Canada

Canada’s rope history is documented above all in Toronto and Montréal, and much of it overlaps with that of the United States. The shared story is told in Kinbaku in North America; this page gives the Canadian outline.

Rope for a general audience

The sociologist Zoey Jones, whose 2020 Carleton University dissertation is based on interviews with practitioners in Canada and the United States, gives two Canadian examples of rope performed for the public, both held on each city’s Nuit Blanche art night: Morpheous’ Bondage Extravaganza in Toronto, which ran from 2007 to 2016, and La Nuit des Cordes in Montréal, then in its fifth year. Both mainly showed shibari-style rope and kept strict rules against nudity, sexual expression and visible sadomasochism so that people outside the kink scene could watch. Jones notes that no other kind of kink has comparable large, recurring performance events in either country. The Toronto event began in a storefront window in 2007, later filled a 4,000-square-foot venue and was never an official part of Nuit Blanche.

A Japanese lineage in Toronto

A Japanese teaching lineage reached Toronto in 2014. According to its own history, the Toronto Kinbaku Salon was founded in late September 2013 by the rigger Osaka Dan. In March 2014 he brought Kazami Ranki to Toronto for a five-day intensive, and soon afterward the salon became a school of Kazami-ryū, with four levels. After the founder left Canada in 2015, the teachers he had trained carried on; two of them became Kazami’s deshi in 2017 and shihan in 2018. The Toronto guide follows the school and the city’s other venues.

Montréal in two languages

Montréal’s rope schools publish in both of the city’s languages. Tension, whose website is in English and French, sorts its curriculum into colored levels modeled on martial-arts belts and says they mark a path, not certificates. Nawakai teaches a six-level series and holds workshops and demonstrations online and in person, with a website in French and English. The city has also hosted the North American Rope Innovation Exchange, a peer-led unconference that moves between cities, in 2022 and 2024. See the Montréal guide.

Beyond the two cities

Rope gatherings have been held farther west as well; in a 2013 podcast, Lee Harrington listed Ropegasm in Edmonton among upcoming events. The sources found for this overview say little else about the scene outside Toronto and Montréal.