Our Mission
Rope Bite Pgh (Pittsburgh, PA) is dedicated to facilitating quality rope bondage education and the sharing of knowledge while also providing safer and inclusive venues to learn, practice and play in a spacious and well equipped environment. Rope Bite Pgh also brings in top tier rope educators from around the world to teach while making it as accessible as possible.
Upcoming Classes/Events
Rope Bite usually meets on the second Sunday of the month except holidays. 2024 dates are: 1/14, 2/11, 3/10, 4/21, 5/19, 6/9, 7/14, 8/11, 9/8, 10/13, 11/10, and 12/8. More info is here.
Rope Fundamentals is available as a free online class!
To find out about upcoming classes and events first, sign up for our email list.
A lot of info is located under Getting Started in the menu above. Please take the time to look through those pages as a lot of common questions are answered in there.
Our Story
Founded in March of 2011 by Russ (TwistedView), Rope Bite Pgh began with about 30 people at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center (now Equality Center) as a monthly rope class. Over the years it continued to grow and evolved into an open skill share and practice time. We moved from the GLCC to Persad and began meeting twice a month. After outgrowing Persad, Spirit Hall was kind enough to take us in and give us a very large space and nearly unlimited hardpoints until 2018. In 2018 Rope Bite shifted to focus on intensives and long format classes to allow for people to learn more and take the time to make sure they understand all of the concepts compared to a one hour or less class.
The Body Shop Pittsburgh was kind enough to give us an amazingly well equipped and inclusive space and we will be resuming hosting national and international presenters for rope bondage intensives as well as holding numerous educational, practice and play events there. If you want to keep up with classes and events there, sign up here. We also work with events to provide demonstrations, rigging or anything rope related for your event. Also please check out SaferSex.com.
While what we do is commonly called shibari, we prefer to just use the English rope bondage. Shibari means to tie or tying (anything, not just people) in Japanese and doesn’t commonly refer to rope bondage in Japan. Kinbaku would be a much better word to use if we were in Japan. For more information on the history and myths, please read this article by Midori.
Proud member of the NCSF.