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.