Riggers and Producers

Ted Michaels-TedMichaelsDamsels.com

‘Portia is a creative multiplier. She doesn't just consume the work that is presented to her. She doesn't just add to it. She lends her creative and physical talents to the work in ways that a producer couldn't have imagined while coming up with their sets.

She takes the time to understand my work. She makes an effort to communicate how she can lend herself to that work. She's not just a model. She's not just a collaborator. She's a creative partner when consumed to her fullest. Two people working together creatively in such a fashion can accomplish more than the sum of two people. It is multiplicative.

The canvas is a piece of glass, and my idea starts fixed in the middle of the pane. I can adjust or modify but always stay close to that original point. Working with Portia is striking the glass. The original point becomes the nexus of fractures that extend outward in all directions. Ideas up ideas forking in all directions and then fracturing over and over again into ideas I could never have considered if not for her partnership with the original idea.

The idea becomes a lighting bolt, forking through the air in a myriad of directions as it explores variations of the original idea. It zig and zags, cutting the air as it explores until it strikes the ground at the one beautifully charged point where the most exquisite version of the idea becomes reality. I'm the bolt. She's the air. The partnership is the flash, requiring both for that strike that is the idea to finally come to be. But then is shifts. Sometimes she's the bolt, and I'm the air. Countless ideas become countless upon countless. I view creativity as a dance, and Portia is an exquisite creative dance partner.

She allows iterations both in the moment and over time, knowing her body and valuing the vision of anyone she works with. She always makes suggestions that never alter the vision, only allow a new lens through which to view it. She allows a rigger to make slight adjustments that take a restraint that will not work or will end in an early tap out into a successful rigging that is as beautiful as it is binding. She takes everything she's ever done and lends it to everything her current collaborator might want to do.

She doesn't just rope bottom. She partners in the creative process in ways that go far beyond being in a restraint. The strictest bondage, actually any bondage, I've put her through has always been a collaboration, a discussion, a workshop where she consumes my visions and melds them with her own experience and knowledge of herself to help create something beyond what I had already envisioned. I never execute just my vision with her. It is always something made better through the combination of our creative energies.

The best rigging requires knowing the bottom's experience both in the moment and over time, and she communicates that. I'm all about iterations. That's how I grow. I run through a rigging a dozen times before a model experiences it. I visualize what might not work and how I'll adjust. Portia gives up front, in the moment and after-the-fact feedback. For anyone trying execute at the highest creative level, that is absolute ******* gold.

So for me, consumed for all of her talents, she's my muse, she's a collaborator, she's a partner, and she's my creative queen. If you can accept even a fraction of what she's given to me creatively for your own work, you will do nothing but benefit.

Eric Cain-FutileStruggles.com

'The beauty of a bondage model like Portia Everly if you are a rigger, is that she can articulate to you exactly how her body "felt", so you can make adjustments and learn, and when you are not your best, she will still make you look good because she can and she wants to.'