Trustworthy with Power

One of the great benefits of the intimacy director is that they typically occupy a position outside the existing power structure of a company hierarchy.

There is real value in that.

I currently occupy several very different roles in my work as an intimacy professional. Most often, I serve as an outside contractor in educational and theatrical settings. I also hold the title “intimacy director in residence” for a regional company which brings with it certain institutional authority. In my own university productions, I am often the stage director who fulfills the additional role of the intimacy director.

While the work may look similar from the outside, the architecture of power in each room is completely different.  This has made me question these various structures and really ponder the nuances of power and an intimacy director’s relationship to it.

Thinking about Power Dynamics

There is a difference between someone holding “power over” someone else and someone offering “power with” someone else.

“Power over” relies on hierarchy: it can command, coerce, grant, or withhold.

“Power with” is collaborative: it helps create the conditions in which another person can act with greater agency.

That distinction resonates deeply with how I understand my role as the intimacy director in the ecology of a production. Intimacy directors are not powerless. We carry expertise. We often have the authority to pause a rehearsal. We may be brought into a room specifically because an institution trusts our judgment. We have professional standing and specialized language. Performers may perceive us as authority figures even when we hold no formal power over their careers.

However, the intimacy director is not there to overpower anyone: speaking for performers without their permission, dictating choreography without input, or pressuring someone to ignore their boundaries are anathema to well-trained intimacy professionals. Instead, we work to create spaces that welcome all perspectives, that honor performers’ individual processes, and that invite collaboration between performers and directors to craft sustainable, artistically rigorous physical storytelling.

Ethical practice, then, is about becoming conscious stewards of the authority we possess. Adopting a “power with” model allows intimacy directors to utilize their implicit authority as an expert to make space to bring others into the conversation, especially those with less power in the hierarchy.

Intimacy Director as Outside Contractor

When working as an outside contractor, intimacy directors may be better positioned to occupy a “power with” position.  They are not responsible for casting, grading, or professional advancement for performers. They are less entangled in many of the institutional pressures that shape the experiences of faculty, directors, administrators, and performers.  The freedom that this offers in a rehearsal room is difficult to overstate.

Performers can tell the intimacy director what they actually think. They can ask questions they may be reluctant to ask someone who evaluates them. They can express hesitation without immediately calculating what that hesitation might cost them. They can say, “I don’t want to do that,” or, “I need more information,” without wondering whether the intimacy director will quietly decide they are difficult, uncommitted, or not ready for professional work.

That freedom seems to create an interesting paradox: performers who genuinely believe they are allowed to say no are often more willing to say yes.  When refusal is credible, experimentation becomes safer. Performers who trust that they can stop, ask questions, change their minds, or request an adjustment without penalty may be more willing to attempt something unfamiliar and to take greater artistic risks.

Intimacy Director “in Residence”

Becoming embedded in an institution has enormous advantages. One can shape policy with an eye towards more inclusive and consent-forward practices. One can advocate for more transparent and ethical contracting. One can influence an institutional culture in significant ways that create the conditions for better work for all involved.

But institutional belonging creates another danger: the intimacy professional can slowly become an agent of institutional hierarchy rather than an advocate for agency. It can happen through very ordinary pressures: “we don't have time;” “the director really needs this;” “can you just help the performers become comfortable with it?”  And suddenly the intimacy director’s job has shifted from helping everyone make informed choices to helping the institution obtain compliance.

Whether one is an external contractor or more formally embedded in an institution, the ongoing question needs to be: what and who is your power serving? This becomes especially important in academic settings.

The Stage/Intimacy Director

Once you learn to think carefully about boundaries, consent, power, choreography, and embodied storytelling, it is impossible to return to a rehearsal process that does not account for them. And, at many academic institutions, including my own, a faculty stage director has been trained as an intimacy director, often with institutional financial support. This creates an expectation that the faculty member with fulfill both roles.

The concept of “power over” and “power with” are now in direct conflict with each other. A faculty director can prioritize consent and agency, communicate carefully and clearly, give student performers time to consider staging requests, invite collaboration in creating choreography, provide anonymous avenues for students to express concerns, and can utilize all their “intimacy director” skills, knowledge, and protocols.  But, it does not change the fact that a faculty director is responsible for grading, future casting, and professional mentorship that creates inevitable and inescapable pressures that may make refusal more difficult and complicate the conditions under which students give consent.  

This semester we are doing the first production with real staged intimacy since I became a certified intimacy director. Before we began staging rehearsals I presented my students with the standard protocols that I use with performers in outside spaces. I have given versions of this presentation many times. This time, however, I was acutely aware that I was telling my students “you can say no without worrying about how I will react” while also being the person shaping the production, making artistic decisions, and holding institutional authority in their lives.

So I named it.

I told them plainly that my occupying dual roles in the room meant there was a power differential, and that I wanted us to acknowledge it rather than pretend it did not exist. A number of eyebrows went up. I do not think many of them had considered that before.  Naming the power imbalance made it visible in a way that built trust in our rehearsal space.

Later that evening, one of the students emailed me privately with questions about staged intimacy they had been worried about but did not want to raise in the larger group.  To me, this was significant because it demonstrated that my student seemed to understand two things simultaneously: I had authority, and it was still safe to bring me a concern. 

Would I prefer to have an intimacy director to work alongside me?  Absolutely. It is invaluable to have a creative partner with whom to shape scenes involving staged intimacy. However, when it isn’t an option, we can work to make the ethic of the larger rehearsal space transparent and capacious enough that sustaining an atmosphere of consent can become everyone’s job. The ethical task is not simply to tell students they may say no, but to create conditions in which “no” is genuinely usable.

Claiming Power Responsibly

And so I find myself returning to the question of power and the idea of being “outside the system.”

There is great value in independence. There are moments when a performer may speak more freely to someone who has no power over their academic, artistic, or professional future. Institutions should take that structural benefit seriously and invest in it wherever possible.

Perhaps the actual goal is simply to remain trustworthy with our power inside whatever system we enter: to use our authority purposefully without coercion; to support performers without infantilizing them; to challenge our collaborators without bullying them.

We do this by reminding ourselves that we have power in a room, by questioning how other people are likely to experience it, and by and by continually asking whether our use of it aligns with our ethical commitments.  We can inhabit our role in a way that tells artists: I see you, I want to work with you to create something beautiful, and I care about your agency as a human being.

That feels to me like a power worth having.

Further reading: Mary Parker Follett’s ideas about “power-over” and “power-with” have deeply influenced thinking about collaborative leadership. For an accessible introduction to Follett and her work, see Mary Parker Follett: Community, Creative Experience and Education or reference her 1924 book, Creative Experience.