Intimacy: The professionals making it safe for today’s theaters

This article is the first in a series looking at the work that intimacy professionals--coaches, coordinators and choreographers--do. Other installments will look at best practices, how the pandemic has changed the profession, how to hire an intimacy coach, what intimacy coaching won’t do and how the work of equity, diversity and inclusion intersects with cultural boundaries.

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What do you do when you’re directing a show that has a great deal of physical intimacy? Do you send your actors off to a private room and tell them to “figure it out”? Or do you call upon the skills of the growing number of intimacy professionals—theater artists who are skilled in telling the story of intimacy while using a process that avoids past abuses?

Intimacy coaching is not a new profession or practice even though the title didn’t get its first use until 2006.

Fight choreographers, stunt directors, and directors have been doing the work ever since people have had to be intimate on stage or screen. It has only been in recent years that the practice has been named and has grown to more widespread use, in part because of the #metoo movement.

Intimacy professionals aren’t just there to help establish a non-abusive process, they’re also there to help tell the story, to make things sexy when they need to be sexy.

Tonia Sina, co-founder of Intimacy Directors International, started using the phrase “intimacy choreography” while she was helping to choreograph intimate scenes at a university. Her thesis explored the techniques she used and talked about how to stage intimacy.

Laura Rikard, the co-founder of Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE), was a graduate instructor at the University of Virginia where she was getting her MFA in acting. Intimacy became a part of her research in 2008, but at the time she called it “instilling safe self-care in actor training.” Chelsea Pace, the other co-founder of TIE, was a graduate instructor at Arizona State University and she was forming a choreographic language for intimacy.

“She was noticing we have it for a fight, we have it for dance, why don’t we have it in these moments of most vulnerable physical moments,” Rikard asked. “She was working on that and establishing what is now the foundation for our boundary practice.”

While there were many people working in the discipline, it exploded after the onset of the #metoo movement.

“The intimacy discipline already existed,” Rikard said. “People have been staging intimacy as long as there has been theater. No one invented it. Some people did it well. Some could have done it a lot better.”

After the #metoo movement, the industry began to recognize the discipline and with its recognition, more people became interested in doing the work and having the work in any spaces where intimacy was being portrayed.

Elizabeth Terrell, an intimacy coach and instructor at Western Michigan University, taught voice and movement for actors. She’d done some fight choreography and pointed out that a lot of today’s intimacy coaches come from that discipline.

“With both intimacy and conflict on stage, the idea is to make it look real and impressive, but to keep it safe,” Terrell said. “I started doing it mainly because what they were doing on stage didn’t look sexy and people were uncomfortable.”

Too often, she said, actors who had intimate scenes were told to go off to another room and figure out how they were going to do it.

“I’ve been the only woman in a room full of men,” Terrell said. “They’re trying to make it look like sex and it’s very uncomfortable and hard to advocate for yourself. Someone else coming in makes all the difference.”

What is intimacy?

That definition is subjective, according to Rikard. For some people, it is any moment of storytelling around close physical touch. For others, it deals with close relationships while for still others it is any emotional moment that is really intimate.

“I like to say that the very act of going into a space to collaborate with people to create something new is intimate,” Rikard said. “So, we need to train everyone in the room in these practices so they can integrate them into what they are already doing so everyone has a consent-based practice, can establish boundaries, understands what a deloaded process is and when it comes to moments of physical intimacy, they know how to choreograph it, document and support it.”

Intimacy doesn’t always mean sex and it isn’t limited to people in a romantic or sexual relationship. Rather, intimacy occurs in any physical relationship or any relationship where they have prior knowledge of each other.

“I love working with people who are playing family members, because there is a way that parents touch their children regardless of their children’s age,” Terrell said. “In my ideal world, individual actors would pay attention to the ways we are in physical relationship with other people and notice the ways that we are physically different with different people in our world.”

Nor is intimacy choreography a monolithic activity where any one person is right for all situations. At TIE, they have people researching many different forms of intimacy, some specialized, some general. Researchers are tackling such topics as queer intimacy in musical theater, the intersection of race and consent, and working with minors.

The #metoo movement is not the only major influencer on the discipline. The pandemic has changed things as has our understanding of how the brain works.

Rikard calls out a lot of theater pedagogies that were developed before scientists discovered the neuroplasticity of the brain. That knowledge, she says, makes many of theatrical practices antiquated. Old pedagogies used shock and surprise and sometimes called on actors to have the same lived experiences as their characters.

These pedagogies opened the door for a lot of abusive behavior that ignored boundaries and frowned upon those who asked for them.

Many industry practices make consent complicated.

“The way artists are trained is to be compliant, to be yelled at by people higher in the hierarchy, to say yes to everything,” Pace said. “The first rule of improv is ‘yes, and…’ The messaging gets ground into everyone’s psyche and mind in terms of what it means to be a good artist or collaborator and that is that it means--they have to be compliant.”

Actors are having to deprogram decades of training to go against everything they were taught and learn to say no when something crosses a boundary or causes them trauma.

The younger generation comes into the room with a lot of trauma, Rikard points out, and teaching them with shock and surprise doesn’t work for their generational programming. It is why we need to look carefully at which elements of a pedagogy can be kept and honored and which need to be let go of.

“We are now understanding that there is a difference between saying yes creatively and setting our boundaries to do our work,” Rikard said. “The big change people are discovering within the past few years is that we can have boundaries in this work—actors can have boundaries about where they don’t want to be touched—and still tell the story. We can have boundaries about how long we stay at the theater. We can take care of ourselves while we are within the work.”

Directors don’t need to fear that intimacy choreographers are in the room as sex police. Rather they are partners and collaborators who want to see the intimate moments work, for the story to be told. That requires both flexibility and creativity.

“It’s not about the moves, it’s about the story and storytelling,” Pace said. “If we are telling a story of intimacy, what are ten other ways we can do it? If we are doing choreography, we have to do the choreography.”

It becomes a matter of priority and chronology. The storytelling comes first and then the choreography and documenting of that choreography. Terrell says she works with everyone to establish boundaries using a traffic light system of green being allowed, yellow meaning they have to stop and talk about it, and red meaning absolutely not.

“We figure out how to do it so everyone is working in safe areas,” Terrell said. “We do it like fight choreography. You practice what body part goes where—your knee goes here, your elbow goes here—it is every bit as specific as dance and fight choreography. When they run it, there is an intimacy call and it is every bit as boring as a fight call is. It’s just boring, but when you put it all together, it looks great.”