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An update on Ranboo

An update on Ranboo

When I wrote about the development of Ranboo, I promised an update about my personal development w.r.t. Ranboo.
In the meantime, I taught Ranboo or elements of this style on three different continents in over 20 cities and to approximately 300 people (just in my class at this year’s Shibaricon, there were about 130 people.) I always try to communicate the basic ideas of Ranboo and I always try to say as clear as possible, that I cannot and will not teach people to “tie Ranboo”.

Why not? Well, it is easy to explain. Ranboo is, as I said, my personal interpretation of some of the key terms of the Osada Ryu and I like to tie this way with certain people. It is, if you want, a personal thing. And in my ideal rope world, people learn and practice the basics of rope bondage, perfect ther skills and then, at a certein point, “fill the patterns with life”, i.e. once they understand (the German language has a much better word here: “begreifen”) the reasons for this or that technique, they can implement their personality. (Here is definitly a parallelity to the Japanese concept of Shuhari)

So, why sharing it and giving workshops about Ranboo, one may ask?
That’s easy to answer, too. I love sharing my thoughts, I love teaching and I love the eyes of people who, for the first time in their rope life, see how kinbaku can also be. It can be fun, it can be dynamical, it can be a dance, it can be brutal, it can be fast and much more.
After this general and personal thought about teaching Ranboo, I want to go deeper into a detail, that has developed in my tying. Some have read my writing about the interview metaphor and there are already people who attended a workshop about it.
(https://fetlife.com/users/1762060/posts/2762869)
According to this metaphor, tying can be seen as a special kind of communication, where the power relationship is included. It is not a metaphor that describes the way of applying ropes but rather, how the process of tying can be described.
Ranboo, in contrary is only a way of how to apply ropes.
My new deveolopment, or, the promised update consists in combining those two concepts with each other.
The crucial part of the interview metaphor was to listening to possible answers of the person in ropes.
The crucial part of Ranboo was the element of surprise, i.e. actions of the tying person that make it impossible to foresee the next steps. A foreseeable scene can become boring.
In basically all my recent Ranboo scenes, I tried to find a way to listen to my partner, in order to set better actions. In contrary to non-Ranboo scenes, it is very tricky to listen carefully because the dynamics and the intensity is much “higher” in Ranboo. Nevertheless, there are lots of “slots” in Ranboo, where it’s very easy not to just make a break, but to use the low speed/low dynamics for listening carefully. Such slots are for example, the beginning of the scene, where I wait behind my partner and look at his/her body language. The very next situation is the wristcuff, then, also, when you apply the first wrap and so on and so forth.
Ranboo means to vary the speed, the distance, the (physical) intensity. This leaves enough room to listen to your partner very carefully.
Maybe, my development can be described as follows: I found, that it’s necessary to step back from a scene to keep an overview. Only this overview enables one to listen carefully enough. Because nobody wants an interviewer who talks all the time. But it can be amazing, when the questions, that are asked, are stormy and overwhelming.

Next update as soon as I have one.