Marika Leila Roux

Marika Leila Roux is a professional Shibari model and rigger, who performed and teaches worldwide. Marika discovered bondage by accident during a photoshoot as a model in 2011. Then, she started in the world of Japanese rope bondage, learning and practicing. Eventually, she became a model, performer, rigger and teacher.

After many years of exploring the traditional techniques and emotions of the Japanese Rope Bondage, her interest and practice evolved. Gradually, this guided her to a more contemporary and experimental approach to Shibari. Her creations and projects display a different face of Japanese bondage. They show a more artistic and sensual character of Shibari, instead of its purely sexual and S&M origins.

Marika Leila Roux’s method and approach to ropes adds yoga and other bodyworks. She teaches to both models and riggers. Her aim is to guide them into a developing active, conscious and efficient partnership. She encourages her students to develop independence, freedom, creativity in the practice, while they maintain a fundamental background of safety, knowledge and awareness.

Marika Leila Roux, in 2016, began with the Study of Falling. This is an aesthetical and philosophical research and work in progress. Her aims is to make a beautiful scene,  where the suspended body of Marika, standing without a ground. Later, it falls, but there is no fear on the impact.

The Study of Falling is a scene where the body in ropes offers endless aesthetically and metamorphic possibilities and interpretations, where the body is the main subject of the scene. The idea is to find a perfect image that is both physical and an emotional landscape, for both the subject and the viewer. The body in rope remains subjected to gravity, which imposes a defined and confined space of movement between a point of origin and a point of attraction, where the probability for a collapse is immense.

Image: Gerard Duart