Adopt best practices into theatrical intimacy work
(Photo: Alex Sutula)
This article is the third in a series looking at the work that intimacy professionals--coaches, coordinators, and choreographers--do.
The second dealt with how to hire an intimacy professional.
Other installments will look at how the pandemic has changed the profession, what intimacy coaching won’t do and how the work of equity, diversity, and inclusion intersects with cultural boundaries.
~~
Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard, the two co-founders of Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE), have both done (and continue to do) in-depth research into the intimacy profession. As part of their work, they have established five best practices that they want everyone in the room to be able to practice. Not limited to intimacy professionals, these are practices that they want to train everyone to be able to integrate into what they are already doing.
These five practices are:
Consent-based practices
Boundary establishment
De-loaded process
Physical intimacy choreography
Documentation and support of choreography
Even those professionals who are not a part of TIE incorporate these practices into their work.
Consent-based practices
Consent is conditional, contextual, and revocable. Permission given in one place is not permission given in another.
Consent, Pace points out, is a complicated concept in the theatrical industry because so many of the practices and pedagogies that have long been in place. Actors are taught to say “yes and” and to be compliant. Directors are taught they have to make others comply. Even with the current emphasis on consent, actors—especially actors of color—can find themselves quickly replaced if they bring up issues of consent or insist upon a boundary.
So while some directors and producers are now telling actors to let them know if they don’t want to do something, it is difficult for actors to do so.
“We’re asking an actor to deprogram decades of training and to go against everything they were taught, to go against the first rule of improv and say no,” Pace said.
Part of this deprogramming involves creating tools that support consent.
“We need to look at the environment we’re operating in,” Pace said. “We have a whole set of tools we use to support consent in the process. It is easier to say, ‘I have a question’ or ‘that’s a boundary’ or ‘that doesn’t work for me’ than to say no.”
Alexis Black, a certified intimacy director with Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (IDC) and an assistant professor at Michigan State University, found that the sooner you can communicate aspects of the show, the better.
“We think that consent begins at auditions,” Black said. “I like to work with directors and stage managers to do a pre-production analysis, to look at the moments of intimacy we find in the script and that can really vary because a director might see a moment that they want to extend something. It says they kiss, but the director really sees them leaning together and going to black.”
She likes to ask the director a lot of questions so she can support whatever he or she is looking for and have a creative conversation with the actors about how to tell the story. She quotes another intimacy director, Claire Warden, “There are a thousand ways to tell the story of a slap and a thousand ways to tell the story of a kiss.”
Consent-based practices involve everyone in the room including directors, stage managers, and designers. Everyone needs to consider how they can support consent.
Black recommends holding a consent workshop or intimacy practices workshop at the beginning of rehearsals. It gives her an opportunity to take everyone through practices and protocols. She includes fun experiences that include ensemble and trust-building, and normalizing vocabulary in the room.
She encourages directors and stage managers to participate and even for designers to come so that they can have better communication while keeping fun in the room.
“It is called a play, but it is still our workplace,” Black says. “If we come back to that, here are ways for us to work healthily as coworkers in a consensual workplace.”
A consent-based practice also involves understanding the power dynamics in the room. It teaches actors that not only can they do “yes, and” but they can do “No, but.”
“No isn’t a bad word,” Black said. “An open communicative atmosphere involves room for questions. Actors know that they can even revoke consent or set back or pause.”
Elizabeth Terrell, who teaches intimacy at Western Michigan University and has consulted with professional theater companies, encourages actors to become physically aware of their bodies and figure out what their boundaries are.
“Most of us grow up with this idea that you need to do whatever needs to be done because we are easily replaced,” Terrell said. “While that is true, there is an emerging empowerment to take care of ourselves as artists that is fairly new and that I want people to live in. It’s just not necessary to sell your soul and your comfort for a role.”
Like Black, she stresses the use of the word no.
“No is a complete sentence,” Terrell says she trains her actors. “We practice saying no and letting that be enough. You don’t need excuses. If you’re not comfortable, you’re not comfortable.”
She also recognizes that it is difficult and stressful for actors to ask for help. She makes all her students memorize the sentences: “This feels like a specialist situation. Can we call in a couch?” It lets them ask for help without stating that they are uncomfortable.
A culture of consent goes beyond a single show. The company itself needs to have policies about harassment and a system for reporting and resolving incidents. In educational settings, there is a danger when a student is told they must accept any role or be penalized in their grade. It is the sort of thing that needs to be eliminated.
(Photo: Chelsea Pace)
Boundary establishment
Pace said it becomes important to look at the environments we are working in and to provide space where actors can say that they have a question, a boundary or to identify something that doesn’t work for them. She also points out that not only do actors have physical boundaries, but they also have emotional, social, cultural and professional boundaries.
“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 is that we can have boundaries in this work. We can take care of ourselves while we are within the work. When we know what the boundaries are, we can be boundlessly creative within that space.”
“We’ve had a lot of success in setting not only physical boundaries in terms of touch, but also how your body moves or doesn’t.” Pace said.
Relationships can also make things complicated. Many lines get blurred in the theater as people work together and form extra-professional relationships.
“We have really great working relationships and it gets blurry at the bar after rehearsal,” Pace said. “It is super important with people who work with long-time collaborators who might be their family, romantic partner or friends to have good boundaries and a clear context of consent.”
Rikard said there have traditionally been three rules to being a good actor:
· Don’t be a jerk
· Show up on time
· Be prepared
The fourth that she would add is: “Know what your instrument can and cannot do.” But for actors to do that, she says, the folks with authority in the space must give actors space to check in with themselves and set their boundaries without having to explain their boundaries.
“The big change people are discovering is that we can have boundaries within this work,” Rikard said. “Actors can have boundaries about where they want to be touched and still tell the story. The entire production team needs to think about boundaries if we are going to have a more humane profession. For example, we can have boundaries about how long we schedule the process, we don’t have to be in the theatre until 3 a.m.”
Too often, she warned, actors have been told they are not being professional if they get triggered. However, she says it is important to acknowledge that if the body and the mind are the instruments, it will get triggered.
“It’s an impossibility to guarantee that a person will not get triggered when the body and mind are the instruments. If they do get triggered, it doesn’t mean they can’t do the job. IT means we need to honor that it happens and provide space for self-care if it occurs and establish tools in actor training to help actors and directors understand how to navigate these moments. That is what my upcoming book is focusing on.”
One of her teaching tools is to tell an actor they can say “button” as a self-care cue to communicate that something has been activated and that the actor needs a moment. They can then decide whether the trigger is digestible, whether it is something they can live with and continue doing the work, or do they need to do the work a different way. Do they need to ask for some support that is beyond the skill of the person currently guiding them?
“If we talk about this in our processes and in our training, self-care as part of the technique will become normalized,” Rikard said.
Boundaries can come up in unexpected places. Rikard described one situation where they covered the camera and the intimacy was all sound. She told the actors that they should explore some breath and sound to make sure there weren’t any boundaries. While doing that, the actor told her that it was a boundary to make “e” sounds. So they choreographed it without e sounds.
Intimacy professionals can be very focused and specific when working on boundaries with actors. If, for example, a director only wants a caress on the arm, Black said she doesn’t walk through boundaries for the entire body—only for the parts of the body that will be touching.
Boundaries encompass how a person is touched and not just where. An actor might say that there has to be a certain amount of pressure or else it tickles.
Black works with actors using a green-yellow-red system. Actors can tell her that a particular part of their body is a red zone. If a body part is yellow, they might work on touch with one actor placing their hand on a zone and rubbing it to get used to interacting with the other actor in that way.
“There can be verbal ways of doing it and physical ways of doing it,” Black said. “Talking about boundaries includes talking about the intensity of touch and being specific about how we’re touching.”
When working with scenes that involve sexual violence, she ensures that actors know where there are doors that they can step through if they need a breath.
“This is tough because time is a resource in theater,” Black said. “Something we are starting to look at very deeply is urgency in these long rehearsal hours. Urgency puts product above person in certain incidents. When we’re looking at creating a story around traumatic events, that urgency can really put pressure on actors to push through and if they have any inclination toward panic, that could raise that temperature.”
She encourages companies that are putting on those kinds of shows to post mental health resources in the room.
While there are those who fear that boundary setting will stifle storytelling, Black insists it does the opposite. In her classes, she constantly stresses that intimacy is about safety, boundaries, and storytelling. That structure can create a lot of freedom once people grow accustomed to it.
“Actors literally have every word they’re allowed to say given to them, but no Hamlet is the same,” Black says. “We can use this structure to create beautiful freedom for our actors, keep them safe, keep it repeatable, keep it dynamic and keep us all excited to play in our space.”
De-loaded process
An important distinction that many intimacy professionals make is the difference between having a trauma-based practice and a trauma-informed practice. The former, they say, should be handled only by licensed mental health practitioners while the latter can be done by anyone who understands what trauma means.
“One way to explain ‘trauma informed’ is to understand that we are all human beings who come into the space and part of the messiness of being human is that most folks likely carry trauma or the effects of trauma,” Rikard said. “Understanding this means working in a way that is respectful and sensitive.”
One way of doing that, she explains, is to be deloaded in her vocabulary in the way they teach and specifically having a desexualized vocabulary when choreographing intimacy.
“Say there are two characters in the scene and the stage directions read ‘they hump each other,’” Rikard said. “It is not deloaded and desexualized to instruct the actors to—to hump each other. That may be the characters’ intent, but as an intimacy choreographer I will state the actual physical action the actor will do. When choreographing that physical movement, I may use the following language, ‘Open and close the distance of your pelvis on a diagonal over an eight count. Place the hands on the destination of the shoulders at a muscle-level touch. That’s choreography. It’s repeatable, manageable, and documentable.”
She says such choreographic language serves the intent and poeticizes humping each other for the audience while taking the pressure off actors.
Black said the desexualized vocabulary needs to continue outside of choreography. No one should be making side jokes about intimacy outside of or during rehearsals.
Historically, actors who have to perform intimate scenes are told to just figure it out even though directors would never say “just go punch each other.” Actors did it, but it put enormous pressure on them to have had the experience they were portraying. The assumption was that they were willing to bring their own experience to the stage.
“None of those assumptions were helpful,” Rikard said. “When we have a desexualized and deloaded process in choreography intimacy, it makes no assumptions about what the actors’ life experience is. It can be clear and work within their physical boundaries and it can be managed. It is repeatable and it is adjustable. We’re not depending on instinct or magic.”
Kaja Dunn, an intimacy professional and cultural consultant who often works with TIE, stresses the importance of using language that is appropriate for a workplace environment.
“You might think you are seeing a passionate lovemaking scene, but we are talking about it in choreography, which also means the scene is repeatable,” Dunn said. “’Go make out passionately’ is not something you do in a workplace. So you say, ‘My nose comes to your cheek and then comes down for a four-count and then I kiss you.” That takes all the emotion out of it.”
Deloaded language applies to more than just sexual scenes. If, for example, an actor has a disability, the coach has learned the language of the disability community so that she or he can be respectful and sensitive.
“If I accidentally misspeak, I’ve offered a system of checks and balances in our language around boundaries so they can let me know ‘hey, the way you spoke about my person isn’t correct—can you rephrase that?’ without anyone taking offense or fear of retaliation.” Rikard said. “We are all trying to do better and that is a never-ending journey. Even the most informed teacher, director, etc. may misstep. We can only grow if we call in each other. Collaborating means having difficult conversations and understanding how to articulate all our boundaries is the bedrock of a healthy collaboration.”
“Because we work with such loaded content in the script, we want to have a deloaded process for the instruments portraying that,” Rikard said.
Black said that often separating the movement from the acting can be helpful in lowering the temperature in the room and the stress that actors experience. Things are broken down by count or even by breath. Both actors will know when a grab might take place and what its intensity will be.
“They can focus on these specifics that keep them grounded in the work,” Black said.
Another form of deloaded process involves how artists, directors, and coaches refer to scenes. So, instead of saying “Let’s rehearse the rape scene,” they would say, “We’re going to work on Act 2, scene 3,” or “We’re going to work on the scene on p. 92.” The importance is in finding a desexualized, deloaded way of naming it.
Physical intimacy choreography
Pace stresses that no one has invented the actual choreography, but there are new ways of talking about it.
“I developed a set of ten ways of talking and thinking about movement that were specifically designed to choreograph intimacy,” Pace said. “We call those ten ways the ingredients and they are very similar to any other movement system that you’re looking at.”
One of the reasons it is important to have a choreography language is so that it doesn’t’ require a lot of onboarding from actors and it doesn’t have to rely on the lived sexual experience of actors.
These ingredients include such things as getting closer together, opening and closing distance, visible power shifts, changing positions, and exchanging authority or agency or lead in a scene.
Pace points out that COVID has affected some choreography with general hygiene and disinfecting mouths becomes a part of staging kissing.
Black says that in her workshops at the top of rehearsals, she gets into staging and choreography. She explains there is a lot of collaboration in a show. There could be fight choreographers, dance choreographers, a dramaturg, or a cultural consultant present.
“I’m there to check in with actors, read their body language and make sure they are empowered and that they are excited and enthusiastic to tell the story,” Black said. “Directors sometimes think we’re going to come in and stifle impulses, but in my experience, every actor, when told what their partner’s boundaries are and what is free-range and what are the green zones, finds it easy to build in an improv way without being super tense. Once you know the story and where you are going, it becomes a fun piece of storytelling.”
“Choreography is making sure the moves are repeatable,” Black said. “Even moments of improvisation can have guidepoints of choreography.”
(Photo: Laura Rickard)
Documentation and support of choreography
Documentation is primarily involved with recording what the choreography is. Pace recommends two things when it comes to choreography. The first is written documentation where the actors write out choreography.
“Passion fades, choreography is forever,” Pace said. “If you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen. Use your own words and the ingredients language.”
Second, she recommends making an audio recording of the choreography and not a video because a video is too easily taken out of context and can do harm to the participants if it is later seen by those who do not know the context.
“It sounds funky,” Chase admits. “With dance we’re used to seeing video. The problem is, we’re making an illicit video and putting stage managers at risk.”
She explains that in the film world, there are industry protocols and industry languages that don’t exist in the theater world. Too often in theater, a video just gets thrown in the company dropbox without protections. With an audio recording, they have the actors run through the scene and a person narrates what the actors are doing with the actors speaking their lines. It allows the artists to have a real-time account of what the choreography sounds like, but it is devoid of meaning to anyone not in the room.
She says the audio track can also function as coaching for actors who are rehearsing the scene later in the process.
Other forms of documentation include how casting calls are put together, audition disclosure forms, and in writing publicity.
“Documentation supports the process in more ways than just the choreography,” Pace said.
Together, these elements form a foundation for any company to engage with sound intimacy practices—either with or without an intimacy professional.