cycles of self-criticism?

I messed up at rope lab the other night, in a way that could have ended badly. In focusing on one aspect of a transition, I neglected another. My bottom could have been dropped on her head. She wasn't; she was fine; we get her down safely, ended there and untied, and she's still bottoming for me at the intensive this weekend. Needless to say, I have both aspects of that transition now nailed very firmly in my mind. And when I moved past that point, I found some things to feel good about: the sequence had gone well until then. I understood it, still remember the poses, and would like to try it again.

"Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett, in a rare moment of clear meaning.

I will continue to try, fail, fail again, and fail better.

In the meantime, here are things I am good at:

1. I have adapted my tying to my size, developing techniques to tie people much bigger than myself. This often involves climbing on them, which most folks find pretty enjoyable and entertaining, and provides opportunities to play with the size difference in a new way. Making a big person small, or making them tall and then striking from below delights me.

2. I'm adaptable to tone. Want mean rope? Can do. Want nice, cuddly rope? Yup, great! Hug rope? Sexy rope? Circus rope? Let's go!

3. I'm willing to branch out and try new things. Western style, new ryus, new perspectives -- even if I don't end up adopting whatever it is, I'm willing to see if there's something to take away from it.