With the growing support of the field, members of the OU School of Drama are developing consent-based practices for staging theatrical intimacy.
In a performance space, intimacy refers to moments of touch between actors, especially those that include private areas of an actor’s body. Often these moments in a show are thematically sexual or romantic or refer to sex and gender-based violence.
Though actors are frequently asked to engage in these intimate moments in rehearsal and onstage, they are often not given the same level of planning and dissection that is given to other parts of a show.
Kate Busselle is an intimacy director at the OU School of Drama and the Assistant Professor of Movement and Stage Combat. Busselle has a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in Theatre and Performance Studies and is the founder of an online intimacy company, Heartland Intimacy Design and Training. She is recognized as a pioneer in the field of theatrical intimacy in professional and educational realms due to the collaborative work she has done to create some of the first theatrical intimacy training companies and educational materials.
Kate Bussell Lecturing in Staging Theatrical Intimacy.
Since joining OU in the fall of 2021, Busselle has done intimacy work for every show in the School of Drama. This year she began an upper division course called “Staging Theatrical Intimacy,” that is the first intimacy course to be offered by the school.
Busselle calls the position of intimacy director the “actor’s advocate.” In moments involving physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, nudity or sexual violence, Busselle said it is her job as the intimacy director to negotiate boundaries with actors and block a scene that honors those boundaries. Her goal is to create a repeatable piece of choreography that leaves nothing to chance.
At the collegiate level, Busselle has seen intimacy work be readily accepted by students. Performing artists in college have no difficulty understanding the value in developing consent-based practices. However, there is often resistance to the work on the professional level.
“Game of Thrones” actor Sean Bean is among those that view intimacy directors as a limiting force rather than an empowering one. According to Variety, Bean said that intimacy coordinators “spoil the spontaneity” of staging an intimate scene by bringing attention to what the actors are doing and said that “the natural way lovers behave would be ruined by someone bringing it right down to a technical exercise.”
“As we've emerged, … people (ask) ‘Do intimacy folks limit the creativity within the space? … (Would) they function like safety police? Or like fun police?’ And really, that's not at all what we do,” said Busselle. “We try to create a mechanism where we can advocate for the ballet dancer or we can advocate for the actor. … We get to be the bad guy on their behalf.”
With the long history of abuse in the professional world of the arts, unions are pushing back against coercive practices. However, Busselle said the director-performer relationship is inherently hierarchical in a manner that makes it difficult for performers to self-advocate.
“We have a lot clearer boundaries and reporting mechanisms for those things … and it's a lot clearer now that those things are not tolerated by the unions,” Busselle said. “But it doesn't solve the problem of precarity and vulnerability of actors, of having financial precarity, of ‘this is a boundary for me, but I also need to pay my rent.’”
Attention to education about consensual intimacy coordination helps change the attitudes of the professional world by helping to create a group of emerging artists who not only value self-advocation but have tools and understanding of what they want to be happening in theatre spaces. Busselle said she sees a growing attention to creating a culture of consent in the School of Drama student body.
“One of the things that has been abundantly clear, at least in this past year specifically in this department, … students have become much more aware of thinking about how to create cultures and environments that support this work and support the actor,” Busselle said. “Even students who are … learning how to be a director, they're being much more thoughtful and intentional and mindful about, ‘how do I make sure I don't recreate experiences that I’ve experienced in the past.’”
While the goal of intimacy work is harm prevention, Busselle said the reality is often that intimacy work is harm reduction. Despite a growing acceptance of the field, Busselle said that her expertise for a show is often only requested retrospectively.
“I am often invited into spaces professionally after something has gone wrong,” Busselle said. “Instead of proactively, to prevent harm from happening in the first place.”
Busselle said the School of Drama student body has a strong desire to create safe and welcoming theatre spaces. When she began at the university, Busselle was the only one with a staging intimacy protocol. Through her Staging Theatrical Intimacy course, she trains students to be intimacy directors and assist in coordinating intimacy scenes in school productions.
“Now I have kind of a network of folks who are people I can turn to and say, ‘Hey you go take that project,’” she said. “People who are wanting to further this field.”
Wyatt Parker is a senior actor major and one of seven students in Busselle's "Staging Theatrical Intimacy" course. He is among the students Busselle sees with a desire to further the field of intimacy.
Parker’s desire to take the course stemmed from negative personal experiences with onstage intimacy in high school and his first years of college. An additional impetus is that the current field of intimacy direction involves very few male-presenting people. As a job that involves the constant care of performers’ emotions, the role of intimacy director is feminized. Similar to the feminization of invaluable jobs such as nursing or teaching that are also heavy in emotional care, the labor of theatrical intimacy is not often approached by male-presenting people. The heavy emotional work is left to be done by women, despite needs for more equal distribution.
“The intimacy direction career path, its 90% women. And very few men take it,” Parker said. “So the emotional toll of managing everybody's emotions and the the labor of that all most often falls on fem-presenting people.”
Parker said he hopes that the existence of the course will help spread a culture of consensual staging practices throughout the school. He wants students to have tools with which they can advocate for themselves during the rehearsal process.
As a part of the staging theatrical intimacy course, students practice choreographing intimacy. They often recruit actors from outside the class to act out the scenes and learn their choreography. Parker believes this a great tool in the spread of safe staging practices.
“One of the big goals, … even if people aren't taking the class, is having people do the intimacy scenes in (it),” said Parker. “So that they can experience what safe intimacy staging looks like, and be able to identify it.”
When it comes to intimacy, directors often hold an actor’s willingness to be spontaneous in higher esteem than the actor’s needs or boundaries. Parker believes that such valuing of spontaneity is contradictory to the role of a director.
“In the same way that you don't just let actors walk around on stage with the lines memorized is the same reason why you don’t let actors just kiss and touch each other without choreography,” Parker said. “There would be no reason for a director.”
Parker also pushes back against the idea that having boundaries is unprofessional because he believes they are a tool for making art that is as impactful as possible.
“I think giving people the tools to say when they're comfortable and how they are most comfortable only, like, creates more room for more creative and stronger and more powerful art,” said Parker.
Elyssa Armenta is a senior acting major who is also in Busselle’s “Staging Theatrical Intimacy” course. She is writing her capstone paper on the intimacy work she is doing this year. Her interest in intimacy direction stems from negative high school experiences and a desire to create safe artistic spaces.
“You're trying to do something that's taboo and can be really hurtful, in the safest way possible,” she said. “I think there's something really special about that.”
Armenta said that the development of specific language for intimacy work helps give actors agency because it keeps everyone on the same page. Terms such as “skin level, muscle level, and bone level” are used to describe levels of tension.
In establishing boundaries, the term “fence” refers to a part of an actor’s body that is not to be touched, and a “gate” is something that is a negotiable. She said that this type of detail helps keep everyone on the same page and helps take away subjective interpretation.
“If a director were to say, ‘can I just have like a passionate kiss here?’ What does that mean?” Armenta said. “Everyone's definition of passion can mean something different, so it's unclear and then that absolutely blurs the lines.”
While intimacy staging education is helpful for actors, it is also helpful for directors. James McCabe, a junior in the School of Drama, was drawn to the “Staging Theatre Intimacy” course after working with Busselle on a production. In the script, McCabe’s character assaults a woman. Busselle constructed an equally impactful scene that didn’t involve the recreation of a violent assault.
“Ever since then, I feel like if I want to be a good director, I need to understand how someone goes about blocking this, McCabe said.
McCabe’s focus in the class is learning how to create a safe space for actors.
“It's just being cautious, but also being direct with how the staging is going to be,” said McCabe. “Because if I'm not specific enough, that's when fences are crossed.”
As an aspiring director, McCabe believes intimacy training is an essential part of creating a safe artistic space, even when a director fails to see the value.
“When someone tells you that this is necessary, it is. Even though you haven't had to consider it, it is still a thing that people think about,” McCabe said. “You can't force a person to go through something they're uncomfortable with and that can be traumatic for them. … Even though it's not traumatic for you does not mean it's not traumatic for them.”
Busselle and her students have made drastic improvements in the dynamics of rehearsal spaces, but the element of an intimacy director is not yet considered standard practice in the school or in the performing arts at large. There is a hope that the vitality of an intimacy director’s role will become universally understood throughout the acting world and become part of every facet of performing arts in the future.
