In Japanese, “Shibari” simply means “to tie”. The contemporary meaning of Shibari describes an ancient Japanese artistic form of rope bondage.
The origins of Shibari come from Japan, somewhere around the 1400 to 1700′s. Shibari is descendent of Hojo-jutsu, the martial art of restraining captives. Local police and Samurai warriors used Hojo-jutsu as a form of imprisonment and torture. While detaining individuals, the honor of these policing Samurai required them to treat their prisoners with official dignity in all titles and respect. Many various techniques were used to bind and incapacitate detainees, and the various styles, knots and patterns would represent the honor and status of their captured prisoner.
In the late 1800′s and early 1900′s a new form of erotic Hojo-justu evolved, called Kinbaku (“tight binding”). Today, particularly in the west, this art of rope bondage is typically called Shibari, and it is more of an artistic and/or erotic, and sometimes spiritual practice. Not so much a martial art as it once was, there are small sects of the art that practice a more physically demanding and excruciating version of the art, Semenawa.
A Shibari artist uses rope to rig and create geometric patterns, shapes and lines that uniquely contrast or compliment the human body’s natural curves and planes. The ropes color, texture, tension and application are used like a paint brush atop the the skin of a model who has just become a canvas. In Shibari, the model/muse is the “rope bottom” and the rope artist is “the rigger” (Modified Transcript from "The Art of Contemporary Shibari" website)
Erik Likes Red Studio would also like to give recognition to the numerous other cultures that have contributed to the Art of Bind Release that is practiced in so many diverse countries all over the world. From the intricate knotwork of the Celtic and Norse Lands to the Polynesian Islands, countless Indigenous North & South Americans, and so many other East Asian cultures and countries. Knotwork and rope play is continually being rediscovered and transmitted across time and space showing us simply that human’s everywhere and always will love to get tied up!
INSIDE THE STUDIO
Erik Likes Red Shibari Studio is located wherever (and whenever) ropes and willing participants end up in the same space and time. It is rare to find those few persons able to submit (consensually, of course) to such methodical artistic objectification. Those wanting and willing to explore the most visceral edges of human vulnerability are an honor and a gift to an artist striving to capture and frame the most authentic moments of the human experience in rope.
Human consciousness is birthed from chaos, from aeons of trauma interwoven in the very code that meticulously maps out the brain and body of our material form. Inside, we carry the hereditary experience of an animal over 370 million years in the making. We carry all the memory of our environmental conditioning and adaptation throughout countless millennia. We each hold deep inside us a heritage of human suffering and the pain of being torn apart, devoured by life itself, over and over, a million times before. It’s a memory echoing in all our instinct and intuition. It even vibrates through this current life in all the violence that we inherited from our parents and all those that hurt us the most. It becomes in our patterns of survival and all its mechanisms of coping created entirely out of our control…
And here is where the rope begins… where neither fight or flight are options any longer. And here is where we become undone, bound in binds that either drive us mad or to inevitable ecstasy...
“I’ve seen laughter, tears, orgasm, and poetry pouring forth in these ropes. It is something different for everyone. I become an Artist and a Witness all at once, a performer and a spectator—It’s such a potent place for me, a place of pure creation, absent of judgement.” —Erik
Want to Experience The Ropes?
Shibari is undoubtedly an experiential art. Immersing into a deep state of physical and mental submission can be a very empowering experience, and will inspire intense mental, physical and spiritual release. During a Rope Session an individual will be led through a somatic journey into and through the art of BDSM and sensory activation and play. Consciously practiced and intentional Shibari will incite the potent power of vulnerability within us and create a container of trust and safety in which we are able to resolve many of the more challenging aspects of our unconscious mind, and integrate ourselves into a more healing and whole relationship with this human experience. #experientialart #somaticart
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CONTACT ELR STUDIO
Wanted: Artists, Models & Collaborators
If you are an artist, model, or just a person who wants to have a rope. experience, please contact ERIK LIKES RED STUDIO. Shibari is inherently a collaborative art and we welcome all those brave and beautiful people interested in working with us.