Intimacy Direction
An intimacy director can be defined as "a choreographer, an advocate for actors, and a liaison between actors and production for scenes that involve nudity/hyper exposed work, simulated sex acts, and intimate physical contact" (IDC). While intimacy is a topic many shy away from, the importance of theatrical intimacy is very prevalent in the industry today. People are realizing now more than ever that this is something both needed and necessary to ensure the safety and comfort of those involved in intimate scenes.
Intimacy Direction: an In-Depth Look:
An Introduction to Alli St. John
I had the privilege of sitting down with Alli St. John, our guest intimacy director, and discuss the importance of intimacy direction, her experience working in this field, and what it means to be an intimacy director. To read more about her and the work that she has done both during her career and in her time here at Utah State, please continue reading.
About Alli:
- My name is Alli St. John. I am currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. I did my bachelor’s at Baldwin Wallace University, where I did a BA in Theatre with a focus on acting and directing. I then worked in educational theatre for five years before I went to Arizona State to do my MFA in Theatre for Youth and Community.
- I think what we’re seeing is actors are feeling more support, both on and off set. The culture is shifting, and actors feel empowered speaking up about their boundaries and the work they do in intimate scenes. There is more of a demand for this work, and we’re seeing recognition that this is a valuable and creative role on the creative team.
- Especially in programs here where we train actors, it’s a great experience for them in an educational setting. And it prepares them for professional opportunities! Talking about this cultural shift, standing up for themselves, we need to see this in educational settings in order to prepare them for professional settings.
- There are a lot of resources now, which is really cool, because even five years ago there really wasn’t. Look up companies that are offering workshops! The two that I recommend the most are Theatrical Intimacy Education and Intimacy Directors and Coordinators. They have different models in terms of how they structure their workshops, but they’re both really great.
- Start with like a “best practices workshop” and get the foundational knowledge, and then they will offer other types of workshops for more specific things. [For example] TIE has a workshop specifically for stage managers. I’ve taken their workshop on working with minors, and they have stuff specifically on working with trans and non-binary actors. So, there’s a lot of content out there. There’s this great book by Chelsea Pace released in 2020 called Staging Sex, and that’s a great resource.
- I would say start taking workshops, learn from people, and if there are theatres near you that are hiring intimacy directors, ask if you can shadow them or be their intimacy captain, and start to learn with some hands-on experience too.
- I would say this field is less than ten years old. It really started when people who were in fight choreography and the directing field noticed that we have specific language for how to choreograph violence, we have specific language for how we choreograph dance and movement, but we were lacking language in how to work with intimacy. Those founders in the field really worked to figure out, “how do we deload and desexualize language?” “How do we offer direction?” “How do we take the weirdness out of staging intimacy and make it more work forward and professional?”
- And I think it’s becoming more popular because we’re seeing the value in it, and actors are saying, “yes, this is great!” Directors are seeing the value in having a collaborator in those moments. They are a really great person to have on the team that can help shift the power a little bit. It can be really hard for an actor who is working on an intimate scene to tell their director that they don’t want to do something, that it makes them feel unsafe, or it starts to cross a boundary that they have, but if you have someone who is designated for that work and has set a culture of, “you can talk to me about these things, we can be flexible, we can be creative together,” I think that is really empowering for actors.
- I have been a director for ten years, so I already have a lot of experience working with actors. When I got to grad school, I started focusing my research on how high school teachers are handling moments of intimacy with their students, so I’m really focusing my intimacy directing work in educational spaces, [specifically] with universities and high schools.
- As this is becoming a more popular field, everyone’s looking to professional theatres and film and television. So, we have a lot about becoming intimacy directors for that area, but not a lot of attention is being paid to the educational spaces. And as an educator, it is really important that those populations of people are getting exposure to this type of work too.
- Yeah! Last fall, I did a case study with a high school theatre classroom, and I did interviews with them. So, I interviewed them at the beginning of the semester before I did any work and asked them, “what do you know about consent?” and “what role do you think it plays in the classroom?” and a lot of questions like that. Then we started implementing the work. I had their teacher implement, and I mostly observed. Then I did another check-in with them, another interview, and said, “how has this impacted your experience in class, and how has this semester been different from past semesters in theatre?” and their overall response was that “it was really great! I felt really supported in the classroom, I felt like I could talk to my teacher about things, I didn’t feel pressured into doing things while we were working on our show.”
- And this is a school that doesn’t really have much of a theatre program, it’s a STEM school and theatre is an elective. They really were confused at first as to why I was there. They wanted to know why I wasn’t doing this research study at a school that had like a big theatre program, and that broke my heart a little bit because I was like, “you’re still very deserving of this work!” and I think its applicable in spaces outside of the theatre too. As these students go on to become physicists and engineers, I’m hoping that they’re taking this with them into those spaces. I think the foundation of intimacy directing is culture building and thinking about consent, and that is applicable in any workplace.
- About three years, but I’ve been directing for the past ten years.
- Yeah! It gives me more language. The more specific I can be in offering direction will less confuse an actor as they know what it is that I’m asking for. It’s a great communication tool, so I use a lot of the principles of intimacy directing even when I’m not directing intimate moments.
- Directors can definitely be thinking about, “when are actors seeking and avoiding eye contact?” I think there’s a lot of really useful stuff in those ten ingredients of intimacy directing that directors, I think, will also find useful, especially when we think about how we have to have a separation of actor and character. I don’t believe that actors need to be taking on these characters and living the lives of these characters. We have to be using techniques to make it seem like that to an audience, but there’s no reason for an actor to put themself through anguish just because that’s what their character is experiencing. So, for a director to be able to have technical terms [and use them] to craft a moment that looks a certain way but is not asking actors to do themselves emotional harm, it’s important.
- When I’m brought onto a project, I will meet with the director and the rest of the creative team and get a sense of what their vision for the show is like. What’s the visual language, what’s the style, what are they looking for? I want to get an idea of what their style of directing is, and what they want from me. How involved in the rehearsal room do they want me to be? And I’ll read the script and go through, and I’ll mark all of the moments that I think I would be the most useful for, and I ask the director to do the same. Then, we compare our notes and make sure that I’m giving them what they need and not giving them something that they don’t want.
- Ideally, I’ll come in before auditions, so I’ll be part of crafting the audition announcement and be present in the audition room and for casting. That doesn’t always happen, [but] that’s in an ideal situation. Once we begin rehearsals, we’ll start to schedule out when we’re going to have our intimacy rehearsals, because I require actors to have a 24-hour notice before we start blocking anything. First time we do any intimacy blocking, it’s a closed rehearsal. It’ll just be me and the actors, and then either a stage manager or an intimacy captain who is there to take notes and learn the choreography. Then, when we feel good about what we’ve done, we’ll show the director. The director will give me notes about things that they want adjusted, and then I will continue to work with the actors. We’ll do that until we’ve worked our way through all of those moments of intimacy.
- As we get closer to the show, we’ll have another set of closed rehearsals where we’ll start to remove any placeholders. If there are kisses in the choreography, they’re just making contact with their hands. [We’re] not asking them to be kissing throughout the entire rehearsal process. Once we get closer to tech and dress rehearsals, we’ll have another closed rehearsal where we’ll start to remove those placeholders, [that way] they’re not kissing for the first time in front of their peers. We have that in a secured space.
- Once the show opens, I look at the performance reports and make sure that there’s no notes about the intimacy choreography. If it’s wonky, I might come in to do a brush up rehearsal with them. I’ve had it before where I’ve noticed they’ve skipped their intimacy call before a performance, so I’ve had to email the stage manager and say, “hey! You need to make sure that happens, they can’t skip that.” Once it opens, I’m just sort of keeping eyes on the performance reports to make sure everything is running smoothly and they’re not asking me to come in and brush anything up. I might also go in for a put-in rehearsal if an understudy is being called in.
- I think it starts with culture building at the beginning. I’ll do a consent workshop with the full cast where we’re playing games that practice saying no, on not assuming yes, asking open questions, things like that, and making sure that everyone is feeling comfortable with me in the space. When we get into actually doing the work and the blocking, that’s where having a closed rehearsal space is really important. [A closed rehearsal space is] a room that we can close up the windows, there’s no way for other people to walk by and see what we’re doing. I put a sign on the door that says that it is a closed rehearsal, and I leave a phone number that they can call if they are having an issue or need to be in that space. I make sure that the rehearsal space is not a space that other people will regularly need access to. So it’s not like a green room where people are storing their belongings, or anything like that.
- We keep what happens in that rehearsal to ourselves, we’re not going out and talking about it. It stays in the rehearsal. We’re working together, and I like to make it collaborative! It’s not often that I’ll come in and have like point by point, everything blocked. I’ll have a shape of the scene and some major moments that I would like to see, but I like to hear from actors. I think that helps them feel safer and like they’re part of the process when they can help shape those moments.
- I can sense when an actor is feeling nervous. They might be avoiding eye contact with me, or I can see there’s tension building in their shoulders, or they’re fidgeting with their fingers. Those are signs to me that we’re not going to dive right in. We’re going to sit and chat for a little bit, we’re going to look through the scene together, [and] I’m going to give you a preview of what types of things I’d like to see. I’m not just going to throw you into the deep end, especially if I can sense that you’re already feeling apprehensive about it. In bigger scenes like the last scene in Act I of Spring Awakening, there is a heavy amount of intimacy, so I went in saying, “okay, we’re just going to craft this together. I have no notes, [here’s] my blank page, let’s just explore and try some things. I want to hear your ideas. What do you think this should look like?”
- I love creating these really beautiful and sweet moments. It’s really cool and also challenging, because I’m also a director, to only be responsible for these specific moments. So there’s a shift that I have to do in my brain where I’m not looking at the big picture, it’s not my job to look at the big picture entirely, but I do have to make sure that what I’m creating is supporting the larger vision of the piece. I love working through in a closed rehearsal with actors and figuring things out and solidifying our choreography and saying, “okay, now let’s run it all the way through,” and it just looks so beautiful.
- And we’ve created some really sweet moments in Spring Awakening. The last couple days, we’ve been putting in our understudies and teaching them how to do the choreography, and it’s really cool watching them pair in their different combinations. And they can just do it, because they know the right moves, and so watching them swap in and out with each other and do the scene is really exciting. I also consider myself an actor advocate, so being able to take on that role and be there to support the actors while not having to worry about the other millions of things that a director has to worry about. I can really just focus on being there for the actors and students.
- I’ve really loved all of the students. All of the actors have been delightful to work with. They’re all so kind and generous, and really excited about the work. Jason (director) and I have had a really great time working together, [because] we have a really similar style, so that makes it easy. I’ve really appreciated the trust that he has put in me to craft these really important moments for the show, and his willingness to turn it over to me and figure it out. We’ll show him [our work] and he says, “yeah that’s great!” or “we’ll tweak a couple things here and there,” or “we actually need them to enter from this other place.” For the most part, it’s been highly collaborative, and I’ve felt like I’m making a difference and a contribution to the show.
- I was in a closed rehearsal last night with a couple of actors, and Jason was working with some other actors onstage. We met during break and he said, “they just did their boundary check-in and asked permission and stuff.” I wasn’t in the space, but they were taking all of the tools that I’ve given them and are applying it themselves. [They are] teaching each other, which is really cool because as future classes come in, those students who are here now will be able to continue to be like, “this is the culture we have here now. This is how we handle physical contact and touch in our theatre.”
- I might ask them what’s making them feel nervous. If it’s just the idea of portraying intimacy onstage, if it’s that they don’t know what they’re going to be asked to do, I would want to ask if there are specific things that are making them feel apprehensive about it. Then, I can address those things, but I also will always approach from a place of, “we can pause whenever you want, please ask any questions, we don’t need to rush through this.” I think one of the hardest things is when actors feel rushed, and I’m only here for two weeks so there is a finite amount of time to get this right before I depart, but I’m still a resource. I’m not actually disappearing; I just won’t physically be here.
- I think students and actors sometimes are worried about not actually being able to say no. Being told you can say no and actually saying no are different. I think it’s important for intimacy directors to model [this] too and use “button” and “pause” and say, “oh wait, I’ve messed up. Let’s try that again.”
- An intimacy captain might be a stage manager, it might be an assistant director, it could be someone who specifically wants to be learning about intimacy directing, so that is exclusively their job. I think in an educational setting it really is choosing an intimacy captain based off of interest and who wants to be learning how to do it. Their job is to be in closed rehearsals with me, taking notes and making sure that we have a really accurate record of all of the choreography. That way if we’re in rehearsal and an actor calls “button” because they don’t remember what to do next, they have the notes and can say, “okay, so you’re going to do this move with this many counts with this level of touch, and then you’re going to avoid eye contact,” so they can say what it is. In this case, because I’m not here for the duration of the production, Jordan’s (assistant director) job is to maintain that choreography and be that point person in rehearsals, and then she can always send me videos or pictures or text me or send me a voice memo, whatever, with any questions, and then I can respond back. She will also be responsible for leading our closed rehearsals when we remove our placeholders because I won’t be here to do that, so I will be zooming in for those, is my hope, so that I can still be present and answer real-time questions and see what’s going on. But she’ll be the presence in the space with them.
- There are a lot of different ways that you can make a scene happen. Sometimes it can be challenging to know what you want this to look like and not quite figure out how to use the language to get the actors to figure it out. Sometimes the thing that you really wanted to see happen just isn’t going to work for a variety of reasons. As someone who’s not a dancer or a traditional choreographer, sometimes in my head I imagine bodies moving in a certain way and then we get into the space and it’s like, “oh! No we can’t do that, because we have joints that only move in one direction,” like we can’t do that! How do we make this work? There was a moment of triumph in an early rehearsal where I had two actors. The person standing in front had their back up against the chest of the person standing behind them, and I wanted them to do a twist, and I was like, “I think this is what’ll happen?” and then they just did it! And I was like, “yes! It worked!” I’m glad that the physics of it [worked]. They were facing each other and then I was going to have them turn to be chest to back, and I wasn’t confident that the way I envisioned it in my head was physically possible, but we figured it out and it was a triumphant moment of like, “oh good, I don’t have to come up with something else.”
- It’s also really exciting when I craft a moment and we work through it, and then the actors are excited, and they’re excited about what they’re doing. It’s a good feeling. Its really fun when I’m like “ooh, what if we try this?” and the actors are like, “*gasp* yeah! Yes! Let’s do that!”
- I think the big thing too for Spring Awakening specifically has been making sure that we’re telling a story of consent, because I think there are a lot of moments that you could easily stage it in a way that makes consent fuzzy. So, we’ve been really working with our choreography to make sure that we are telling a story of consent between these characters. There’s this avid challenge to these characters, that they’re really young and inexperienced, so while we want things to look clean and good, they should also be clunky and awkward right? Because that’s what teenagers experiencing these things for the first time would be like. So, it’s finding this balance in the choreography and for the actors of like, “yes, we know our choreography and we’re confident and we know what we’re doing, but also we have to portray characters who don’t know what they’re doing.” The actor knows what they’re doing, but their character does not.
- I’ve had a great time! This is the first time I’ve done an in-residency situation where I’m here for a short period of time and then I am out before the productions done, so I’m feeling a lot of big feelings. I think it’s really exciting to get to come drop in and say, “okay, here’s all this work, and now I’m going to head out and trust that you’ve got it, and then you can reach out if you have questions or if you need me to fix anything.” But I think the hardest thing for me is that I don’t get to see the show. They’ve put so much trust in me to do this. Everyone is just walking into that room like, “okay, tell me what to do.” And I trust them that they’re going to maintain the choreography and the integrity of what we’ve done, and I’m not going to walk out of here and they’re going to mess around with it and do something different. And I know that Jason respects the work, that he’s not going to swoop in and start changing what I’ve done. And I trust Jordan to maintain all of the work that we’ve done together. I think you really do have to trust the people you’re working with to make this type of in-residency thing work.
To hear more from Alli, you can read her most recent article here.
To access her website, click here.
To read more about hiring an intimacy director, click here.
To access her website, click here.
To read more about hiring an intimacy director, click here.
"Consent is conditional, contextual, and revocable. Permission given in one place is not permission given in another" (Redman)
Intimacy Definitions
Intimacy direction has only recently been introduced to the theatre and film industry. With the introduction of intimacy comes questions and thoughts that one might need clarification on. Here are some definitions for common words and practices used during intimacy coordination.
Intimacy Director: used when discussing theatre and live performances.
Intimacy Coordinator: much like an intimacy director, an intimacy coordinator does the same work but for film and television.
Intimacy Captain: someone who shadows the director/coordinator and takes note of blocking and choreography.
Button or Pause: a safe word used by actors to signify their need for a break.
Ten Ingredients of Intimacy Directing: a set of ten ways of talking and thinking about movement that were specifically designed to choreograph intimacy, developed by Chelsea Pace (Pace, from Redman).
Intimacy Director: used when discussing theatre and live performances.
Intimacy Coordinator: much like an intimacy director, an intimacy coordinator does the same work but for film and television.
Intimacy Captain: someone who shadows the director/coordinator and takes note of blocking and choreography.
Button or Pause: a safe word used by actors to signify their need for a break.
Ten Ingredients of Intimacy Directing: a set of ten ways of talking and thinking about movement that were specifically designed to choreograph intimacy, developed by Chelsea Pace (Pace, from Redman).
By: BB