What's On My Bookshelf
The work of Intimate StageWorks draws from a number of overlapping conversations: intimacy practice, performer agency, ethics, trauma-informed care, directing and acting technique, and scholarship about bodies, gender, and storytelling onstage. These are some of the books I return to, recommend, argue with, underline, and keep within reach.
Intimacy, Consent & Rehearsal Practice
Chelsea Pace, Staging Sex: Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Theatrical Intimacy
One of the foundational practical texts in contemporary theatrical intimacy work.)
Ayshia Mackie-Stephenson, Intimacy Directing for Theatre: Creating a Culture of Consent in the Classroom and Beyond
Particularly valuable for thinking about how consent-based practices extend beyond individual moments of choreography into rehearsal and educational culture.
Alexis Black and Tina Newhauser, Supporting Staged Intimacy: A Practical Guide
for Theatre Creatives, Managers, and Crew
A useful reminder that responsibility for intimacy work belongs to the broader production ecosystem, not only to performers and intimacy professionals.
Brooke Haney, The Intimacy Coordinator’s Guidebook: Specialties for Stage and
Screen
A broad look at the developing practices and specialized applications of intimacy work.
Joelle Ré Arp Dunham, ed., Stanislavski and Intimacy
An especially interesting bridge between intimacy practice and longstanding traditions of truthful, embodied performance.
Ethics, Agency & the Stoics
My thinking about intimacy work is also deeply influenced by Stoicism as a philosophy of practice concerned with character, choice, responsibility, and how we behave in relationship with others.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings
Epictetus, The Enchiridion
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius
Seneca, On Anger
Seneca, On the Happy Life
Seneca, To Marcia, On Consolation
These texts continue to shape the questions I ask about courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, boundaries, communication, and professional responsibility in the rehearsal room.
Trauma, Voice & Performer Care
Emily Jaworski Koriath, Trauma and the Voice: A Guide for Singers, Teachers, and Other Practitioners
Particularly important to my work with singers and opera performers, where the body, breath, voice, emotional experience, and artistic material are unusually intertwined.
Opera, Bodies, Gender & Storytelling
Because much of my own artistic life has been spent in opera, my intimacy practice is also shaped by scholarship examining whose bodies appear onstage, what happens to them, and how operatic storytelling has historically represented gender, desire, violence, and power.
Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women
A provocative and enormously influential examination of the recurring suffering and destruction of women in the operatic canon.
Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative
Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera
Both have been important to the way I think about voice, embodiment, narrative, and the strange theatrical world opera creates.
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred
Years
A broad historical companion to the more focused questions I ask about changing performance practices.
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
A foundational text for thinking critically about the ways music itself participates in constructing gender, desire, and power.
Mary Ann Smart, Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera
Another important voice in the conversation about bodies, gender, sexuality, and operatic representation.
Margaret Cormier, Rape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence
Particularly relevant to contemporary questions about how inherited repertoire depicting sexual violence should be staged for present-day performers and
audiences.
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