Berlin

The Berlin scene

Berlin’s rope scene grew inside a city that already had an open, experimental culture of SM, dance and body work. The dancer and choreographer Felix Ruckert launched the xplore festival at Dock 11 in July 2004, a yearly program of workshops and talks on creative sexuality, BDSM and tantra. In March 2007 he opened schwelle7, a venue for participatory and experimental body practices that he ran until May 2016. A 2014 profile in The Berliner placed it in Wedding and described its community as very queer. According to Dock 11’s portrait of Ruckert, schwelle7 hosted kinbaku masters who taught and performed there, and he helped make Japanese rope better known in Europe. Japanese teachers were already coming to the city: the timeline in a Kinbakumania profile of Osada Steve lists performances and workshops in Berlin in January 2004, a story told in Kinbaku goes global.

From exchange to institute

In 2012 Ruckert started EURIX, a week-long exchange for European riggers and models that still meets twice a year, in spring and autumn. Its current home is the Holzmarkt site, where Ruckert opened IKSK, the Institute for Body Research and Sexual Culture, in October 2020. IKSK’s rope program includes a weekly drop-in class for absolute beginners, a basics series and suspension practice with rotating teachers from the Berlin scene. Its class descriptions are published in German and English; they invite participants to switch between tying and being tied and say no partner is needed for those willing to work with others in the group. The wider European story of EURIX and Berlin’s place in it is told in Kinbaku in Europe.

Studios and queer spaces

Berlin’s rope has kept close ties to the stage. The choreographer Dasniya Sommer, who according to the City of Women festival archive has studied and taught shibari since 2006, is one example, and Gestalta, who came to rope in 2007, ran a month-long “Cirque Shibari” research project at schwelle7 in 2014. Gestalta opened Daruma, a dedicated rope studio, in January 2024; it teaches structured courses from first knots to suspension. Shibari Studio Berlin is built around the work of the artist Dan Carabas, with tantric shibari workshops, private tuition and online courses.

Two schools teach Japanese lineages directly. Discover Kinbaku is the duo Alexander MA and Natasha NawaTaNeko, partners since 2011 and teaching and performing internationally since 2016, who are drawn in particular to the semenawa of Akira Naka. From Studio 6×6, an attic studio in Moabit, they run workshops and course series and host the Kinbaku Salon; with their publishing house Die Goldbomben they also produce The Kinbaku Society of Berlin Magazine, a quarterly of poetry, essays, drawings and photography that began in 2019 with a small group of their students and 100 copies. The non-profit Osada Kinbaku Dojo teaches its own interpretation of classic Osada Ryu and, as in a dojo, lets students learn at their own pace.

Much of the city’s community life runs through queer-led spaces. Karada House presents itself as a queer-run collective of teachers, artists and organizers; its beginner rope classes come with solidarity tickets and discounted multi-class rope cards. It also organizes Queerope Berlin, a five-day gathering for Japanese-style rope that is open only to women and LGBTQIA+ people; the 2023 edition was held in English, and the 2026 edition ran in September. KOR berlin calls itself a queer “brave space”; shibari is the core of its program, which also covers breathwork, tantra and embodied consent. Qibari takes a body-work route, pairing rope with shiatsu in a Rope-Shiatsu training.

What the city offers now

The result is a scene where a newcomer can choose between institute-style drop-in classes, studio courses that build toward suspension, queer community classes, rope jams and twice-yearly exchange weeks. English is widely used: besides IKSK’s bilingual class listings, Karada House and KOR berlin publish their programs in English. For what to expect at a first session, see What happens at a first shibari class.