Ebi McKnotty
Quebec City rope educator and performer who writes the free Rope365 practice curriculum, owns the Quebec City studio Cordespace and co-founded Montreal's Nuit des Cordes and the NARIX conference; she studies the Akechi Denki style with Akechi Kanna and Pedro Cordas.
Ebi McKnotty (she/they) is a rope educator, performer and organizer in Quebec City, Canada, and the author of Rope365, a free online curriculum for learning and practicing rope bondage. She owns Cordespace, a studio for Japanese-inspired rope in Quebec City, and co-founded two events in the Canadian rope scene: the Montreal performance event Nuit des Cordes and the NARIX conference.
Background and lineage
Her own Rope365 biography dates her start to self-bondage in 2006 and her first time modeling in rope to 2007. In 2011, on a visit to London where she met a large group of Japanese and European teachers and performers, she started to tie other people and to suspend herself. The Rope Podcast, which interviewed her in March 2021, says she learned there with the Ichinawa-Kai and with Kazami Ranki. She calls herself a student of the Akechi Denki style (Akechi-ryū) and names Akechi Kanna and Pedro Cordas as the teachers she currently learns from. By her account she first studied with Hajime Kinoko, with Kazami Ranki and with Osaka Dan, and she also credits A-Nicolas, Tifereth and Felix Ruckert among her influences. She says her rope work has been described as experimental.
Rope365
Rope365 presents itself as a collection of ideas and resources for learning rope bondage, shibari and kinbaku, built around 365 concepts, one per day for a year. The material is grouped by season: spring for foundations and classic ties such as the box tie and the frog tie (futomomo), summer for body positions, fall for technique and creativity, and winter for more intense explorations. Separate sections cover safety, consent, buying rope and vocabulary. The site says the curriculum is free, funded by patrons on Patreon, and written without generative AI; it is offered in English, French and Spanish. Its credits page lists photographers, models and guest writers, among them Andy Buru. The 2021 podcast episode covered how she created the site and how learners at any level can use it.
Teaching and Cordespace
On Rope365 she writes that she has taught since 2013 and that she now owns Cordespace, where she teaches with a team of more than twenty people. Cordespace’s own team page dates her first performances and teaching to 2011, lists her roles at the studio as manager, teacher and supervisor, and says the studio has run its rope meetings in Quebec City since 2014 and works in French. Her personal page adds that she helps organize Rendez-Vous Cordiaux, a monthly program of introductory and regular classes with intensives for more complex techniques. The same page says she has retired from international teaching, gives private classes only to students who have studied with her before, and no longer organizes NARIX or Nuit des Cordes.
Events and performance
Rope365 describes NARIX, which she co-founded, as a conference about exploring rope tying; Cordespace gives its full name as the North American Rope Innovation Exchange. Her performance album lists shows at Nuit des Cordes from 2016 to 2021, at events she labels MBE between 2012 and 2016, at Bound in Boston in 2015 and at Soirée Shibari in 2017, and the page names a collaboration with Le Diamant and Robert Lepage. It also shows rope photographs credited to her as photographer.