V10i4 APR Intimate

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After weeks of talking on the phone every night, they are finally alone together — in the same room, on the same couch. Just inches apart. For once, there is only silence between them.

The tension grows until finally, Matt leans closer to Sophia, and places his hand tentatively on her arm. Sophia’s eyes lock onto his, and after a brief moment, she leans toward him, her eyebrow quirking up subtly. Matt gives an almost imperceptible nod, and Sophia quickly kisses him on the lips, before she loses her nerve.

Sophia looks up. “How was that?” she asks.

The intimacy director walks closer. “Looks good from out here,” she answers. “Matt, how did you like that new hand placement?”

“It was good, I think. Putting my hand on her arm felt more respectful than the waist, but still natural. Sophia?”

“Yeah, works for me,” Sophia says with a smile.

Scenarios like this one are becoming more and more common in theatres across the country. Kimberly A. Starr, who has been working as an intimacy director in the local area for the past few years and is currently setting up for her 20th show, explains that there has been a shift in the performing arts industry. “Now, it’s more like we’re all partners. It becomes a collaboration between the director, the intimacy director, and the actors.”

What are intimacy professionals?

Starr says she’s seeing more and more directors that are open to bringing in an intimacy director (ID) to help navigate intimate scenes and ensure the safety and comfort of the actors in a show. She says that directors are recognizing the value of having an ID as a partner in the process, as they can act as an advocate between the actors and the director.

Other intimacy professionals called intimacy coordinators (ICs) do similar work to IDs, but for movies and television shows instead of the stage. The details of their work differs from that of IDs, but the goal — making sure actors have advocates in situations involving intimacy — is the same.

According to Rolling Stone, television networks like HBO are starting to bring in intimacy professionals more regularly to work with their actors. Emily Meade, an actor on The Deuce, told Rolling Stone that she loved working with ICs, because previously, she had mostly kept her concerns to herself so as not to be perceived as a problem. Meade said “she didn’t want to disappoint the people she worked with or to seem like she was complaining.”

Starr also emphasizes how helpful it is to have a buffer between the actors and the director, partly to avoid situations like the ones Meade describes. “I get to be a confidante, advocate, and partner in the process,” Starr says. If an actor needs to make a change, they work it out with the ID.

And that can be a huge help to many actors — especially those who are young or new to the industry — who feel like it’s not their place to advocate for themselves. Tonia Sina, who coined the term ‘intimacy choreography’, told American Theatre in an interview that having an ID on set could prevent non-consensual encounters and abuses of power that can be “extremely uncomfortable and very victimizing at times.” Alicia Rodis, co-founder of Intimacy directors & Coordinators, added, “[W]e don’t have to just take it. We can actually be part of the process and work together.”

The choreography of intimacy

“Intimacy direction is really fucking cool,” says director Emily Richman. “And you can quote me on that.”

Richman worked with Starr when she directed Equivocation. She compares intimacy direction to fight coordination. “With intimacy direction, it's the same thing we do with fight choreography for safety,” Richman says. “We don't want people getting physically hurt. Well, we don't want people getting hurt or harmed by intimacy on stage, either.”

While these days it seems logical to have choreographers and other coordinators in place for intimate scenes as well as combat scenes, that wasn’t always the norm.

Chelsea Pace, one of the founders of Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE), told SDC Journal in 2019 that she was studying stage combat, and she learned that it was formalized through a number of organizations that worked with fight choreographers. Then she found that, in stark contrast, when it came to intimate scenes, there didn’t seem to be any such resources in place. “I started asking questions about why there wasn’t a system for staging intimacy,” Pace said.

In an article from Inside Hook, intimacy professional Ita O’Brien echoed Pace’s sentiment, saying:

An intimacy coordinator is a practitioner who brings a professional structure and skill to creating intimate content, just like a choreographer would bring their skill to a dance, or a stunt coordinator would bring their skill to creating a fight.

It about more than physical intimacy

TIE is just one of a number of organizations around the country that now provide training and services to theatre professionals regarding intimacy on stage. TIE states in their mission:

Theatrical Intimacy Education empowers everyone with the tools to ethically, efficiently, and effectively stage intimacy and nudity, create consent-based spaces, establish boundaries in all environments, and help everyone develop progressive practices. This is about culture change.

The Journal of Consent-Based Performance (JCBP) makes education for intimacy professionals even more accessible by removing some of the barriers to entry commonly associated with other scholarly journals. What’s more, in addition to academic articles, the JCBP promotes community-based learning in an effort to bypass some of the gatekeeping that can sometimes occur. On their website, JCBP says:

We promote a definition of consent that extends beyond sexually charged contexts to include the uplifting of personal agency and the radical act of accepting without retaliation or questioning the personal, professional, physical, and cultural boundaries of others.

It is imperative that actors are never asked to justify or defend their boundaries, Starr says. “The purpose of the ID is to ensure actors’ boundaries are respected and enforced so actors do not feel coerced into doing something they do not want to do.”

Starr says that in order to ensure the safety of everyone involved in a show, the work of intimacy professionals must start before even casting is complete. “Ideally, my role starts four to five months before the show auditions,” she says. Starr compiles an analysis of intimate scenes in a script, and creates an Audition Disclosure Form (ADF) for actors who are auditioning. That way, they know what to expect before they even try out for the show.

Example from sample script analysis with director feedback, created by Kimberly A. Starr for the show *Becky Shaw*.

Actors look over the ADF and note what they are willing or unwilling to do, or what they would prefer to alter in the script. Then the ID and director work together to ensure that all of the blocking serves the story — maintaining the show’s artistic intent — while also maintaining actor safety and comfort.

When an ID analyzes a script, they are not just identifying intimate scenes, but are also looking for any potentially sensitive language or costuming.

“Issues around costuming might be discomfort with a man who’s going to be shirtless, or a woman who’s going to appear in her bra and underwear,” says Starr. “And we also cover language. There's a show right now that has a reference to the KKK, and so we need to make sure an actor would be comfortable saying that.”

And of course, the ID works with the cast and director in intimate scenes. But the label of ‘intimate’ goes beyond romance, Starr says. “There's the physical intimacy of sex, nudity, kissing, hugging, arms around each other, that kind of thing. But there's also emotional intimacy.” She gives the example of working on a show recently in which a daughter prepares her father’s body for his funeral, an experience that can be very emotionally difficult for the actors. Starr says that Richman, who directed that show, was savvy enough to be proactive in bringing in an ID, despite the fact that the show had no romance scenes.

Collaborative boundary setting ftw

Once actors are cast, the ID facilitates exercises which help the actors establish boundaries, both individually and with the group. Each pair of actors that have any scenes that contain intimacy will establish boundaries between them, as pairs; and each individual actor also shares their own personal boundaries with the group as a whole. All of the group boundaries are agreed upon by the entire cast, and formalized into a production standard.

Richman says she is a big fan of the safety tools IDs equip actors with. Everything is consent-based, and the actors have what they call ‘self-care words’ to employ if something feels off in the moment. If that word is said, the action stops so their concerns can be addressed. Starr says they go over everything with the actors during the casting process. The actors know that at any time, they can halt a scene, change their boundaries, or ask to practice an intimate scene at a later time.

Richman says that making changes for the safety and security of actors is never a problem. “Something I always tell my actors is that there are so many ways to tell stories. If one way isn’t working, there's always another way to tell it.”

As Adam Noble — another member of TIE who teaches workshops on ‘Extreme Stage Physicality’ — said in SDC Journal, “[W]e can tell better stories if we are careful with people, if we are putting them in a safe space where they can offer you their best work.”

In a 2020 essay entitled ‘Intimacy Direction in the Time of Physical Distance’, internationally produced and published playwright and novelist Emily C.A. Snyder said:

The field of intimacy has brought a great amount of good to the performing arts. The ability to speak about consent and the choreography of sensuality has provided a much-needed safety net to casts and crew alike.

However, Snyder warns that we still have a long way to go. Her essay addresses the multiple ways in which the performing arts need to reform their inherited biases, which she says tend to center “younger, more petite, able-bodied, cisgender white [actors].” But she sees the increase of intimacy professionals as an avenue into the grander, systemic changes that are needed in the performing arts:

While systemic inequalities that plague our industries also haunt the field of intimacy, the work of creating equal and welcoming systems that honor the individual and tell a diversity of stories with dignity is the work of everyone in the performing arts.

You can find a listing of theatrical intimacy professionals in the Pacific Northwest at https://www.pnwtheatricalintimacy.com