recorded April 2020 in quarantine

Hi, everybody. You are listening to the Rope podcast with Fox and Mya. Thanks for supporting the show.

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This podcast is about Rope Bondage. Rope Bondage is edge play with inner and risk, and we strongly recommend you get proper training and listen to episode zero before attempting it. Find it at the top of our FetLife page, RopePodcast.

Mya: Fox is a rigger and I'm a bottom, and we're rope partners and have been practicing together for around four years. We love sharing our enthusiasm for rope with you, from our home in the lovely Bangkok, Thailand.

Fox: Yes, Maya. And today we are connecting from Bangkok, Thailand with New York City, USA, because we're very pleased to welcome the team behind New York City Street Shibari project. So that's Rope model Zero Gi, photographer Dirty Archangel, who is not on the air with us, but is with us in spirit, and rigger, Sam Jay. Hi, guys.

Zero-Gi: Hi. It's wonderful to be here.

Samjay: Thanks very much for having us. And as disclosure, we're actually coming from the illegitimate 6th Borough of New York City, which is euphemistically known as West New York or Jersey City. But we're about 20 minutes from Midtown, and so certainly our thoughts are definitely with everybody that's lost family members and lost jobs here. It's like 700 deaths a day right now for the past week or ten days. And obviously it's hard all across the world. So our thoughts are with those people, aside from everything that we'll discuss today.

Fox: All right, well, we join you in those thoughts. So, guys, your project brings shibari to the streets of New York, and you use iconic backdrops from the city contrasted with Gigi doing some pretty amazing feats of rope, such as recently hanging from a vertical chest harness off a bridge in Central Park. So, yes, today we're talking about your project, your inspiration, how you guys work together to create this beautiful art, and mostly while we're talking about, rope. So to start with the usual way, how did you guys get started in rope?

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Zero-Gi: But it's all about this level of experience, and then I'm just a born monkey. I've been trying to climb everything that was accessible since I could crawl. And so just this really shared thirst for adventure and creating together, and we had this confidence in each other's abilities and attitudes in adverse conditions that just made things seem possible. We knew that he could be across the span of a jail taking photos from way far back, and that he is at least ten minutes from being able to reach me and that I am strung up upside down, and that we're not going to have any problems that we can't handle.

Samjay: But that's also Gigi in the sense that she gives a lot of confidence in her body awareness and her communication. So it's like, I have the confidence to do that because I know that her experience as a self suspender doing this almost every day, she knows what she can handle. She knows what feels like good and bad pain. She knows how long it's going to take me to get to her to do these things. It's not the case that I'm just so awesome and that I could do this with anyone. It's just I can't. It's just the case that she gives me a lot of confidence that I can do these things because she would let me know. And there's plenty of times where I fully believe that if I have a heart attack out there, that she's going to get herself out, she's going to get down, and she's going to rescue me. We talk about all these ideas about safety for the rope bottom, but it's like, Well, I've strung you up at home, and if I have a heart attack, how are you going to save me, you know?

Fox: Yeah, that's fair, save the rigger too.

Samjay: Let's worry about the safety of the rigger!

[laughter]

Zero-Gi: These are the risks that we're talking about at home. And so these are the types of conditions that made this all of a sudden feel possible between him and me. And then there was also, at this point, a level of exposure to what the New York City possibilities of outdoors and the public were. Because of course I was raised in the same "don't fly your kink flag" culture that I think is really important to talk about- what is appropriate to expose the public to and what is not appropriate to expose the public to. And I think that context is really important here. And so New York City just has a very different context for what is okay in the public and what is protected in the public as freedom of expression. And we might get into that a little bit later as far as the gains that we benefit from the queer community in our history for our city, but that's a huge part of things. When we were at the New York City Pride Parade last year, I was staging for the block of the parade walkers for the Eulenspiegel Society, which is a really old- in fact, it is the oldest recorded kink organization in, they think, the world. I might be wrong about that. But we were with them and one of our friends was there and had some rope and was just like, "Hey Gigi. Ahahh?" And sort of like points at the scaffolding and I was like "Ahahh?"

Samjay: Gigi ain't going to say no--

Zero-Gi: Aw, I was there with you. So I made sure that I wasn't going to be totally piking on our plans. But he was sort of like, "Eh, go do your thing." And so our friend strung me up from the scaffolding while we were waiting for the parade to get a move on. And it was really good times. It was a whole bunch of corporate types and people who just really were maybe tourists or maybe not regulars in the Kink community, but were very queer positive, clearly. And so we knew that they had open minds, they just weren't savvy about our community.

Samjay: Yeah. And what I really saw here, I'm far more a coward about the public thing than Gigi is. What I saw was Gigi's ability to not only be up in suspension, but to radiate joy and to radiate positive reassurance for that corporate audience. So imagine these corporate types. Pride has been so overrun with corporate connections because everybody wants to look good now, right? And so there's all these volunteer corporate types that are out there because they're told this is the good thing to do and we need to make a showing to this community.

Zero-Gi: It's definitely changed.

Samjay: Right, and so they're seeing Gigi get strung up and they really don't know what it is, just like any passerby that might see us. They don't know what it is and they don't know if they should be concerned--

Zero-Gi: Oh, and they also don't know the proper swinging distance radius that you generally give somebody in the air.

Samjay: Right, and so to see how you sort of managed that crowd was really important for me to know that this could be okay and that this could be a positive experience not only for us, but for a wider audience of New York City passers by.

Zero-Gi: Thank you for saying that.

Fox: Speaking of which, what's usually the reaction you get from bystanders and from law enforcement when you're out there shooting in the city, potentially naked or in lingerie?

Zero-Gi: So we definitely have varied reactions from the public. I think that people ask us about cops a lot and about law breaking.

Samjay: I remember somebody whinging online that we were committing crimes, CRIMES, and it's like, at most, $100 fine for indecency and $50 for obstructing traffic. And that is the full extent of the, quote, crimes. They're not even misdemeanors or felonies. These are civil fines.

Zero-Gi: So I think knowing your local laws is really important because I don't think that New York City is typical there at all. But the first time and occasionally, a couple of times the cops have been called by people who are concerned, who are walking by. And so when we were in Central Park on our first shoot later in the morning, the cops came, rolled up to sort of check in. They stayed in their car and rolled down the window and shouted over to us. I was suspended upside down, sort of hanging out in a tree nearby. And they were like, "Hey, we got some calls about an underage person." and I was just like, "Hi, I'm not underage, and we're doing fine, and we're doing some aerial arts-" And they weren't even interested. They just wanted to know that I wasn't under 18, which, like, high compliments.

Samjay: Yeah, and so we were absolutely doing something wrong. There was, like, this fenced off area, but that's where the tree was. And so we're across this boundary. And if they wanted to tag us for that, they could have. But they're often very much about keeping the peace rather than about issuing tickets. And the other side is that there's long, rich history supported by the queer community, but also by other artists in the city, that is about really protecting the First Amendment, freedom of speech, freedom of expression. And what might be odd to know about New York is even panhandling is a protected form of freedom of expression in New York. And as odious as that might be, it's protected. And so, on the one hand, police officers have to weigh a potential $60,000 lawsuit that's happened, for example, versus issuing these minor fines. And so as long as you're not actually doing something violent or felonious or in New York, climbing higher than 25ft- higher than 25ft means that you might fall and land on somebody so it's a public safety issue- but as long as you're not doing that, they're pretty amenable to what you're doing. And they get artistic expression. They get that no one in New York has space. We all have to go out onto the street.

Zero-Gi: Space is a premium in New York.

Samjay: Yeah, and so all these street performers and artists are out on the street looking for acceptance and recognition and hoping to be like graffiti artists in the past where they were actually outlaws. Right? And then there were so many of them that people saw this is beautiful, and now they're celebrated in museums. And I think the Museum of Brooklyn has got this great photo of somebody committing a piece of vandalism, an actual crime, and celebrating this early graffiti artist.

Zero-Gi: Absolutely. And so that's been our experience with law enforcement, I think. And as far as bystanders go, I think that it is a really useful skill in this case to be able to have a reassuring and informative chat about what we're up to while strung upside down by my ankles with my hands tied behind my back, giving them thumbs up and really goofy smiles.

Samjay: And importantly, it has to be Gigi here because of the gender dynamics. You've got two men, and one man doing the tying. Potentially, we look like sleaze bags. Potentially we look like assaulters or exploiters of Gigi. And so it's really important that that communication, both the cops and bystanders come from Gigi.

Zero-Gi: Yeah, nobody's interested in talking to them. They're very interested in talking to the young woman who is bound up. And thankfully, the way that I've learned to interact with these people seems to work really well for what we do.

Fox: What's your secret? What kind of things do you say? How do you explain shibari to them?

Zero-Gi: Oh, so it really depends on what kind of knowledge somebody comes up with. There are definitely people who are just like "Ah, yes, I know the kinbaku. I'm one of you" then it's just like, "Ah that sounds really cool, man. Thanks. We're just doing our thing." [laughs] there are a lot of people who are just sort of like "I know this. I'm one of you." That's awesome. We're just going to keep doing our thing. And if somebody comes up and they want to know that I'm okay, they want to know that I'm not in pain. I'm not going to be doing anything that's going to force me to make pained faces--

Samjay: Gigi absolutely lies.

Zero-Gi: But the thing is, if you're going to be in public doing something like this, I just can't see it being possible if you're going to show any signs of pain, because at that point, people are going to be concerned that something is wrong. You need to be able to have a big smile on and reassure everybody else. If you're somebody who needs caretaking and reassurance, then you can't be in that position for the public.

Samjay: Yeah. So this is really sort of an artistic expression and an artistic endeavor to really build other sort of directions that rope can go, that other people have moved forward with well before us and are far more successful with this sort of idea, the idea that rope can really be used in a lot of different ways and for a lot of different purposes. So we're not going to have a big semenawa session out in public, and you've got to watch our sort of bedroom ties or living room ties--

Zero-Gi: Yeah, we're definitely not flaunting our kink out there. We're acting as ambassadors.

Samjay: --and it's really this very artistic endeavor. And so sometimes we get some confusion with the kink community because we are outside of the norm of what's acceptable in the kink community. But we are very much in the vein of performance arts and we are well within the boundaries of what performance art works looks like. So performance art is really about capturing the responses of audiences and really provoking and confronting them--

Zero-Gi: Which is not what we're about at all.

Samjay: No, and that's not it. We're out for acceptance, we're not out to shock people, and we are not really about provoking people. So within that larger world of performance art, we're actually not that controversial.

Mya: So you do have that kinky and artistic sense. And in the community right now, I think there's a lot of new people coming in who are much more aerial, much more yoga-y, and from my very kinky perspective, perhaps less kinky, but it seems that you guys have both of those sides. So how do you distinguish between the art versus the kink in this project?

Zero-Gi: That's a great question. I think that those other interaction modes, we really strongly believe that they are all valid and awesome, that diversity and inclusivity are the way to go and they are the future and they need to be celebrated and welcomed. And I think that there's been a lot of "one true way"-ism and superiority of whatever is the current trend in shibari for people who are highly educated and there's no reason to gatekeep what rope can be. I think that's actually pretty great.

Samjay: Right, so I think we're very much about a bigger world for rope that we're not tied to a particular route or aesthetic. So when we're at home, obviously we're involved in a relationship. And so it's very much about the kink trinity of pain, power and sex. And you can get all of those in a rope interaction. But when we go out to the world, we're engaging in a dialogue, it's a very different sort of engagement and it's just not appropriate to bring those things out necessarily.

Zero-Gi: Definitely not DS. It's not going to be a power imbalance that we're displaying to the public at all. It's super collaborative.

Samjay: Right, so context really matters here. We're still pushing the envelope in some dimensions. So ironically, when we go out and when we shoot nude, everybody gets it as art, it looks like art, they get it. It's art. We actually have fewer problems. It's when we shoot in lingerie, we're actually no longer breaking the law- this civil fine- but we are breaking a social contract because people see that this is something intimate that should be in the bedroom and they feel this conflict in this dialogue. And that's actually really interesting to us because she's fully clothed, right? But for some reason, it's more confronting. And for that reason we partnered with Thistle and Spire, who's providing our lingerie for us. Once again, this other way of building this bigger world.

Zero-Gi: It's really just that we want to make friends in different artistic worlds- we want to go to their headquarters and we want to talk to them about what we do and have them talk to us about what they do and make connections outside of our very very insulated kink and rope worlds, and so it's also that.

Samjay: Right, it's also laundering for acceptance. So the lingerie industry is already publicly accepted. People are okay with seeing lingerie ads at the bus stop, on big screen advertisements, billboards, everywhere. We are inundated with lingerie ads and it's okay.

Zero-Gi: They're a success story.

Samjay: Right? And then there's many of these other accepted art forms and when we partner with these art forms all of a sudden we become accepted as well. And that's what we're after. And then obviously making friends. It was so fun to go over to Thistle & Spire's headquarters and see their designers, see what they're working on, discuss what colors actually sell and which don't- white doesn't sell, apparently-

Zero-Gi: Oh yeah, except we are really all about mixing the ideas of these- it's about what a piece of lingerie says to a layperson and I think that white is sort of this idea of purity or newness, this débutante and I think it works really well with the purity of nature and a scene that is really serene and it really fights against this idea of dark dungeons and these assumed spaces of what bondage is.

Samjay: Yeah, and so we told them exactly what we liked about white and why it was right in some contexts, and you know what, the next time we visited them, they had a whole fleet of white lingerie items.

Zero-Gi: Yeah, and they fully outfitted us for a performance in New York City with their new white stuff and so that was pretty cool. And so it's really about these friendships where we can trade ideas. We think ideas are the greatest currency we have to offer and to learn from other people. And so I think there are a lot of people who are coming into shibari who are doing new things, and that's awesome. And we're doing something maybe a little bit different but we don't want to fight against anybody else who's doing other new things.

Samjay: And I think that there's this thing in the rope world- going back to your original question about sex versus nonsexual rope. We both have partnerships in rope that are either sexual or nonsexual. We're okay with both depending on the person we're with as long as it's very consent consistent interaction. Both modes are fine and I think sometimes we run into this problem in the rope world that I think we also see in the littles community. The littles community is very divided as to whether you're a sexual little or a nonsexual little and a lot of potential mud can be thrown in that mud. And really, both are okay.

Zero-Gi: Yeah, neither of these is more pure than the other and neither of these is dirty, and as long as everything is negotiated between two adult and capable parties who are fully understanding and on board with what you're doing- like, man, that's pretty dang okay!

Mya: All right listeners, we're going to take a little break here

Fox: I think you can tell already that Samjay and Zero Gi have a lot of interesting stories to tell about rope. So rather than not give you all of it, we've decided to split this interview into two episodes.

Mya: So look forward to the second half of this interview on our next episode with an exclusive behind the scene on that famous Central Park bridge suspension.

Fox: Hope you'll join us again then! In the meantime, if you'd like to support the rope podcast, you can find all the ways to do that on our website ropepodcast.com

(transcription by NYC Shibari’s Zero-Gi)

See more about NYC Street Shibari here

Samjay: So as background I spent 2010 working for $12 an hour as a radio tower climber out in all weather with 50 pounds of broadband equipment on my back, and you learn very quickly at 800ft up that you do not want to drop a screwdriver. You do not want to drop a part, because that is a two or three hour climb.

Fox: Yes. Not to mention the people underneath.

Zero-Gi: Indeed, whether or not there are people underneath, it's really about the effort on his part.

Samjay: These are radio towers out in the middle in no place, there's nobody underneath.

Samjay: I discovered the Fetish scene in Melbourne, Australia, in early 2011, and the Melbourne Rope Dojo opened in June. And I was one of the first five students at the Melbourne Rope Dojo when it opened. And I just kind of went because it was just something to check out just like you go to some impact skill-share and you're learning about everything. And I was really a diligent for a couple of years, and I had no idea how tremendously good the rope education I was getting. So Scott, that was running it was a licensed Osada Steve instructor. And so the quality of education that I was getting was amazing. And at the time, I was also really heavy into the Melbourne arts scene. I was dating a Romanian sculptor at the time, so I just really piped into that. And she had this massive dream of running life drawing sessions. And so I immediately saw the connection between what you could do with shibari and life drawings. So in 2012, just a year into rope, I was hosting these life drawing sessions through 2013, well before it became like a standard activity in the world. But at the same time, I would just have rope as this toy that I would incorporate into my other scenes. And it would be this one thing that would always fuck up. It was the one annoying thing in every scene and it kept bugging me and I kept having to work at it, and eventually it just crowded everything else out. And what I like about Rope is this is this way to get close to someone and it's just so high contact, high interaction that really I can't even imagine stepping back 5ft to throw a whip because it's like, I want to get into this person's grill. And so it just became all consuming. And so about three years in, maybe in 2014, I started having to leave the ryu behind. The reason why was because it seemed really strange to take another rope top's ideas and impose it on my rope partner. And I had a partner at the time that just didn't like the whole interaction forms of, like, let's say, Osada ryu. And it took me three years to sort of break away from that dogma. And then I moved back to the States, to Boston, and then a year and a half ago, I moved to New York. And so each one of those evolutions has been sort of a different feeling and a different process. But if I think about where my Rope is going, sure, we've become known for this NYC street shibari stuff, but really if I think the area of growth, at least for me, is home ties, hot connective home floor ties and really developing empathy and observation and empathy for my partner. And so that's a long process that I am so far from being where I would want to be. And so that's really sort of where my rope journey is at.

Fox: Brilliant. So Gigi, you said a bit about when you got interested, but is there a specific thing that had planted the interest for rope in your mind?

Zero-Gi: Absolutely. And so I got involved in Fetlife after about a year of very dedicated research because that is my way, I'm an academic. And so I got onto the Fetlife and I immediately looked up my local scene's educational events, and it was on Long Island, and so I went to- three days after opening my Fetlife account- a Consent and Negotiation Roundtable and everybody from the whole island was there, it felt like. And that was how I got to meet the people who were really close to me. And I had immediately been attracted to the rope that I saw on Fetlife. And I got connected to somebody who did that really well on Long Island and he started showing me what he did. We ended up getting involved and he really helped me on my first little ties. And so I started bottoming really actively from there and I started self tying almost immediately just because in my daily life I'm a daily practicer. And so it's what comes really naturally to me is I got to practice a thing everyday. Day one, it was a karada. Day two, it was a futomomo. Day three, it was weaving ties and it's pretty much an everyday addiction. And so I am an almost everyday rope bottom and an almost everyday self-tier. For the love of beautiful femme/them-creatures, I have occasionally been known to transform into a rope top. But that's really just when somebody's got those eyes that blink at me and I just can't tell them no.

Samjay: It's really funny. In the rope scene is Gigi is an academic and the number of PhD rope tops and rope bottoms in the scene is ridiculous. I went to an intensive in New York in 2017 and I'm looking around the room and I'm like, maybe I'm like the third best PhD rope top in this room of twelve rope tops. And I started just checking things out and no, I was like the fifth best PhD rope top out of twelve. It's just like the amount of education of people that get drawn to rope is ridiculous.

Zero-Gi: We are definitely the nerds of the kink world, and I stand by that.

Fox: So what's the origin story of New York City Street Shibari? How did you guys set it up? How did you get hooked up with Dirty Archangel? How did all of that work?

Zero-Gi: It was definitely Dirty Archangel's first baby of an idea. He contacted me in fall of 2018 and sent me a cold message with this vision of his panoramic photographs of New York City with me in rope in the foreground. And I was sort of like, Okay, man. But then I looked at what he had on offer in his portfolio, and he had the most stunning panoramic shots of New York City. It was iconic. Every single one was a masterpiece. And he had these gigantic, decadent, wall sized prints all over corporations. And all of a sudden, it was just like, man, this guy has really got something special. But it was still very much the case that my priorities have never been with creating content. This is my passion and what I love. And so I was really focused on the things that were going on in my life, and I pretty much put it as a solid maybe. And then I was involved with Sam Jay, and we developed a really strong rope relationship by that point. Some of those things that we'd gotten into by a year later were the first documented single toe suspension, which was hot times for us--

Samjay: Which we pretty much did within a month of meeting each other. It was just like, you meet this person that is just like this "yes and" thrill seeker, and it's just like this logical evolution. Like, I think maybe our second tie, we pulled something from Nicolas Yoroï, which was a Tk plus big toe suspension. And we just launched into that. And Gigi is just loving it and just owning it, and then it's just like, well, if you can do that, how about this other thing? And she's all over it.

Zero-Gi: Totally. No, but we researched it for a month, and I will say that it was my research task and it was definitely a proposal. It was not a mandate, like, "by the way, in a month, big toe, you and me, we're on." Although that would have been a really wonderful proposition.

Mya: It's an incredible photo

Zero-Gi: Oh, thank you. It's a hilariously bigfoot-esque photo, but I think that's sort of how it should be. But the place that I ended up having to go to find any sort of writing about this was to go to medieval torture records because that was the only place I was able to find anything. In sports. I was able to research big toe dislocations from upward and downward injuries, but nothing about pulling a big toe. And so I needed to go to records of people being strung up by their toes for torture in the medieval era. And that was the only place that I was able to get any sort of idea on a precedent that was recorded on the internet, as far as I could find. And we had looked at the risks really thoroughly, both as physical consequences- we had our plans, we had negotiated toe breaking and toe dislocations and exactly what sequence of events would lead us up to--

Samjay: What's so funny is people are always worried about the big toe, but you see this person inverted. It's not whether or not we break the big toe. We're okay with that. It's whether or not we drop Gigi on her head and she breaks her neck or hits her head. Right? And that's why her arms are over her head as a little extra insurance. But we're going to tie that thing so fucking tight because what's important is we don't break her neck. And so I think people don't realize that the level of injury that we are okay to take on provided it is not permanent long term damage. And Gigi really gave me, in this space, a level of enthusiasm and a level of confidence that we would be okay with the outcome.

Zero-Gi: Yeah, for me it's really about relationship risk as much as it is physical risk. And so that is something that has carried on and something that made this all of a sudden- this thing with DA- feel like a possibility. Thank you for putting it so wonderfully. And so that was right out of the gate. Just sort of the type of thing that worked well for us. And then at that point, we had hung me off of the outside of a fifth floor railing when we went to Seattle. And we'd had a couple of abandoned locations that we've done with friends and also just with the two of us because we were just so well within our comfort zone that we knew that Sam Jay could climb up a really difficult climb and I'd do the same climb and he could tie himself in, tie me while up there, like in this case it was standing on the window bars of a jail about two stories up.

Samjay: I'd like to say that anything that I can climb, Gigi can climb in high heels.

Zero-Gi: It was One case where I was in six inch heels doing the same climb. Very kind of you to say, but you also have a really strong history with altitudes which also made this idea of going on the streets- it all seemed possible all of a sudden.

Zero-Gi: That's such a wonderful question. And to use a bit of a rope pun, so loaded. But we started our rope partnership about a year and a half ago, and we have really compatible, as Sam Jay likes to put it, thrill sets. And so we were pretty much off to the races immediately. And we have a very similar sense of exploration and excitement, and we share ideas a lot. And so we've gotten quite entangled with each other as a result of that. Before that, I have a much shorter history than Sam Jay does. It's been two and a half very devoted years, and unlike his ten, but I've had a really wonderful thirst that can't seem to get quite clenched so far, and every day it just gets better.

Fox: Sounds nice. What about you, Sam, how did you get started with Rope?

Rope Podcast interviews Samjay and Zero-Gi in a two episode feature on NYC Street Shibari (now with full transcript of part one)

To see more, check out our whole NYC Street Shibari page with gallery highlights here