Exploring Kinabaku: The Path We Chose

Kinbaku is a journey, A journey of two people as they explore the bounds of their emotions and desires. Inspired by a variety of styles and approaches, Braxas is developing his own, unique approach along this journey.

Creativity, personal intention, emotional interaction, and technical skill are at the core of this workshop. When we combine these elements, we can tap into what drives us to tie and explore freely without constraint.

To start, we will look at some simple, but challenging, floor shapes. Together, we will gain a deeper understanding of body mechanics, which will allow us to adapt our shapes and patterns to fit to our models in the best way that we can. Whilst there will be a lot of technical information, we will take some time to explore how our partners respond to our presence, our touch, our ropes. We can explore a variety of different mindsets and emotions, allowing our journey to progress organically.

As the workshop progresses, we will take time to understand the fundamentals better by exploring some technical structures, gaining a thorough knowledge of how our harnesses function gives us the freedom to make, and break, the rules.

We look forward to sharing our insights into tying fingers, toes and the hair to create shapes that leave our partners feeling totally bound and broken. We will explain the possibilities for adding these techniques to your floorwork, partials and suspension sessions. Its important to remember that this can have a very powerful effect on the models, therefore, there will be a significant portion of this workshop dedicated to education of rope bottoms.

Moving forwards, we will begin to tie in the air, increasing the challenge for both the model and the rigger. Building upon the previous exercises, we will have a further opportunity to sculpt and shape our models, taking the time to learn more about Braxas unique, broken style.

Prerequisites:

A good knowledge of upper and lower body harnesses

Safe suspension line management

Anatomical knowledge and understanding of preventing nerve injury

Ability to differentiate between circulation and nerve issues

The plan:

Both days start at 10 am, and we work until 6 pm with an approximately 2 hour lunch break in the middle.

Andrew Braxas

Andrew Braxas first fell in love with Kinbaku in 2016 when he attended the Kinbaku Dojo Berlin. Since then, his life has been a whirlwind of private tuition, workshops and rope events. He began his journey in Osada style and although he has evolved a lot since then, he owes a lot to the incredibly detailed and thorough education that he received.

As the owner of Belfast Kinbaku Dojo, Braxas has been teaching bondage on a weekly basis for a number of years and places a strong emphasis on technical understanding combined with emotional interaction.

To Braxas, Kinbaku isn’t about patterns or pretty shapes. Patterns are a tool, and pretty shapes are the by-product. Kinbaku is about taking your own internal emotional monologue and turning it into an external emotional dialogue. The journey is the goal. By taking elements from a number of different styles, combining it with his own techniques, Braxas is developing his own, unique, approach.

Nëya

Even though Nëya found herself firstly in the role of the rigger and she still ties in active role more often than the passive one, in the last couple of years she started focusing on the model role a lot as well. Nëya went through several not just technical but also emotional styles of tying and gathered a lot of insights about her way to experience rope from the other side.

The thing that matters to her the most, when it comes to rope bottoming, is authenticity. Nëya is trying to find that very aspect within all her sessions as well as teaching. Emotional and physical safety has many ways and rules and are the most important when models learn about rope but at the end it all comes back to the goal we have. Which could vary from aerial shows to emotional one rope sessions. All of this is valid if we are true to ourselves and our partners and Nëya’s goal as a teacher is to show this to her audience.

She has been teaching at Subspace studio in Prague since 2018 and she has also taught on both sides of rope throughout Europe.