Hi Shibari Study,
I have been enjoying your series and the clear way everything is explained. However, I have increasingly noticed that you do not have any lessons about bottoming, nor do you include any feedback from the models during the tutorials. In the latest series, by tying many inexperienced models, you further the common (and incorrect) assumption that bottom's skill level is not important. By having the models talk during your tutorials (explaining that they prefer a wrap here, or can feel uneven tension in this way etc) it could help bottoms know what types of feedback they can provide their riggers, or to know what to pay attention to in their bodies. I think this is a huge gap in your website and I think it is pretty easily remedied.
Dear @Ariana Hirsh, Thank you for your feedback! We are well aware of this current educational gap and are planning to add more bottoming related content in the future. We understand what is missing as we create new content, and a louder voice to our demo bottoms is definitely on our priority list. Producing new content takes times (budgeting, producing, shooting, editing, releasing), sadly there is always a long time spent between our wish to create specific new content and the concrete release on the platform. We have a full shooting schedule for 2020 and 2021 and the new courses and classes will be including more bottoming skills! Until recently our website was dedicated to producing pattern tutorials only, focusing on the technique and rope/body mechanics behind a harness/tie. We had to keep the models very passive in our current tutorials because of a simple technical issue; they don't wear a microphone (so their bodies are free to be tied on without a sound box and cables in the way) so you couldn't hear them properly in the video when they talk. There are a few videos where the sound allowed the model to be heard - e.g. the Bones and Ropes Leg-Tie tutorial where the model is talking about her experience and sensations in the tie. Because we strongly value and recognise the bottoms active role in Shibari, we always ask our presenters to explain as much as possible about the body mechanics aspects of each tie presented and how it impacts the bottom's comfort/experience in different ways. Our two main presenters so far (Gestlta and myself) are both switches and always take the time to mention what models can do or say to contribute to the exercise/pattern demonstrated and guide their rigger to execute/adapt it properly for their body.
Another reason behind the lack of direct intervention of our models is the clarity of the final material. Videos are not like live teaching where information can fuse and flow freely and be picked up organically by the audience. It is important to keep things structured, straightforward and very clear. In order to bring in-depth bottoming skills on the table, we need to produce videos dedicated to it (with bottoms wired with a microphone, and their experience being the central focus of the video). We have a lot of this planned in our future shootings (with Barkas and Addie next spring for example). We are also producing a course with Fuoco in February entirely dedicated to bottoming skills and preparation (anatomy of your body in rope, active bottoming, warm ups and stretches, positional 'coaching' for face-downs and torsions, etc). All that being said, if you didn't mean in-depth bottoming education but organic and spontaneous interventions of the bottoms asking for an adjustment during a tutorial, then I guess it just didn't happen in what we recorded so far! Now that we are shooting more challenging suspensions it will start happening naturally (in my latest shooting -to be released soon- it happened a few times in suspensions that the bottom asked for something and I made sure to 'translate' it out loud and include it to my teaching flow). We hope you enjoy our current content for now, and are very excited to produce a lot of new content in the months/years to come!