Redlily X Switzerland

Three Workshops in one weekend. Join us at Villa Vogelsang in Biel/Bienne with Redlily from Copenhagen, Redlily is an intersectional feminist and queer Shibari and intimacy expert with over 15 years of experience in teaching and performing around the world. https://www.redlily.dk/about

About the model:

El (they/them) is a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, mindfulness facilitator,  Their work is deeply rooted in a trauma-informed, compassion-based approach that integrates somatic awareness and nervous system regulation.

Alongside their clinical and therapeutic background, El is also a self-suspender, rope model, and circus artist, bringing a lived, embodied understanding of how the body processes sensation, trust, vulnerability, and resilience. This unique combination allows them to bridge psychological insight with physical experience, offering a nuanced perspective on the mind–body connection.

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Following are the Descriptions for the three workshops, please read until the end!

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Queer Gaze

3-hour workshop

This course explores rope as a tool for intimacy, presence, and aesthetic expression beyond normative frameworks. This class invites participants to engage with shibari not just as a set of patterns, but as a tactile language that supports closeness, trust, and embodied connection.

We will focus on how techniques such as tension, placement, body management can deepen sensual awareness and create space for intimacy to emerge. Rather than prioritizing rigid forms or predefined roles, the class emphasizes listening: to bodies, to breath, to emotional responses, and to the dynamic between partners.

Through guided exercises and discussion, participants will be encouraged to explore how their own identities, desires, and ways of seeing shape, the experience of tying and being tied. Aesthetic choices are approached as expressive and personal, allowing rope to highlight vulnerability, strength, softness, and play in non-normative ways.

Open to all levels. Beginners and experienced practitioners alike are welcome to explore how technical skill can serve intimacy rather than overshadow it. The class is grounded in consent, communication, and care, and welcomes all genders, bodies, and sexualities.

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Ropes for Gender Euphoria – Affirming Ties and Intentional Shapes

3-hour workshop

This 3-hour workshop explores how shibari and rope technique can be used as a tool for gender affirmation and embodied euphoria. The focus is on creating ties and shapes that respect, reflect, and celebrate the gender of the person being tied, whether that gender is fluid, non-binary, trans, cis, or questioning.

Rather than treating bodies as neutral or standardized, this class invites participants to consider how rope placement, structure, emphasis, and negative space can support a person’s sense of self. We will explore how different technical choices can highlight, soften, conceal, or affirm specific areas of the body, always guided by communication, consent, and the desires of the bottom.

Participants will work with intermediate foundational techniques and variations, using them creatively to adapt to different bodies and gender expressions. 

Attention will be given to:

• Intentional rope placement and shaping
• Adapting ties to support dysphoria-sensitive areas
• Creating structure without imposing gendered assumptions
• Communication practices that center affirmation and agency

This workshop is open to all levels except complete beginners.

Participants should have basic familiarity with rope handling, safety principles, and consent frameworks, but no advanced skills are required. The emphasis is on adaptability, listening, and care rather than complexity.

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Beyond the Template – Adaptive, Bottom-Centered Suspension
 6-hour advanced shibari workshop

Beyond the Template is an invitation to step away from inherited shapes and familiar pathways, and to meet suspension as a living, responsive practice. This 6-hour advanced workshop explores suspension as something that emerges through listening, trust, and shared intention.

In this space, technique becomes a language rather than a rulebook. We will work with suspension structures that adapt to the body in front of us, its proportions, its limits, its breath, its resilience. 

Riggers will refine their ability to build effective, efficient suspensions that respond moment by moment, while bottoms are centered as active participants whose experience guides the form, pace, and duration of the work.

The workshop invites participants to explore a range of suspended shapes, not as templates to be replicated, but as possibilities that unfold through collaboration. Attention will be given to weight, lines, tension, and release, as well as to the quieter elements: presence, communication, and the subtle feedback that travels through rope and skin.

Themes and practices include:

• Letting go of fixed suspension models
• Adapting structure to different bodies and needs
• Bottom-centered decision making in the air
• Reading the body, adjusting load, and responding with care
• Suspension as a space of connection, vulnerability, and mutual focus

This is an advanced-level course for practitioners with solid suspension experience and a shared responsibility for safety, consent, and aftercare. The work is physically and emotionally demanding, and participants are expected to engage fully, riggers in creating functional, responsive suspensions, and bottoms in being suspended through multiple shapes and transitions.

Beyond the Template offers space to unlearn, to soften certainty, and to discover suspension that feels intentional, alive, and deeply relational.

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What to bring?

• Familiarity with the required skill level of the corresponding workshop
• comfortable clothes to be tied in/to tie in
• a blanket to tie on
• ropes
  • for the Sunday workshop, bring at least 8–10 ropes
• safety tool

The workshops on Saturday have a maximum of 12 couple spots, the workshop on Sunday maximum 9 couples spots. Tickets are couple tickets: 1 Ticket = 1 Couple spot.

Doors open 10:30. There is no parking belonging to the space, however there is "Blaue Zone"/public parking in the neighbourhood (7.- via parkingpay app). Easily reachable by bus from the train station in Biel/Bienne via line nr 5 or nr 6. The exact address will be shared after the ticket is bought.

Participation is at your own risk; the organizer accepts no liability. 

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