It came as a shock when a friend of mine shared with me her insecurities, about how she feels “not good enough”. “Not good for what”, I asked her. “You know, to do the figures…” It was heartbreaking to hear.
Yes, our (western) rope culture values toughness. We hang on one toe and keep smiling. It is always “higher, faster, tougher”. We are part of the problem, for sure, as we also “show” on every show what we can. It is however not the point…
Rope is not a high-performance sport. It is an intimate practice.
There is another vector where you can go instead of “higher, faster, stronger”. It can go slower, deeper, and more subtle. I wonder why we are like that. Is it all just our education fault (how the rope is taught) or it’s more than that? Do we try to avoid… intimacy?
Rope is revealing. Rope has no agenda on its own. All you do with it exposes how you think and what you desire. This is a vulnerable place to be.
Rope brings in power dynamics whether you want it or not. One’s hands are tied and another one is free. One is doing and another one is being done. This is terrifying if you really feel into it.
Rope is poetic. You need to be in love with who you tie, though, not to end up practicing that last suspension from the workshop. At least, fall in love for this one rope session…
Much safer than all of that is actually dealing with the technique. Hide behind the technique. And technique is important, I’m the first who says that. It is there for a reason: to make our rope play safer, to make it more subtle, to make it more expressful. But it does not replace the message we might have for each other. The reason why we tie. The purpose of what we do together on that jam night…
I don’t have an answer. I am just concerned that even in exercising something as deviant and as intimate as Kinbaku, we manage to create an external frame and performance pressure. We judge ourselves against this frame, we get competitive, and someone gets hurt, for nothing.
Or feels they are not good enough…