Prague

The Prague scene

Prague’s rope scene is built around a small group of teachers and two dedicated studios. Its best-documented starting point is Petr Soptík, who, according to Subspace’s own history, began teaching shibari in Prague, Brno and abroad in the early 2010s; his studio profile gives 2011, the studio’s history page 2012. In 2015 Joan von Brook joined him, and the two began running monthly workshops and performances in the Karlín district.

A festival and a studio

Out of that work came the Prague Shibari Festival, which has met twice a year since 2016. Each edition lasts three days, with several workshops running side by side during the day and performances and rope jams in the evenings. Its focus is mainly Japanese bondage, though less traditional forms are welcome, and its organizers’ page names past guests including Kasumi Hourai, Riccardo Wildties, Yoroi Nicolas and WykD Dave. It is one of several rope festivals on Europe’s calendar. The wider European picture is in Kinbaku in Europe.

Soptík and von Brook founded Subspace as a body-work studio at the end of 2018, according to its About page (its shibari page also gives 2017). From 2019, former students joined the teaching team. The studio now calls itself the oldest and largest shibari studio in the Czech Republic and teaches five named tying schools, among them a Kinbaku track and Yukimura-ryū. Its history page records visiting teachers becoming regulars: aibunawa workshops from 2022, Riccardo Wildties teaching regularly from the same year, and Naka Akira joining the teaching team in 2023. Soptík names Naka and Wildties as the main influences on his own style, which ties Prague to the Naka-ryū line described in the Europe essay.

A second dojo and independent teachers

Alive Kinbaku Dojo in Holešovice presents itself as a living space dedicated to shibari and kinbaku. It runs a weekly Friday jam and a monthly get-to-know-you evening, certified beginner courses capped at four to eight couples, themed workshops and its own Alive Kinbaku Festival, held twice a year since September 2025. Independent teachers work across several venues. Diana Vera, who came to rope in 2013 and has run courses since 2016, teaches most of her courses at Alive Kinbaku Dojo and also works at Klub Ateliér in Strašnice, where her eight-day training cycle first ran in spring 2024.

What the city offers now

Prague has dedicated studios with weekly classes for beginners and advanced students, jams, private lessons and two festivals, plus teachers who travel to other Czech cities. Most local programs are published in Czech; Subspace marks some workshops as taught in English, and its site offers English and German versions through an automatic translation widget, while the festival invites guest presenters. The community-run directory ShibariRigger lists studios in Prague alongside others in Brno, Ostrava, Plzeň and Pardubice, which it describes as verified safe spaces. If you are visiting for a festival, see Rope when you travel.