Isabelle Hanikamu 井佐鐘

Isabelle Hanikamu (井佐鐘) is a kinbaku performer and teacher based in Montréal. She founded Nawakai (縄界, “rope world”), a study and teaching group that her site describes as formerly Kinbaku Dojo Montréal, and she presents her own approach under the name Sensual Semenawa Ryū (官能責め流), which stresses the sensual and erotic side of rope.

Lineage

Her site says she trained under Naka Akira. In an interview with Kinbaku Today, reprinted on her site, she said she first met him at his workshop in Berlin in January 2014 and had regarded him as her teacher and idol since she began rope; she had just returned from Tokyo, where she took private lessons with him that she described as open discussions without a fixed syllabus. She said Naka had allowed her to teach his style and some of his patterns, and that during the same trip Kazami Ranki invited her to perform at the Jyohya club in Osaka. A 2015 profile in Le Devoir by Josée Blanchette reported that she had been practicing daily for four years and visited her master in Japan every year.

Approach

In the Kinbaku Today interview she explained semenawa as tormenting with rope and argued that this is close to kinbaku itself, since tight binding is already a torment; restriction, in her view, can open the way to emotional release, and she adjusts the level of pain to each partner. Her site lists exaltation, love, sensuality, power exchange and beauty as what she looks for when tying, and compares teaching to drawing water from a shared well, asking for curiosity, patience and openness.

Teaching

Nawakai’s program runs from an introduction covering safety, consent, equipment and basic knots, through basic ties such as wakisarashi, momo shibari and ashi shibari and intermediate ties such as the gote and agura, to partial suspension, suspension lines and a module on advanced communication and trust. She gives group and private lessons in Montréal and teaches elsewhere on request. In early 2017 her Soaring of Suzaku European tour stopped in Nîmes on 7 January, at After Dark! in Bordeaux, at Session 42 of the École des Cordes and a performance on 21 January in Paris, and in Rome for an intensive workshop and a performance on 4–5 February; her site also records a wakisarashi workshop at Sydney Rope Dojo.

Stage and media

For Triptyque, a show by the Montréal circus company Les 7 doigts de la main created with choreographer Marie Chouinard, she designed a bamboo suspension for the dancer Anne Plamondon, adapted it for the stage and trained Samuel Tétreault to tie it; the piece premiered at TOHU in Montréal in October 2015. She also served as kinbaku consultant and performer for a video produced by Moment Factory and shown on the stage screens of Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour. She has explained kinbaku as a guest on Radio-Canada’s Pénélope McQuade show.