Curating Connection: How I Think About Intimacy Direction
When people first encounter the role of an intimacy director, they often imagine someone brought into the rehearsal room to choreograph a kiss, stage a moment of sexual contact, or help establish boundaries around particularly vulnerable material.
All those things are part of the work, but I have come to think about intimacy direction more broadly.
I see the intimacy director as a curator of relationships onstage.
Every theatrical story is built upon relationships. Characters touch, avoid touch, interrupt, pursue, comfort, threaten, flirt, caretake, resist, embrace, and sometimes simply occupy space together. Long before a scene becomes explicitly sexual or physically intimate, bodies are already telling us everything about how these people relate.
Who reaches first? Who is permitted to enter another person's space? Who looks away? What kind of touch feels habitual, and what kind of touch changes the relationship forever? Where does tenderness live? Where does power live? What happens when one person wants greater closeness than another?
These are questions of consent and agency, but they are also questions of storytelling.
A Creative Partner in the Rehearsal Room
Directors are responsible for holding an astonishing number of things at once: narrative arc, pacing, visual composition, characterization, design, musical or textual demands, institutional expectations, schedules, and the individual needs of an entire company of artists.
An intimacy director offers another set of eyes.
My responsibility in the room can be unusually specific. In paying close attention to the physical and relational life of the characters, I can help translate what a director wants the audience to understand into embodied behavior. Sometimes that means choreographing an explicitly intimate encounter. Sometimes it means discovering that the most revealing choice is a hand that almost reaches another person and stops. Sometimes it means establishing a physical vocabulary early in a production so that a later rupture in the relationship becomes visible before anyone says a word.
This is one of the reasons I resist reducing intimacy work to the management of sexual content. Intimacy is much richer than sex. It includes affection, trust, dependence, vulnerability, power, care, violence, longing, familiarity, estrangement, and the countless ways human beings negotiate closeness. The intimacy director notices these patterns and helps shape them intentionally.
Consent as a Foundation for Artistic Risk
At the same time, none of this creative exploration works particularly well if performers do not have meaningful agency within the process.
I believe strongly in consent-forward rehearsal practices. But I do not advocate them because I think the purpose of rehearsal is to eliminate discomfort or make art risk-free.
Art must contain risk.
Actors, singers, and dancers routinely enter emotionally complicated, physically demanding, and deeply vulnerable territory. We ask artists to imagine lives radically different from their own, expose parts of themselves before audiences, inhabit conflict, experience rejection, portray violence, explore sexuality, and tell stories that may be uncomfortable for everyone involved.
The question, then, is not how to remove risk, but how to create conditions in which artists are free to take meaningful risks deliberately and with confidence.
When performers know what is being asked of them, when expectations are clear, when boundaries can be communicated without derailing the creative process, and when physical storytelling is specific and repeatable, artists stop spending valuable energy wondering what might happen next. A performer who knows the choreography of an intimate scene does not need to negotiate the physical mechanics of that scene anew every night. Instead, they can attend to intention, character, breath, text, music, impulse, and relationship.
Structure creates clarity. Clarity creates room for courage. And courage creates artistic freedom.
Boundaries as Creative Information
This is also why I think differently about boundaries than we sometimes do in artistic spaces: Boundaries are simply information.
If one artistic choice is unavailable, the question becomes: What else might tell this story? This question is inherently creative. Some of the most interesting theatrical choices emerge when collaborators move away from the assumption that there is only one way to communicate passion, dominance, tenderness, fear, or desire.
A boundary invites greater specificity. What exactly do we need the audience to understand? Is the story actually about a particular physical action—or about what that action signifies?
Once we know that, an entire vocabulary of alternatives becomes available; this is where consent practice and artistic imagination meet.
The People Whose Bodies Tell the Story
My own approach to intimacy work is profoundly shaped by the fact that I came to it as a performer, director, and educator.
I know what it is to tell stories through a body and voice. I know what it is to sit on the other side of the table and hold responsibility for an entire production. And I know that rehearsal rooms function best when artists have both the freedom to make choices and the responsibility to communicate clearly with the people around them.
That has led me to a philosophy of intimacy direction rooted in collaboration, clarity, repeatable craft, performer agency, and artistic courage.
I am interested in ethical rehearsal practices because I care deeply about the people making the art, but I am equally interested in them because I care deeply about the art itself.
When we create rehearsal cultures in which artists know that their voices matter, we create the conditions for artists to go further. To be more vulnerable. More specific. More playful. More courageous. More fully present with one another.
That, to me, is the promise and benefit of intimacy direction: to help curate the relationships through which our stories become human.
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