Juliette

Juliette is a shibari teacher and performer who works in Belgium and France; her own site lists Brussels, Paris and Lyon. Rope is her main professional activity.

Rope career

She discovered shibari in 2016 and started on the receiving end of the rope, as a model. According to the shibari page of L’Alternée in Brussels, her wish to tie grew out of wanting to pass on the sensations and emotions she had felt while tied. She has trained with many shibari teachers, whom her pages do not name. Her organiser profile on the Karada House platform says she began performing in 2018, building staged visual tableaux in which she pays attention to scenography, costume and sound, and that she has taught in Brussels since 2022. She also works with contemporary dancers, helping them bring rope into their research and choreography.

Approach

Juliette describes the body as her central tool and as the means by which she passes rope on, and names contact dance and aikido as influences. Her practice favors improvisation, continuous movement and what she calls constructed chaos, and she is interested in what happens between two people in the intimacy of rope, looking for a balance between comfort and constraint and between strength and vulnerability. Her teaching, as described on her own site and on Karada House, mixes movement, biomechanics, technique and improvisation, puts understanding and personal experience ahead of repeating fixed forms, and gives weight to physical and emotional safety, inclusivity and verbal and non-verbal consent tools.

Teaching

At L’Alternée she gives most of the technical and themed workshops together with Raphaël, who models in the classes and whom she introduced to shibari; for some themed workshops she invites guest riggers. She also offers group classes, private lessons and private sessions, and runs workshops in Paris, for example a low-bamboo semi-suspension class and an all-levels class on rope handling and use of the body.

Media

In a May 2022 RTBF video report with Raphaël, she described shibari as often seen as sexual but also close to yoga, a way of letting go with a possible therapeutic side, and said that every session begins with a framed conversation about which parts of the body may be touched, because without consent there is no shibari. Her site also lists an episode of the podcast Sin Eden Sublime and a Radio MOJO broadcast.