Directing Desire: Intimacy Choreography and Consent in the Twenty-First Century 303131221X, 9783031312212

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Directing Desire Intimacy Choreography and Consent in the Twenty-First Century Kari Barclay

Directing Desire

Kari Barclay

Directing Desire Intimacy Choreography and Consent in the Twenty-First Century

Kari Barclay Oberlin College Oberlin, OH, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-31221-2    ISBN 978-3-031-31222-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31222-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

One exercise that Theatrical Intimacy Education uses to train intimacy choreographers is to stage a connection between characters across a room; participants imagine a golden thread travelling between them. Golden threads have connected me to intimacy professionals across the United States and abroad throughout this writing process. I owe gratitude to the intimacy directors and coordinators who have taught me over the years: Tonia Sina, Claire Warden, Adam Noble, Samantha Kaufman, Ashley K. White, Jessica Steinrock, Chelsea Pace, Laura Rikard, and Lizzy Talbot. Conversations about intimacy choreography with Maya Herbsman, Amanda Blumenthal, Erica Wray, Lauren DeLeon, Raja Benz, Joy Brooke Fairfield, Amanda Rose Villarreal, Ariel Lipson, and Victoria Nassif have immensely enriched my understanding and practice. In particular, Julia Fisher has been an invaluable Cleveland collaborator. Our coffee chats, email conversations, and collaborations have shaped so much of my intimacy choreography work. Thank you to Betty Lee, Diego Dew, Diana Khong, Iryna Lymar, Grace Wallis, Irie Evans, Ryan Tan, Cory Molner, Denise Astorino, Jeannine Gaskin, DeAndre Short, Patricia Fell, and many others for enlisting me to direct intimacy and to my actors and designers who brought their skills and ideas to our choreography. Thank you to Jacob Sexton, Liz Dooley, and Maybe Stewart for being my interlocutors about asexuality in theater. My production teams for Can I Hold You?, Stonewallin’, and 20 Minutes of Action have helped me stage many of the ideas in this book. I began this research during my doctoral studies at Stanford University, and generous colleagues and friends guided me as I transitioned from v

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in-person research to virtual work during the COVID-19 pandemic. My dissertation adviser Samer Al-Saber has modeled what it means to be a scholar-artist-educator. I thank him for pushing me to make strong choices and stand by them. Peggy Phelan guided me generously since the start of my Stanford career. It is rare to meet a scholar who combines intellectual rigor with a commitment to supporting her mentees as whole human beings. Matthew Smith provided invaluable feedback on my artistic work, teaching, and scholarship. Estelle Freedman offered generous guidance on gender and sexuality studies, as well as histories of sexual violence. I thank mentors and educators during my time in the Bay, including Young Jean Lee, Cherríe Moraga, Jisha Menon, Amy Kilgard, Laura Frost, Branislav Jakovljevic, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Diana Looser, Lesley Hill, Helen Paris, and Rush Rehm. My classmates in Theater and Performance Studies, particularly Danielle Conley, Rishika Mehrishi, Amani Starnes, Thao Nguyen, and Suhaila Meera, were crucial to this work. Thank you to TAPS PhD alum Joy Brooke Fairfield, who published my first article on intimacy choreography in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Thank you to Amanda Rose Villareal, who offered valuable feedback on a second article I published about intimacy choreography in The Journal of Consent-­ Based Performance. The Ric Weiland Memorial Fellowship supported this research financially and with interdisciplinary community. Thank you to Oberlin College and Northeast Ohio for providing me a home as I finished editing this book. Colleagues including Caroline Jackson-Smith, Matthew Wright, Chris Flaharty, Laura Carlson-­ Tarantowski, Eric Steggall, Holly Handman-Lopez, Jennifer Blaylock, Al Evangelista, and KJ Cerankowski have offered steady encouragement and conversation. Thank you to my students, particularly in my fall 2021 course on intimacy choreography, who shaped my teaching and scholarship. Thank you Eileen Srebernik and Sivaranjani Siva for shepherding this book through the publishing process. I give thanks to all those who sustained me materially and spiritually during this writing process. I thank the cows of the East Bay Hills and the gulls of Lake Erie for their companionship in my many walks in nature. I wrote Directing Desire on the unceded lands of the Muwekma and Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, Lenape Peoples, and Erie and Haudenosaunee Peoples. I thank the original indigenous caretakers of this land and the Sogorea Te Land Trust and Lake Erie Native American Council for carrying that tradition of stewardship forward. My research would not have been possible without the support of librarians at Lincoln Center’s Performing Arts Library and Stanford, as

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well as the workers at Yali’s Café and Coupa Cafe. Thank you to my friends Meghan Lechner, Tania Benites, Allegra Hyde, Jon Davies, Milind Rao, Aaron Almanza, Sasha Trope, and Rose Gittell for keeping me grounded. My parents, Dean Barclay and Andrea Senkowski, are two of the most inquisitive people I know. I thank them for making “love, goodness, and excellence” the guiding values for my work. Lastly, I thank my partner Alejandro Martinez, who patiently sits across the table from me at a coffee shop even now as I type these words. This book, like the movement toward joyful intimacy, is a project that we build in common.

Contents

1 Introduction Boundary Practice  1 1.1 Imagining Intimacy Choreography  1 1.2 The Limits of Consent  6 1.3 Toward a Theory of Sexual Labor in Theater 11 1.4 Intimacy Choreography and Abjection 16 1.5 Feeling Together in the Sexual Commons 21 1.6 Chapter Breakdown 23 2 Erotic  Repetitions: A Brief History of Intimacy Choreography 29 2.1 Repetition Exercises 29 2.2 Intimate Theatrics Before #MeToo 33 2.3 Rehearsing Intimacy Choreography’s History 35 2.4 Influences on Intimacy Choreography 42 Fight Choreography  42 Movement Directing  44 Sex and Relationship Therapy  46 Black Acting Methods  47 2.5 The Adoption of Consent Discourse 50 2.6 Consent-as-Contract and Consent-as-Exploration 54

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3 Sexual  Script Analysis: Sex Positivity and Authorship in Intimate Scenes 59 3.1 The Trouble with “Presence” 59 3.2 The Male Gaze and Structures of Desire 63 3.3 Visual Identification in Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again  65 3.4 Flipping the Script 69 3.5 Wanting to Want 75 3.6 Sex Positivity and Its Discontents 80 3.7 Choreographing Intimacy Beyond Desire 85 4 “Intermediate”  Pornography Mediating Presence with the Intimacy Kit 89 4.1 Choreographing Intimacy Between Media 92 4.2 Thomas Bradshaw’s Theatrical Pornography 95 4.3 Amateurism and the Fantasy of the Immediate 97 4.4 Professionalism, Props, and Cyborg Sexualities102 4.5 Simulating Sexuality with the Intimacy Kit106 4.6 Remediating Erotic “Presence”110 5 Playing  with Trauma: Race, Consent, and Culturally Responsive Intimacy115 5.1 Kink Encounters in Jeremy O. Harris’s Daddy and Slave Play117 5.2 Racializing Touch119 5.3 Power Plays and BDSM’s Status Question122 5.4 Sleeping with the Ancestors128 5.5 Trauma as a Scene Partner138 5.6 Returning to Sensation141 6 Immersive  Intimacy Violation and Transformative Justice in Immersive Performance145 6.1 Immersive Theater’s Aesthetic of Intimacy145 6.2 Intimate Unmaskings in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More 148 6.3 Re-eroticizing the Senses153 6.4 Optimization in the Experience Economy158

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6.5 Performance Frames and Procedural Justice163 6.6 Transformative Justice in the #MeToo Era167 6.7 Contract Negotiations and the Actor-Audience Contract171 7 Conclusion:  Keep in Touch175 7.1 Intimacy Choreography as Maintenance Work175 7.2 Asexual Intimacies in the Sexual Commons177 7.3 Supporting Sensation180 Bibliography185 Index205

About the Author

Kari Barclay  (they/them or he/him) is a writer, director, and researcher based in Cleveland, OH. They work across theater theory and practice on topics including sexuality, queerness, and politics. Their play, Can I Hold You?, was one of the first full-length plays about asexuality performed in the United States, and their play Stonewallin’, a queer comedy about historical memory and the Confederate monument debate, won the SoQueer Playwright Contest in 2021. They have published articles in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, The Journal of Consent-Based Performance, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics and directed performances at MirrorBox Theatre, Cleveland Public Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Ars Nova, among other theaters.Kari earned their PhD in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University in 2021, and they currently serve as Assistant Professor of Theater at Oberlin College. Kari has trained with Claire Warden, Tonia Sina, Adam Noble, Chelsea Pace, Laura Rikard, and other artists who choreography intimacy for stage and screen. They integrate this work across theory and practice to advance racial and gender equity in the entertainment industry. kari-­barclay.com

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Boundary Practice

1.1   Imagining Intimacy Choreography In September 2015, a new play at The Flea Theater in New  York City credited Yehuda Duenyas as “sex choreographer.” The play, Thomas Bradshaw’s Fulfillment, follows a Black protagonist as he works through anxieties around race and upper middle-class life in Manhattan and seeks satisfaction through “rough sex” with a white partner. When the director struggled to block the production’s explicitly sexual moments, Bradshaw asked for assistance from Duenyas, who had directed Bradshaw’s earlier, similarly charged productions. Over the phone, Duenyas facetiously asked Bradshaw if his role would be “like a sex choreographer?”1 The title stuck. The Independent ran an article with the headline, “sex choreographer is now officially a job.”2 The New York Post devoted the headline of its review to Duenyas’s position: “Erotic new play ‘Fulfilment’ required a sex choreographer.”3 The Chicago Tribune noted that Duenyas’s “very 1  Nick Paumgarten, “A Sex Choreographer at Work,” The New  Yorker (Oct. 5, 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/moves. 2  Mimi Launder, “Sex choreographer is now officially a job,” The Independent (Jan. 3, 2018), https://www.indy100.com/ar ticle/sex-choreographer-is-now-of ficially-a-jobacting-films-8140031. 3  Elisabeth Vincentelli, “Erotic new play ‘Fulfillment’ required a sex choreographer,” The New York Post (Sept. 22, 2015),https://nypost.com/2015/09/22/erotic-new-play-fulfillmentrequired-a-sex-choreographer/.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barclay, Directing Desire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31222-9_1

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Twitter-friendly program credit was created especially for this production.”4 Indeed, when The New Yorker ran an article entirely devoted to Duenyas’s work on the production, it garnered retweets and facetious comments including “Does he take private commissions?”5 Naming tends to instill a practice with a sense of novelty. Duenyas was by no means the first artist to develop approaches for choreographing sex in theater. Movement and fight directors including Tonia Sina, Sasha Smith, and Chelsea Pace had been developing methods for staging intimate moments years before Duenyas coined his program credit. However, giving Duenyas a title was what the linguist J.L. Austin calls a “performative utterance,” a piece of language that not merely describes reality but also attempts to shape it.6 By declaring Duenyas a “sex choreographer,” the production had effectively made him one. The New  Yorker’s Nick Paumgarten wrote, “New jobs: Duenyas had created one, at least.”7 Duenyas joked, “It’s not really a category that’s ever existed. I want to see it at the Tonys.”8 The anthropologist Ian Hacking describes this process as dynamic nominalism: “Categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interaction between those processes.”9 Duenyas could only use the title “sex choreographer” because of those doing similar work before him, and his naming would encourage others to specialize in the role in the future. In his New Yorker profile, Duenyas compared his work to fight choreography and deployed a vocabulary drawn from consent educators in BDSM communities.10 Meanwhile, his title of sex choreographer would soon fall out of use in favor of those of “intimacy directors” and “intimacy coordinators.” 4  Chris Jones, “‘Fulfillment’: graphic sex staged and edgy issues,” The Chicago Tribune (Nov. 16, 2015), https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/ct-fulfillment-­ review-ent-1117-20151116-column.html. 5  Daniel Lee. Twitter Post. January 2, 2018. https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/ 948403652384968704. 6  J.L.  Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 6. 7  Paumgarten. 8  Paumgarten. 9   Ian Hacking, “Five Parables,” Philosophy in History, Cambridge University Press (1984), 122. 10  October Surprise, “Screaming Green: A Topography and Bourdieusian Analysis of the Model of Sexual Consent Utilized by BDSM Community Members,” M.A. Thesis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (May 2012), 9.

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In the five years since Duenyas’s program credit, specialized artists like Duenyas have expanded their reach dramatically. While Duenyas joked about sex choreographer as a category for the Tony Awards, the most Tony-nominated production in 2020 and in US theater history, Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, would feature an “intimacy director.” That same intimacy director, Claire Warden, would receive a Drama Desk Award and choreograph intimacy for four plays on Broadway in the second half of 2019 alone.11 Artist Amanda Blumenthal describes a similar dynamic in film and television to what Duenyas encountered in theater; according to Blumenthal, the title of “intimacy coordinator” emerged alongside the best practices required to fill the job description.12 Starting with HBO, film and television networks began to mandate the use of intimacy coordinators for scenes of simulated sex and nudity in 2018.13 In 2020, the union for screen actors, SAG-AFTRA, created industry-wide guidelines for the training and hiring of intimacy coordinators.14 Media coverage for intimacy coordinators has become so widespread that by 2021 the sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live even ran a skit lampooning their work.15 Today, artists specializing in intimacy have created seven professional organizations, hundreds of training workshops, and jobs on Broadway productions, regional stages, and television and film sets for Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu.16 Intimacy directors in theater and intimacy coordinators in film and television have become part of a veritable “intimacy industry” in the cultural sphere. How did a seemingly eccentric 11  Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune at the Broadhurst Theatre, Jeremy O.  Harris’s Slave Play at the John Golden Theatre, Tracy Letts’s Linda Vista at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theatre, and Diablo Cody’s Jagged Little Pill at the Broadhurst Theatre. 12  Amanda Blumenthal. Personal Interview. May 4, 2021. 13  Breena Kerr, “How HBO is Changing Sex Scenes Forever,” Rolling Stone (Oct. 24, 2018), https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/the-deuce-intimacy-coordinatorhbo-sex-scenes-739087/. 14  Amanda Blumenthal, Alicia Rodis, David White, and Gabrille Carteris, “Standards and Protocols for the Use of Intimacy Coordinators” (Jan. 2020), https://variety.com/wp-­ content/uploads/2020/01/sag-aftra_intimacycoord_full.pdf. 15  ”Bridgerton Intimacy Coordinator,” Saturday Night Live (Feb. 21, 2021), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUIN04iIJrM. 16  At time of writing, these professional organization include Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, Theatrical Intimacy Education, the Intimacy Professionals Association, Intimacy Coordinators of Color, Heartland Intimacy, Pacific Northwest Theatrical Intimacy, and the National Society for Intimacy Professionals.

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practice at a downtown theater in 2015 transform into a best practice accepted by Broadway producers? What forces encouraged the formation of the category of the “intimacy professional”? Directing Desire analyzes intimacy choreography's rise in the twenty-­ first century United States as a collision of artistic practices, social movements, and labor struggle that have attempted to shift artists’ working conditions around sexuality in theater.17 While intimacy choreography’s most visible intervention is the integration of consent discourse into theatrical practice, more broadly intimacy choreography exposes staging intimacy as an often-overlooked category of labor in theater and performance. Building on interviews, fieldwork, and analysis of contemporary plays that incorporated intimacy choreographers, Directing Desire calls attention to the challenges to selfhood that staging sexually and sensually charged scenes can involve, and it analyzes various tools that intimacy choreographers use to manage this challenge: the use of repeatable choreography, a divide between performer and character, props and costumes that frame the body, trauma-informed methodologies, and advocacy for negotiating labor contracts. These interventions may be less visible than consent, but they fundamentally upend the assumption that an actor must perform scenes of intimacy based on their own desires or experience. By contrast, intimacy choreography highlights the collective tools a production has to direct desire—to strategically wield scripts about sexuality in ways legible to an audience, regardless of an actor’s offstage experience. I focus on intimacy choreography not because the work is entirely different from the rest of theater practice. Quite the opposite—depictions of sex and sexual desire in theater are paradigmatic of the everyday labor negotiations embedded in theater and its entire enterprise of simulation. Tonia Sina, who wrote one of the first texts on intimacy choreography for her master’s thesis, recounts using the term “intimacy” as a euphemism for sexually charged content when writing for her graduate committee.18 17  In this book, I tend to favor the term “intimacy choreography” over the medium-specific “intimacy directing” (theater) or “intimacy coordination” (film and television). In this way, I gesture toward the interconnection between theater, film, and television, as well as the choreographic work done beyond the specialized roles of intimacy director or intimacy coordinator. When I use “intimacy directing” or “intimacy coordination,” I usually mean work that is specifically within theater, film, or television’s disciplinary boundaries. 18  Claire Warden, Tonia Sina, and Samantha Kaufman, “Three-Day Intimacy for the Stage Workshop,” Workshop. Flying V Theater, Bethesda, MD. July 19–21, 2018.

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However, the idea of “intimacy” in intimacy choreography points toward various aspects of theater practice that feel emotionally involved. Theater often blurs the personal and professional in ways that can be pleasurable and/or disastrous. For performers, knowing when to bring offstage experience into work can be a challenge. When can a performer manage the memories and emotions that a role can bring up, and when can those memories and emotions overwhelm a performer? For directors, too, boundaries can be a difficult dynamic to navigate. The director-actor relationship is necessarily “intimate” in that involves the director in decision-­ making around a performer’s body—how the performer moves, dresses, and speaks. With that level of physical and emotional entanglement, directors constantly confront questions of power, embodiment, and spectatorship. With the phrase “directing desire,” I suggest that theater is a field onto which artists and audiences project their collective fantasies. Crafting performance tests the limits of self and plays with personas and characters often denied in daily life. Artists not only direct desire but sometimes desire to direct, actively seek out opportunities to craft narrative. Working collaboratively to tell a story of intimacy can be itself a source of pleasure that sometimes blurs the lines between work and play. These dynamics in the staging of sexuality underscore the “intimate” nature of various kinds of theater practice. At the same time, staging intimacy has unique challenges that have caused it to become an object of specialization, especially since the #MeToo Movement. The sexuality studies scholar Gayle Rubin writes that “sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.”19 The “special respect” given to stage intimacy in the #MeToo Era has marked it as a practice distinct from the rest of the theatrical process. As arts workers often encounter themselves in precarious economic environments, sexuality has been one sphere in which artists have pushed for workplace protections and noted the difficulty of erotically charged work. The theater scholar Jill Dolan writes, “sexuality is as integral a part of constructing spectator subjectivity in a Shakespeare production at Stratford as it is in live sex shows in Times Square.”20 A potential response to the 19  Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger, ed. by Carole Vance (London: Pandora, 1992), 143. 20  Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 122.

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#MeToo Movement would be for artists to shy away from sex and sexuality in the theater because they are difficult topics to navigate. However, as sex and sexuality are becoming sites of contemporary contestation, theater artists are tasked with exploring power, attraction, and desire in theatrical work. Intimacy choreography, rather than foreclosing conversations about sex, is cracking that conversation open even further, allowing us to think about sexuality in theater and performance beyond our current moment.

1.2  The Limits of Consent At first glance, the movement to advance intimacy choreography appears most closely linked to the #MeToo Movement of 2017. Intimacy choreography gained momentum in the United States following the 2016 presidential election, when then-candidate Donald Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, and the MeToo hashtag in 2017, which spread from Hollywood actors to the general public following allegations of sexual misconduct against media executive Harvey Weinstein. In theater, survivors revealed the harassment, assault, and abuse they experienced at institutions including Chicago’s Profiles Theatre, Houston’s Alley Theatre, and Massachusetts’s Gloucester Stage Company.21 Given this attention to survivors’ stories, consent became a rallying cry for many advocates against sexual violence.22 This impulse was reflected in early efforts to institutionalize intimacy choreography. Intimacy Directors International, the first 21  Aimee Levitt and Christopher Piatt, “At Profiles Theatre the drama—and abuse—is real,” The Chicago Reader, June 8, 2016, https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/ profiles-­theatre-theater-abuse-investigation/Content?oid=22415861. Susan Carroll, Wei Huan Chen, and Molly Glentzer, “Actors describe toxic, bullying atmosphere during Alley Productions,” The Houston Chronicle, Jan. 12, 2018, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/ news/houston-texas/houston/ar ticle/Alley-theatre-houston-gregor y-boyd-­­ allegations-12492467.php. Jessica Bennett, “Nine Women Accuse Israel Horovitz, Playwright and Mentor, of Sexual Misconduct,” The New  York Times, Nov. 30, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/theater/israel-horovitz-sexual-misconduct.html. 22  See, for example, Kirsten King, “Aziz Ansari Allegations Show That People Have a Lot to Learn About Consent,” Teen Vogue, Jan. 16, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/ aziz-ansari-consent-op-ed; Samantha Cooney, “The Aziz Ansari Allegation Has People Talking About ‘Affirmative Consent.’ What’s That?” Time, Jan. 17, 2018, https://time. com/5104010/aziz-ansari-affirmative-consent/; and Rebecca Beitsch, “#MeToo Movement Has Lawmakers Talking About Consent,” Pew Trusts, Jan. 23, 2018, https:// www.pewtr usts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2018/01/23/ metoo-movement-has-lawmakers-talking-about-consent.

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organization in North America to advocate for intimacy professionals in entertainment, which formed in 2016, listed “consent” as one of their five pillars alongside context, choreography, communication, and closure.23 Chelsea Pace, co-founder of Theatrical Intimacy Education, which formed in 2017, likewise promotes creating a “culture of consent” in the rehearsal room.24 When members of Theatrical Intimacy Education founded the first journal in the field to share best practices, they titled it The Journal of Consent-Based Performance.25 At its core, consent is a framework stemming from the legal field that indicates the ability to dictate any sexual contact involving one’s body.26 Within the intimacy field, consent has come to stand in as a placeholder for a variety of values around bodily autonomy and artistic integrity. However, intimacy choreography predates the MeToo hashtag, and its interventions cannot solely be captured under the label of consent. “It’s a frequent misunderstanding of the field to think that [consent] is the one thing I do,” says the Richmond-based intimacy director Raja Benz. “There are a lot of misunderstandings of the origins of the field, specifically because everyone started hiring intimacy directors in the wake of the #MeToo Movement.”27 According to Benz, intimacy choreography builds on best practices developed informally in artistic spaces for years, especially beyond the reach of the early, white-led intimacy organizations.28 Kaja Dunn, who advises on equity and diversity work for Theatrical Intimacy Education, similarly notes the limits of consent for understanding the intersections of sexual violence with other forms of oppression. As Dunn argues, theater artists necessarily negotiate built environments to which they did not consent; they inherit unequal legacies from before they were

23  “The Pillars for Theater,” Intimacy Directors International, accessed Jan. 14, 2020, https://a0f2ed64-0969-4c12-9638-ffdc561fb109.filesusr.com/ugd/924101_2e8c624b cf394166bc0443c1f35efe1d.pdf. 24  Chelsea Pace, Staging Sex (New York: Routledge, 2020), 9. 25  The Journal of Consent-Based Performance, edited by Chelsea Pace, Laura Rikard, and Amanda Rose Villarreal, (Spring 2022) https://www.journalcbp.com/spring22. 26  Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 6. 27  Hobbes & Linds, “intimacy directing with Raja Benz!!” Queer Retrograde podcast, Jan. 29, 2022, https://anchor.fm/queerretrograde/episodes/43-intimacy-directing-withRaja-Benz-e1dks1q. 28  Hobbes & Linds.

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born.29 Can consent adequately protect those historically excluded from the body politic, including artists of color, whose ability to choose is structured by social and economic inequities? Amanda Blumenthal, who founded the Intimacy Professionals Association and coordinated intimacy for HBO series including Euphoria, emphasizes that she tends to “talk around” consent.30 On a television or film set, Blumenthal suggests, talking about consent can make actors feel like they are participating in sex education rather than artistic practice.31 While consent has been a key tool for advancing intimacy choreography in the field, on a day-to-day basis intimacy choreographers find themselves reworking consent beyond its legal usage and gesturing toward further values like communication, equity, and narrative complexity. This ambivalence around consent’s role in intimacy choreography speaks to colliding goals of intimacy choreography—individually to advance artists’ autonomy and structurally to make staging intimacy a less emotionally injurious process. Half a century after the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s, cultural stereotypes surround the staging of intimacy persist along lines of identity including race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. Staging intimacy can make narratives feel personal and bring up histories of stereotypes and trauma, even if artists consent to do this work. Before the #MeToo hashtag resurfaced in 2017, the Black feminist thinker and activist Tarana Burke founded her own “me too. movement” to help survivors of sexual violence heal from shame and find community.32 This was a less visible aspect of the fight against sexual violence than efforts to hold perpetrators accountable: encouraging communication, self-­knowledge, and pleasure as values beyond consent that can help individuals heal in the wake of trauma. Legal scholar Joseph Fischel argues that consent is a “checkbox”—necessary but not sufficient for ensuring

29  Joy Brooke Fairfield, Tonia Sina, Laura Rikard, and Kaja Dunn. “Intimacy Choreography and Cultural Change: An Interview with Leaders in the Field.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34, no. 1 (2019): 77–85. 30  Blumenthal. 31  Blumenthal. 32  This dual focus in some ways reflects the dual origins of the #MeToo movement—first as an initiative founded by Tarana Burke to support survivors of color who had faced sexual violence and the second as a social media phenomenon initiated by those in Hollywood to address violence in the entertainment industry.

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sexual justice.33 According to Fischel, consent law’s understanding of individual guilt and innocence is appealing because it is definitive, but “its bluntness blunts bigger and better thinking and politicking around sex and sexual violence.”34 When some feminists use the label of consent, Fischel suggests, they use it to mean a variety of other values of sex positivity, including creativity, autonomy, access, and an undoing of shame.35 What might be further tools beyond consent that intimacy choreography offers to theater practice? Responding to these many uses of consent in intimacy choreography, Directing Desire analyzes intimacy choreography in the United States as a product of two overlapping and sometimes contradictory sets of norms around sexuality in the twenty-first century—sexual liberalism and sex positivity. The first set of norms, sexual liberalism, is a right-based framework for adjudicating the ethics of sensual and sexual contact.36 By the logic of sexual liberalism, every individual has a right to determine what the kind of intimacy (or simulated intimacy) they engage in so long as they do not interfere with another person’s autonomy. As the historians Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio argue, sexual liberalism was the basis legal precedents fought for in the twentieth century that worked against sexual violence and sexual conservatism, which attempted to restrict sex to the context of heterosexual marriage.37 The second set of norms, sex positivity, also responds to sexual violence and sexual conservatism, and it advocates an undoing of the stigmas around sexuality.38 While sexual liberalism emphasizes individual choice, sex positivity examines the social structures and stigmas that constrain choice. In a similar spirit, intimacy choreography aims to make staging intimacy more accessible to artists regardless of individual experience, even if it means working through discomfort or challenging power structures. As I explore in a later chapter, uncritical forms of sex positivity can also put pressures on 33  Joseph Fischel, Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 18. 34  Fischel, 17. 35  Fischel, 20–21. 36  Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xx. 37  Freedman and D’Emilio, 241. 38  The Intimacy Professionals Association’s Amanda Blumenthal, for example, served in leadership for the organization Sex Positivity Los Angeles, which organizes events centered on sex education “joyful, pleasure-center, and fully accessible” vision of sexuality. “Sex Positive LA,” accessed Dec. 2, 2021, https://www.sexpositivelosangeles.org.

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individuals to equate sex with empowerment and see sex as a sphere of self-expression. These expressive models of sexuality pose particular challenges for theater makers because they can blur the lines between acting and truth. As artists and activists struggle for greater protections against sexual violence, ­ intimacy professionals navigate contradictory social impulses surrounding sexuality in contemporary performance, between articulating and dissolving boundaries, acting and self-expression, and the individual and the social. Intimacy choreography responds to the two colliding and sometimes contradictory ideals of sexual liberalism and sex positivity, which artists have at times conflated under the single label of consent. The rise of intimacy choreography has been so meteoric that it is easy to overlook the years of organizing and visioning that went into the field’s creation, as well as the ultimate goals of the field beyond consent. Directing Desire takes a longer-view look at intimacy choreography, asking what its precedents were, what trends have influenced it, and what enduring questions about staging sexuality it raises. In particular, this book asks what conceptual work consent can and cannot do for intimacy choreography. When intimacy choreographers describe their work as consent-based and trauma-­ informed, what do they mean, and what can their work teach us about consent beyond its use in the legal realm? I discuss these two cultural influences on intimacy choreography because they expose some often-­ unspoken tensions in the field, which stem from the different ways in which artists use consent to describe their work. On one hand, producers are asking for specialized workers who will prevent sexual violence in the theatrical workplace and any accompanying liability. On the other hand, artists are proposing innovations in the variety of intimacy depicted and how that intimacy is crafted. An overemphasis on the former function of intimacy choreographers can cause the field to downplay the later. Intimacy choreographer Claire Warden, the first to direct intimacy for a theater production on Broadway, states that intimacy choreographers “are not HR.… We are a creative partner in the room to steward a process of creative collaboration.”39 Against the urge to read intimacy choreography solely as a checkbox, I frame it as an artform trying to offer a workplace protection and an avenue for creative exploration. 39  Andrea Ambam, “Intimacy Directors Show Broadway a Gentle Way of Returning ft. Claire Warden,” More To Talk About podcast, Mar. 9, 2022, https://podcasts.apple.com/ us/podcast/intimacy-directors-show-broadway-a-gentle-way/id1609713679?i= 1000553473575.

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1.3  Toward a Theory of Sexual Labor in Theater This research draws upon fieldwork within the intimacy industry, and I intend it for scholars and artists alike. For the past four years, I have trained with ten of the leading intimacy directors in the United States and served as intimacy director for over a dozen productions across the United States and Canada. I have intentionally worked across professional organizations and avoided limiting myself to any single approach. This work embedded in the field as participant and observer informs my research. Throughout this book, I describe embodied experiences within the intimacy industry as jumping off points for larger investigations of intimacy in theater. I have also interviewed intimacy professionals and drawn on the extensive archive of journalistic interviews with intimacy professionals. During my research, I have heard horror stories from colleagues about performing sexually charged scenes for theater. These stories tend to cluster around three themes: 1) sexual violence in the theatrical workplace, 2) directors’ assumption of an actor’s sexual desire and experience where it is absent, and 3) sexual stereotyping based on intersecting identities. Beyond advancing consent, this book hopes to address the harm at the heart of these stories by amplifying practices that create space in theater for survivors of sexual violence, artists on the asexual spectrum, and those structurally hypersexualized and desexualized by racism, sexism, classism, ageism, and ableism— in other words, most of us. To remake sex positivity and expand consent discourse, Directing Desire lays out frameworks for artists and scholars to confront social pressures and sexual stereotyping, a normative insistence on desire for some and a normative erasure of desire for others. The book highlights what I describe as collective approaches to intimacy, ones that focus on collaborative choreography rather than individual attraction. Despite the longstanding associations between theater and sex work found in cultures from Elizabethan England to Imperial Japan, contemporary accounts of staging sexuality in theater are surprisingly rare.40 Many 40  For example, India’s Bharatanatyam dancers worked as courtesans before attempts to “uplift” the artform in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Elizabethan England associated actors with prostitutes and situated the two professions in close geographic proximity. Sex worker in Japan made early contributions to Kabuki, and the classification system for Kabuki stock characters may have even originated in advertisements of performers’ sexual services. Stine Simonsen Puri, “Dancing Through Laws: A History of Legal and Moral Regulation of Temple Dance in India,” Naveeñ Reet: Nordic Journal of Law and Social Research 6 (2015): 131-148. Joseph Lenz, “Base Trade: Theater as Prostitution,” ELH 60, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 833-855. K. Mezur, Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Kabuki-Female Likeness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 216-218.

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of the recent texts about theater and sexuality emerged during and after the Culture Wars of the 1990s, when sexually explicit artmaking became an object of attack for the political right and elements of the feminist left. Feminist and queer contributions in theater studies from this era often situated performance as a site for the liberatory expression of stigmatized sexualities. Jill Dolan, for example, has written powerfully about the role of presence and desire in lesbian spectatorship and argued that queer sexuality is a gift to the American theater.41 Similarly, queer theater scholars Kim Marra and Robert Schanke discuss the power of theatre “as a complex and many-layered medium for expression of transgressive desire.”42 In performance studies, Rebecca Schneider, José Esteban Muñoz, and Amelia Jones have described performers’ erotic interventions in the visual field through feminist and queer performance beyond theater itself.43 Many of these texts, particularly those in theater studies, offer a celebratory account of eroticism in performance. In light of social conservatism, depictions of sex in performance can offer a needed departure from homophobia and sex negativity in the public sphere. However, some queer theory and sexuality studies scholars in the twenty-first century also emphasize intimacy as a sphere that can touch on vulnerability, trauma, and history in ways that challenge an individual’s selfhood for better or for worse.44 Performing intimacy can be painful as well as pleasurable, and we need theories of sexuality in theater that account for the embodied labor that goes into staging intimacy. A note about scope—this book focuses on the twenty-first century United States, acknowledging the vital presence of intimacy  Dolan, 122.  Robert Schanke and Kim Marra, Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 7. 43  Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997). José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 44  In the past two decades, queer scholars including Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, Heather Love, and Ann Cvetkovich have urged sexuality studies researchers to explore the anti-social and traumatic aspects of eroticism. Similarly, queer of color critique from José Esteban Muñoz, Robert Eng, and Jasbir Puar have questioned the white, homosexual, cisgender subject often privileged in queer studies. Instead, queer criticism of the past decade has advanced a subjectless account of queerness that decenters “heterosexual” and “homosexual” as static identities. From sex as a liberating expression of selfhood, sexuality studies scholars have moved to an understanding of sex as intersubjective performance. 41 42

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choreographers around the globe. Since 2017, intimacy organizations have emerged in South Africa (Intimacy Practitioners South Africa), Scandinavia (Nordic Intimacy Coordinators), and the United Kingdom (Intimacy for Stage and Screen).45 India has had an enormous and highly visible movement to advance intimacy choreography in film and television with leading figures including Aastha Khanna and Neha Vyas.46 At time of writing, artists in Poland are working on publishing the first Polishlanguage anthology about intimacy choreography, including translated writing from US publications and my own work. The US-based Intimacy Professionals Association has certified film and television artists in Japan, Columbia, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Israel, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, and its leader, Amanda Blumenthal, is a consultant for Netflix in the Asia Pacific region and France.47 Based on my cultural context and the difficulties of travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, I write from a US perspective with occasional references to Anglophone influences from the United Kingdom. This book analyzes dynamics particular to the United States, its funding landscape, and its unions for performing artists, hoping that this study on intimate labor in the United States can complement work done on intimacy choreography in various cultural contexts. The hiring of intimacy choreographers and the adoption of best practices for stage intimacy in higher education have prompted the beginning of scholarly attention to contemporary intimacy professionals. In 2020, Joy Brooke Fairfield edited an excellent special section of The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism on intimacy choreography with

45  “Intimacy Practitioners South Africa,” Intimacy Professionals South Africa, accessed Jan. 23, 2023, https://www.intimacysouthafrica.org.za/. “Nordic Intimacy Coordinators,” Nordic Intimacy Coordinators, accessed Jan. 23, 2023, https://www.nordicintimacy.com/. “Intimacy for Stage and Screen,” Intimacy for Stage and Screen, accessed Jan. 23, 2023, https://www.intimacyforstageandscreen.com/. 46  Mini Anthikad Chhiber, “Taking Sex Seriously: Aastha Khanna, India’s First Intimacy Coordinator,” The Hindu, June 11, 2021, https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/ movies/astha-khanna-the-countrys-first-certified-intimacy-coordinator-on-creating-a-safespace-for-actors-on-set/article34788610.ece. Neha Vyas, “About Me,” Intimacy for Actors, accessed Jan. 23, 2023, https://www.intimacyforactors.in/aboutnehavyas. 47  “Intimacy Coordinators,” Intimacy Professionals Association, accessed Jan. 23, 2023, https://www.intimacyprofessionalsassociation.com/team. “About Our Founder,” Intimacy Professionals Association, accessed Jan. 23, 2023, https://robin-heptagon-6ddm.squarespace.com/about-1.

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contributions from artists and scholars.48 Also in 2020, Chelsea Pace published a practical handbook, Staging Sex, in consultation with Laura Rikard.49 Staging Sex is a great starting point for understanding best practices in intimacy choreography, especially those of the organization she co-­founded, Theatrical Intimacy Education. Jessica Steinrock, now CEO of the professional organization Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, has also written eloquently about best practices in intimacy choreography as part of her doctoral work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.50 In 2021, Amanda Rose Villarreal completed her PhD dissertation at the University of Colorado at Boulder on consent-based practices in immersive and participatory performance.51 In the interest of promoting conversation about skills and best practices, leaders with Theatrical Intimacy Education have created their own publication in the field, The Journal of Consent-Based Performance, which had its first issue in January 2022.52 Placing this emerging writing on best practices in dialogue with scholarship from sexuality studies, Directing Desire enriches the field by framing the field in a way that allow us to understand the labor of staging sexuality and its implications beyond our current moment. In the book, I conceptualize the work of staging intimacy as erotic labor that takes place within a preexisting economic and social infrastructure. For this analysis, I draw on literature from pornography studies and sexuality studies that emphasizes the embodied experience of performing intimacy for viewing audiences. Not all intimacy choreographers may want to think of their work in tandem with pornography, and intimacy choreographers can be eager to draw a distinction between simulated sex and the genital sex acts depicted in pornography. However, intimacy choreography and pornography alike participate in constructing sexual norms and expectations; they reference and reshape the “sexual scripts” that circulate in society.53 Theater studies can learn from porn studies and sexuality ­studies, which provide useful accounts of the interrelation between the  The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 77–161.  Pace. 50  Jessica Steinrock, “Intimacy Direction: A New Role in Contemporary Theater Making,” PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dec. 2, 2022. 51  Amanda Rose Villarreal, “Unscripted Intimacies: Negotiating Consent in Gamified Performance,” PhD Dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2021. 52  The Journal of Consent-Based Performance (Spring 2022). 53  William Simon and John Gagnon, “Sexual Scripts: Permanence and Change,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 15, no. 2 (1986): 97–120. 48 49

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individual sexual behavior and social structures. Mireille Miller-Young’s ethnography of Black women in pornography, for example, conceptualizes the relationship between “the existing political economy” and a performer’s strategic use of their “corporeal resources.”54 The Black feminist scholar L.H. Stallings challenges the divide between embodied and intellectual sexual labor and writes of the interrelation between sex workers, pornographers, and sexual studies scholars who labor on sexual culture imaginatively and physically.55 In one of the rare accounts of sexual labor in theater, Giulia Palladini usefully imagines performance in New York’s downtown scene of the 1960s as “foreplay,” a performance that blends labor and leisure to reshape history (in Palladini’s construction, play with what came before).56 With a similar lens, I take up intimacy choreography as sexual labor that draws on existing cultural tropes and creatively attempts to rework the tropes embedded in our broader culture.57 As I provide a vocabulary in this introduction to describe how intimacy choreographers direct desire, I first emphasize that the staging of sexuality as a labor process that has been abjected—cast off—from other elements of directing practice in contemporary American theater. Intimacy choreography appears such a new phenomenon in part because the labor of staging intimacy has often been rendered invisible or relegated to performers to figure out on their own. The cultural theorist Susan Sontag writes, “everything pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.”58 The same can be said of staging intimacy. As Chelsea Pace argues, directors have often asked actors to do what feels “natural” or go to another room to practice intimacy on their own—techniques that leave actors without direction and increase the risk of harassment and abuse.59 The treatment of intimacy as special compared to other moments in theater has paved the 54  Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press: Durham, 2014), 12. 55  L.H.  Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 16. 56  Giulia Palladini, The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor, and Liesure, 1960s New  York (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 5. 57  I explore the connection between theater and sex work further in Chapter Four. The scholar Ariel Lipson noted this connection and intimacy choreography’s precursors in feminist pornography at a training I attended in Bethesda, MD in 2019. Hannah Fazio with Heartland Intimacy Design has also begun researching the relationship between intimacy chorography and sex work, and I’m excited to see where these lines of inquiry go next. 58  Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 46. 59  Pace, 2–3.

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way for intimacy choreography to emerge as a specialized practice. To underscore why intimacy is separated from the rest of a rehearsal process, I first define abjection as that which challenges an individual’s sense of self and thus is often disparaged or marginalized in society. Next, I outline some of the processes through which intimacy choreographers attempt to manage the challenges that staging intimacy can pose to actor’s selfhood. Intimacy choreographers de-privatize intimate labor by focusing on shared choreography rather than individual desire. In this way, artists and advocates strive to construct what I call a sexual commons, a sphere in which participants can collaboratively shape the scripts of intimacy they perform and negotiate their relationships to the unchosen racial and colonial legacies informing contemporary sexuality. Lastly, I outline the chapters that this book will include, each of which addresses one aspect of intimacy choreography and its relationship to consent and sex positivity.

1.4   Intimacy Choreography and Abjection Post #MeToo, many theater makers have grown more aware of the potential injuries that can result from performing in stage intimacy. While practices developed to avoid physical injury when staging fights or stunts in the twentieth century, it has taken longer to recognize the psychological risks of staging sexuality.60 Staging sexuality can put artists in contact with what the feminist theorist Julia Kristeva calls “abjection”—that which threatens an individual’s sense of meaning and provokes embodied responses that blur the distinction between self and other.61 During encounters with abjection, a physical sensation interrupts the fabric of lived experience and our understanding of ourselves as subjects (active creators in the world) and objects (products of other people’s actions).62 The twentieth-century theater director and acting teacher Lee Strasberg captured this dynamic succinctly: The body with which you make real love is the same body with which you make fictitious love with someone you don’t like, whom you fight with, whom you hate, by whom you hate to be touched. And yet you throw your60  See, for example, Brian LeTraunik, A History of Stage Combat: 1969-Today (New York: Routledge, 2021). 61  Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, transl. by Leon Samuel Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 2. 62  Kristeva, 2.

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self into his arms with the same kind of aliveness and zest and passion as with your real lover—not only with your real lover, with your realest lover. In no other art form do you have to do this monstrous thing.63

Strasberg was known for enabling sexual harassment in his rehearsal rooms and acting classrooms, and, in this quote, he idealizes discomfort and perhaps even non-consent in the staging of intimate scenes.64 However, Strasberg correctly notes the continuities between a body onstage and offstage and the frightening challenges they can provoke for a performer’s sense of reality. For this reason, intimacy choreographers build practices to divide performer and role, discussed more in the next chapter, and to give performers agency over their body such that they do not have to throw themselves into non-consensual encounters with their colleagues. Intimacy choreographers help artists manage abjection such that they can approach fictional intimacy for performance without feeling a sense of horror. Building on accounts of sexual labor and abjection, I argue that staging sexuality has been “abject labor” in theater—labor that is structurally sidelined and that can challenge a performer’s sense of self.65 I use the term “abject” in three senses. First, I build on Kristeva’s understanding of the abject as “filth” and “waste” that a dominant moral code suppresses to create the impression of ordered coherence.66 Despite the efforts of sex workers to normalize their labor in the public eye, associations between sex work, smut, and dirt continue to stigmatize prostitution and pornography. In a similar spirit, theater has at times attempted to distance itself from its relationships to sexuality. The management studies scholars Brewis and Linstead argue that organizations attempt to “cast off” sexual labor from other labor processes, denying its existence or casting it aside as excess.67 Whereas service work at times involves sexual undertones, managers systemically deny the emotional labor involved in appearing ­attractive to clients and coworkers, charming or seducing customers, and making 63  Robert H. Hethmon, Strasberg at the Actors Studio (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1965), 76–77. 64  Kari Barclay, “Willful Actors: Valuing Resistance in American Actor Training,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34.1 (2019): 123–141. 65  Melissa Tyler, “Working in the Other Square Mile: Performing and Placing Sexualized Labour in Soho’s Sex Shops,” Work, Employment and Society 26, no. 6 (2012): 899–917. 66  Kristeva, 65. 67  Joanna Brewis and Stephen Linstead, Sex, Work, and Sex Work (New York: Routledge, 2000), 98.

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products appear sexually appealing.68 The same can be said of some theater directors, who offload the work of staging sexuality onto performers (and onto some helpful stage managers and costumers who have informally supported performers through moments of intimacy). Because sexuality is abject, it is still a challenge for artists and activists to prove that staging intimacy is in fact work that incorporates expertise and creativity. Simultaneously, intimacy choreography pushes the limits of work by imagining theatrical labor as a source of pleasure as well as pay. The notion of abject labor draws on a second body of literature around sexuality and abjection. In Kristeva’s account, encounters with the abject can expose a person to a sense of loss. Kristeva’s classic example is the experience of looking at a corpse and experiencing the horror of recognizing one’s mortality and the fragility of one’s body.69 While intimate encounters are less associated with horror, they can nevertheless make individuals aware of their bodies and the vulnerability they have in the company of others. In intimate encounters, individuals can let go of their everyday selfhood and experience previously denied bodily sensations. Building on Kristeva, some psychoanalysts—including Leo Bersani and David Halperin—imagine sexuality as a sphere of abject encounters. As Bersani and Halperin argue, intimacy is not merely about satisfying desire; it moves “beyond the pleasure principle” and promises feeling that pleasurably and painfully reconfigures the self.70 Particularly in male-­dominated value systems that deny interdependence, abjection provides an opportunity to embrace vulnerability. There is a reason we say that partners “fall” in love; intimacy involves a necessary release and entry into a space of shared fantasy. The same is true of acting; performance can certainly be a joyful challenge to self, and it can be disorienting. Against the pressures to “find one’s self” in the workplace, stage intimacy may be a space to lose one’s self for better or for worse. Imagining stage intimacy as abject labor enables us to foreground the potential restructurings of self that can occur in a production process. 68  See the work of Arlie Hochschild on flight attendants in the airline industry in The Managed Heart. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Oakland: University of California Press, 1979). 69  Kristeva, 3. 70  Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in Is the Rectum a Grave and Other Essays (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010), 25. David Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 148–150.

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When I connect intimacy choreography with abject labor, I draw on a third sense of abjection: abjection as a product of political and historical processes. Structural racism and empire have attempted to cast those in the global majority as inhuman or subhuman, often using sexuality as a focal point. In Extravagant Abjection, the African American Studies scholar Darieck Scott writes that “blackness functions in Western culture as a repository of fears about sexuality.”71 Attempts to abject racialized bodies have marked them as threatening to the coherence of imperial body-politics. The theater scholar Karen Shimakawa similarly deploys the term “national abjection” to describe the construction of Asian American identity in US theater history.72 According to Shimakawa, racial ideologies have produced Asian American bodies as borders through which and against which to define citizenship.73 For Scott and Shimakawa, the abject is a necessarily eroticized position. Neither self nor other, the abject constitutes a site of erotic fascination for the dominant culture. One can see this eroticization in the range of hypersexual or desexualized stereotypes applied to BIPOC communities in the United States. Racial and sexual stereotypes operate in tandem to produce Black and Brown bodies as recurring scenes in the spectacle of white nation-formation. Despite the harmful histories of sexual stereotyping, sexuality can also be a sphere to remake racial meanings, as advocates of racial justice in intimacy choreography including Ann James, Teniece Divya Johnson, and Maya Herbsman are keen to emphasize.74 Intimacy’s destabilizing power, like abjection’s power to destabilize selfhood, can touch the foundations of race and empire. Given stage intimacy’s potential to challenge selfhood, intimacy choreographers help artists manage their encounters with abjection such that they do not produce damaging ruptures in artists’ psyches. Consider, for example, the metaphor of the “consent gym,” which I learned from 71  Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 10. 72  Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 73  Shimakawa, 3 74  Ann James, “Intimate Reform: Making Space for Leaders of Color,” Howlround (Mar. 19, 2020), https://howlround.com/intimate-reform; Candace Frederick, “What It’s Like to Be a Black Intimacy Coordinator,” Elle (Sept. 8, 2020), https://www.elle.com/culture/ movies-tv/a33850492/black-intimacy-coordinators-interview/; and Maya Herbsman, Personal Interview, May 10, 2021.

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Intimacy Directors and Coordinators’ Samantha Kaufman at a training in Dallas, TX in January 2020.75 Kaufman compared working on intimacy in performance to lifting weights. On a whiteboard, she drew a spectrum containing three ranges—comfort, discomfort, and injury. When lifting weights, most athletes aim to work within a range of discomfort such that they can improve their strength, but they must monitor their discomfort when lifting weights such that they do not cause muscle strain or other injury. Kaufman suggested there is an analogous spectrum for performance. An actor may want to work outside their comfort zones such that they can grow as performers, but when actors push themselves too much, they have the potential to cause or reactivate trauma.76 For example, a performer can inventory their response when performing in a scene of sexual violence—is the experience going to help the performer grow as an artist, or is it going to take the actor out of commission? One could ask the same question at a more micro level of individual touch—will allowing a scene partner to touch a performer’s inner thigh help the performer tell a story they want to tell, or will it provoke sensations that blur the line between actor and character in a way that is difficult to control? It is instructive that Kaufman connected this metaphor of a gym to theories of consent. In the metaphor of the “consent gym,” consent is a tool with which intimacy choreographers and performers manage their encounters with abjection. On one hand, consent helps artists set a limit on their work such that they are not pressing into the realm of injury. On the other, consent carves out a space in which artists can experience challenging sensations onstage and explore artistically. In the metaphor, consent thus serves two functions: 1) as a workplace protection and 2) a facilitator of artistic exploration. Tonia Sina, one of the first artists to write about the role of the intimacy choreographer, uses a similar metaphor of having a “container” for staged intimacy.77 According to Sina, consent-­ based choreography is a container for the sensations that can potentially arise when staging intimacy. Consent helps ensure that the sensations of desire or pain do not overflow into a performer’s daily life beyond the 75  Adam Noble, Ashley K.  White, and Samantha Kaufman, “Three-Day Intimacy of the Stage Intensive,” Workshop, Eastfield College, Dallas, TX, Jan. 24–26, 2020. 76  Noble, White, and Kaufman. 77  Claire Warden, Tonia Sina, and Samantha Kaufman, “Three-Day Intimacy for the Stage Workshop,” Workshop. Flying V Theater, Bethesda, MD. July 19–21, 2018. The language of the “container” comes from Stephen Wangh’s Grotowski-inspired approach to acting. Stephen Wangh, An Acrobat of the Heart (New York: Vintage, 2000), 103–105.

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performer’s ability to control them.78 As I underscore in the following chapters, there are challenges to relying on consent as the primary rhetorical strategy for describing intimacy choreography, particularly because many intimacy choreographers attempt to use consent to describe both a legal imperative and an artistic tool. Beyond their focus on consent, intimacy choreographers help artists manage their encounters with the challenges to self that staging intimacy can provoke. The performance studies scholar Judith Butler writes, “Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies. . . . Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.”79 Intimacy choreographers navigate vulnerability, especially around physical touch, by recognizing the vulnerability that marks individuals as members of artistic and political communities.

1.5  Feeling Together in the Sexual Commons Against the tendency to remove sexuality from the labor process, intimacy choreographers might attempt to craft what I call a sexual commons within the entertainment industry. A sexual commons is a space in which artists can negotiate the erotic scripts they stage in theater and attempt to reshape the unequal infrastructures that sustain social perceptions of intimacy. With the term “commons,” I cite the idea of a town square where disparate individuals can meet on shared footing. Especially since the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and its response to the growing corporate control of public space, cultural critics have taken up the idea of a commons as a site of communal relations and an antidote to the individualism of private property.80 In a similar spirit, I urge intimacy choreographers to remove the onus on performers to work on sexuality in isolation and  Warden, Sina, and Kaufman.  Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2000), 20. 80  See, for example, Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland: PM Press, 2019). I first learned the idea of the commons from a mentor, the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy. Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (New York: Vintage, 2000). I also take inspiration from queer of color critique and its appeals to the commons, including Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: NYU Press, 2018). 78 79

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without support. As I explore more in the chapters that follow, in the twenty-­first century United States, sexuality itself has become dominated by the rhetoric of private property; sexuality is seen as something that one has rather than what one does. A potential pitfall of staging intimacy is that artists can view their performance as something that reflects their true offstage sexualities rather than those of their characters. By contrast, I urge intimacy choreographers to pay attention to the social scripts that make up a performance. Staging intimacy is a shared process of crafting a narrative with a common vocabulary. With the term “commons,” I also emphasize the common as the everyday. Staging sexuality need not be something daunting viewed as entirely separate or abjected from the rest of an artistic process; it can be part and parcel of theater. Of course, there can still be room for privacy when staging intimacy. One frequent request that intimacy choreographers give to producers in theater, film, and television is a “closed set,” a chance to choreograph and/or film intimate scenes with only the essential creative team in the room.81 Likewise, intimacy choreographers sometimes schedule one-on-­ one chats to talk through choreography or costumes with performers. These spaces of reduced visibility can help advance performer’s creativity such that they do not have to make high-stakes decisions with all eyes on them. Nevertheless, the goal of this privacy is not to make intimacy feel personal or individual. Every member of a creative team impacts the staging of intimacy, from the lighting designer to the costume designer to the writer. This is true even though intimacy choreographers are specialized artists; they work in tandem with the whole creative team. The late cultural critic Lauren Berlant writes that intimacy is “mass-mediated”; a society’s understanding of intimacy relies on a set of shared narratives about what constitutes closeness.82 Thus, staging intimacy is about constructing a shared vocabulary that will also translate to an audience. The sexuality studies scholar Lynda Hart states, “Desire, like theater, takes place in the fantasy one constructs with others, and like any communal experience, requires a relinquishing of control. We love, and we play, in order to learn

81  Alicia Rodis and Ita O’Brien, “Intimacy Coordination: Closed Set Protocols,” Intimacy on Set and Intimacy Directors International, 2019, https://www.intimacyonset.com/ uploads/1/9/9/4/19940427/closed_set_protocols_april_2019.pdf. 82  Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 282.

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how to survive letting go.83 Once one has established a space of shared narrative that has boundaries and containers, then one can take on challenging material. By temporarily suspending the self within a pre-set choreography, a conscious approach to intimacy in performance creates opportunities to “let go” of truthful sexual identification between performer and character. A sexual commons allows performers to have a foundation of security such that they can stop worrying and start acting. Because it is a shared space, the commons reflect the inequalities embedded in a culture’s material structures; a culture’s social standards create a sexual economy that can coerce or exclude. Part of de-privatizing sexuality is to acknowledge erotic desire as forged with and through the economic marketplace. Intimacy choreography necessarily straddles public and private spheres; it produces public performances of sexuality while simultaneously relying on funding from the nonprofit and commercial arts ecosystem. This animating tension surrounds sexual labor more broadly, which confounds easy categorization as work or pleasure, what Karl Marx describes as the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom.”84 Labor can be dehumanizing and alienating, but it can also be a space to locate practices of freedom when artists gain a certain level of control over their working conditions. A sexual commons is thus a site of struggle over collective scripts of intimacy and the material incentives around their performance. In the chapters that follow, I explore some of the labor struggles that theater workers have undertaken to advance more equitable working conditions around the staging of sexuality.

1.6  Chapter Breakdown As I analyze the labor of directing desire, I turn in my next chapter, “Erotic Repetitions,” to intimacy choreography's history as a specialized practice. Almost all press coverage of intimacy choreography in the twenty-­first century describes its novelty. In part because of the seeming freshness of consent discourse, intimacy choreography appears to fill a void in theater practice. However, intimacy choreography enacts what I call “erotic repetitions,” echoes of previous practices for staging sexuality in theater. 83  Lynda Hart, Between the Body and Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 9–10. 84  Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, translated by Ernest Untermann (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 820.

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Offering a brief history of intimacy choreography, I identify four main influences: fight choreography, movement direction, sex and relationship therapy, and Black theater practices. Next, I analyze the working vocabularies of each of these influences, which tended to focus on boundaries, safety, and access rather than consent. After I sketch this history, I frame consent discourse as a rhetorical device that has helped intimacy choreographers advocate for their work. Intimacy choreographers only adopted the language of consent in 2016 after artists had been developing best practices for over a decade. Rhetorically, consent bridges two different goals for intimacy work—artistic experimentation (consent-as-­exploration) and violence prevention (consent-as-contract). Examining consent’s various roles in rehearsal rooms and labor contracts, I highlight that staging intimacy is itself a process of repetition in which artists come to understand the limits of the labor they are willing to perform. In Chap. 3, “Sexual Script Analysis,” I analyze one such limit that intimacy choreographers place on sexual labor in theater—the need to generate choreography based on one’s own desire or experience. Instead, intimacy professionals use what the sociologists William Simon and Stephen Gagnon call “sexual scripts”—repeated structures that shape human sexuality.85 I begin by outlining choreographic exercises from Intimacy Directors and Coordinators and Theatrical Intimacy Education that help performers tell a story of desire. These exercises suggest that presence, often associated with sexuality in theater, is something that performers create using preset narrative structures. Stage presence is a matter not of spontaneity as much as of rehearsal. As a case study, I examine Alice Birch's Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, an early play to use intimacy choreographers in the United States. In the play, characters invert traditional scripts of intimacy in an attempt to revolt against the male gaze, but they nonetheless find themselves beholden to social scripts nonetheless. Building on a close reading of choreography in Birch’s play, I argue that embodiment around sexuality is tied to the language. There is no such thing as a body free from social signification; presence is contingent and relational. I close by suggesting that this insight from intimacy choreography challenges one strain of sex positivity, which emphasizes individual desire as an innate fact. By contrast, intimacy relies on shared choreography that crafts persona and the impression of presence.

 Simon and Gagnon, 97–120.

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In Chap. 4, “Intermediate Pornography,” I examine some of the technologies that intimacy choreographers use to craft presence for a scene of intimacy—namely modesty garments, prosthetics, and digital media. To help performers craft compelling narratives that fit within their boundaries, intimacy choreographers at times provide costume pieces that help mask performers, known as modesty garments. Intimacy choreographers also help navigate angles for stage and screen that allow performers to simulate sex acts without genital contact. While this focus on simulation seems to distinguish intimacy choreography from pornography, both art forms wield objects to mediate sexuality. To study the relationship between objects and mediation, I analyze a theatrical depiction of pornography in Thomas Bradshaw's Intimacy, another early play that influenced the development of the intimacy profession. In Bradshaw's play, a suburban community unites to stage a “neighborhood porn film” that repairs neighborly tensions. The New Group's production incorporated live video feeds that depicted actors in double and triplicate, creating bodies suspended between mediation and liveness—what Sarah Bey-Cheng describes as “intermediate” bodies.86 I analyze how the play’s fight and intimacy choreographer, David Anzuelo, used prosthetics to create moments of perceived reality and illusion. Intimacy choreography, like sex work, is creative labor on erotic culture. Performers, as “cyborg assemblages,” navigate scripts, camerawork, and identity formations to refashion their erotic presence.87 In a similar spirit, intimacy choreographers use the tools at their disposal to help performers shape their images’ circulation, allowing them to negotiate with the unchosen meanings attached to their bodies. In Chap. 5, “Playing with Trauma,” I analyze intimacy choreography's treatment of social trauma, with a focus on racial history. While intimate touch is most often the occasion for productions to hire intimacy choreographers, productions hire intimacy directors because of the trauma responses that touch can provoke. Especially for performers from marginalized identities, trauma often lurks in the background as an invisible scene partner. In this way, actors are always playing with trauma rather than against it. To study the relationship between trauma and sensation, I turn  Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Intermediate Bodies: Media Theory in Theatre,” in Playing with Theory in Theatre Practice, ed. by Megan Alrutz, Julia Listengarten, and M. Van Duyn Wood (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 64. 87  Brewis and Linstead, 200. 86

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to Jeremy O.  Harris’s Daddy and Slave Play, two of the first plays in New York to use intimacy choreographers in the aftermath of the #MeToo Movement. In Daddy and Slave Play, Harris uses BDSM role-play across difference to explore the relation between erotic presence and violent histories. Both these works place contemporary sexuality in dialogue with moments in social history that marked Black bodies as abject—mass incarceration in the late twentieth century and chattel slavery in the nineteenth century. As Slave Play’s intimacy choreographers Claire Warden and Teniece Divya Johnson suggest, intimacy can activate sensations suppressed in the wake of trauma, at times yielding a combination of pain and pleasure. The case study of Slave Play reveals the need for cultural competency in intimacy and approaches that imagine trauma not just as a source of vulnerability but also of strength. Historical and racial contexts necessarily impact the staging of intimacy, and these contexts that cannot be wished away by fantasies of a post-racial society. Trauma informs sexuality whether we acknowledge it or not, and, as Harris suggests, it is not merely individual. Trauma operates at the social level of collective narratives and identity formation. In Chap. 6, “Immersive Intimacy,” I analyze contemporary theater’s treatment of allegations of sexual misconduct in productions that incorporate actor-audience interaction. I focus on the example of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, an immersive production in which performers and staffers reported allegations of sexual violence to a journalist at Buzzfeed, who broke the story in 2018 similarly to other allegations of the #MeToo Era. However, in this case, the perpetrators were anonymous audience members. After detailing the allegations, I argue that much immersive performance has the goal of “immersive intimacy” between performers and audiences. I examine the sexually charged history of immersive performance influenced by video gaming and Happenings of the 1960s, which often advanced what I call an “aesthetic of violation.” Addressing this history and the allegations at Sleep No More, immersive productions have begun to enlist intimacy choreographers, who have the difficult task of rechoreographing the actor-audience contract. Intimacy choreography have the difficult task of helping artists and audiences create a space of shared sensation that disrupts the usual fabric of daily experience without injuring those involved. I frame intimacy choreography as a transformative justice movement—not merely an opportunity to challenge individual

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perpetrators but also to remake the fundamental labor conditions for staging sexuality in theater. Through negotiations over the actor-audience contract and artists’ concrete labor contracts, artists are struggling for greater control over their working environments in the artistic economy. These chapters explore the shifting norms and expectations around sexuality that have led to the creation of specialized intimacy choreographer positions. However, intimacy choreography need not remain entirely isolated from the rest of a production process or from theater scholarship writ large. The topics explored in each of these chapters—repetition, spectatorship, mediation, history, and participation—are at the heart of theater studies and sexuality studies. While intimacy choreographer is a field of specialization for now, my hope is that its insights can inform theater practice and scholarship beyond that specialized group of practitioners. Theatrical Intimacy Education’s Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard describe an exercise called boundary practice, in which artists articulate parts of their bodies on which they have boundaries and parts of their bodies on which they are open to touch.88 Reframing their evocative phrase, I imagine intimacy choreography metaphorically as a practice at the boundaries, a movement that, although once on the margins, is making inroads into commercial and high-budget theater. It is also a practice, a developing art form that risks failure and success. As artists articulate boundaries, they can overestimate or underestimate the forms of sensation they can manage in a work environment. Scholars and artists cannot outsource concerns of sexual justice to intimacy choreographers, and an actor’s consent is not the only metric for analyzing sexual justice. The process of creating a sexual commons in theater requires a broader inventory of the erotic infrastructure sustaining theatrical production. Placing theater and performance studies in dialogue with sexuality studies, I hope to further a sustained conversation about sexuality’s role in performance. Intimacy choreography straddles truth and fiction. It stages social fantasies in ways that produce pain, pleasure, and the unpredictable sensations that characterize intimate life.

 Pace, 24.

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CHAPTER 2

Erotic Repetitions: A Brief History of Intimacy Choreography

2.1   Repetition Exercises In a fluorescent-lit multipurpose room in Bethesda, Maryland, a group of thirty participants performs an exercise called Instant Chemistry. The group splits into two lines. Standing several feet apart, participants face each other and begin by making eye contact. There is some initial discomfort and laughter. The eye contact continues. Then, a facilitator describes different given circumstances of attraction and repulsion and describes the intensity of connection on a scale of one to ten. The actors are tasked with telling a story of connection, at first from a distance and then with a high five, handshake, or hug. At times, the balance is uneven; one person brims with affection, while the other leans away. Some participants are visibly emotional even after each moment of physical contact ends. The facilitator asks participants to notice their reactions. After the exercise, the participants gather in a circle to discuss what elements of choreography surfaced in the encounters: how did eye contact, shoulder tension, duration, and breath each tell a story of intimacy? The gathering is a three-day workshop on Intimacy for the Stage hosted by Intimacy Directors International (IDI) in July 2018.1 From as far as Australia and Sweden, participants have come to learn best practices for 1

 Warden, Sina, and Kaufman.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barclay, Directing Desire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31222-9_2

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staging sexually and sensually charged scenes for theater. The group’s ranks include sex educators, actors, directors, and fight choreographers. It is a predominantly white group, mostly from the United States, mostly women. The workshop is sold out, even after expanding its size to accommodate an extra ten participants. I have joined the workshop to learn more about IDI’s best practices and better understand the organization’s efforts to end sexual violence within theater and film. In the discussion, participants describe how these best practices would have transformed their approaches to simulating scenes of sex and sexuality in the past. Some also attempt to show their know-how so that they can earn admission to a selective apprenticeship in IDI's certification program. Instant Chemistry takes the idea of chemistry, which some theater artists imagine as immutable or innate, and imagines it as something that can be concocted between performers. The exercise does not assume to know actors’ innate desire; it assigns a level of attraction or repulsion based on given circumstances. Tonia Sina, the creator of Instant Chemistry and facilitator for the workshop, developed Instant Chemistry precisely to depersonalize the process of crafting stage intimacy. Sina recounts how during her graduate training, a director instructed her and a scene partner to craft chemistry for a stage kiss in Picasso at the Lapin Agile. When they repeatedly struggled to match his expectations, the director sent them into the hallway to practice, at which point, the exercise “stopped being acting,” according to Sina. What had been a goal to craft fictional intimacy turned into genuine connection. Attraction bled offstage. Actors damaged existing relationships for what turned out to be a short-lived “showmance.”2 With her master's thesis of 2007, “Intimate Encounters,” Sina developed her Intimacy for the Stage method to enable directors to craft sexually and sensually charged scenes without relying on performers’ offstage chemistry.3 This would be one of the first texts in US theater to conceive of the specialized figure of the intimacy choreographer. Perhaps unexpectedly, “Intimate Encounters” never uses the word “consent.” Instead, it emphasizes safety, communication, and a divide between performer and character. Sina writes that the situation she encountered in Picasso at the Lapin Agile “is not all that uncommon. Our emotions trickled off stage and into our personal lives. I feel very strongly now that this can and  Warden, Sina, and Kaufman.  Tonia Sina, “Intimate Encounters; Staging Intimacy and Sexuality,” M.F.A.  Thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University (2006). 2 3

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should be avoided.”4 With “Intimate Encounters” and her call for intimacy choreography, she offers a potential solution to a problem she saw as widespread in theater. I repeat this story because it reveals how intimacy choreography knits together repeatable exercises and storytelling to convey what intimacy choreography is and what it can achieve. Sina has told this story of Picasso at the Lapin Agile many times in different contexts, and it has become part of my own embodied history in the field. Because intimacy choreography is so recent as a named practice, artists and scholars are still shaping history, and the exercises that artists perform and stories that they tell continue to shape the field’s future. In this chapter, I offer a brief history of intimacy choreography as a series of repetition exercises, practices and narratives that echo earlier movements in theater and performance. Against the push to interpret intimacy choreography solely as a novel intervention of the #MeToo Era, I emphasize the practices that influenced intimacy choreography predating #MeToo—fight choreography, movement direction, sex and relationship therapy, and Black theater methods. These practices strove to advance performers’ and backstage staff’s autonomy using vocabularies distinct from those of the #MeToo Era. As intimacy directors and educators attempt to create consent-based guidelines for eroticism in theater, they highlight that performing intimate scenes is repetitious work that performers negotiate corporeally. I also bring up Sina’s Instant Chemistry exercise because it points to the values beyond consent that have been equally influential on intimacy choreography’s development. With Instant Chemistry, Sina proposes that directors can strategically craft chemistry and manage this chemistry such that it does not interfere with performers’ offstage lives. Instant Chemistry is part of a repertoire of practices through which intimacy choreographers craft narratives of intimacy and navigate the permeable line between performer and character. In another exercise taught alongside Instant Chemistry, actors “tap in” and “tap out” before and after scenes of intimacy—performing ritualized high fives and breathing in sync to construct psychic divides between their onstage and offstage selves. Sina still relies on an understanding of “chemistry” as key to constructing intimate scenes. She does not try to excise desire for a production process. Rather, she attempts to direct desire toward artistic ends using choreography, narrative, and framing. In this way, Sina and subsequent intimacy 4

 Sina, 7.

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choreographers have attempted to redefine chemistry as a repeatable construction rather than an essential combination of performers’ innate attraction. Acting theorists of theatrical naturalism at times created associations between sexuality and the automatic, expressive impulses of a “first time.”5 This approach, particularly from Method Acting teachers, emphasized following impulses and experiencing a performance differently every night.6 By contrast, I use erotic repetitions to describe the iterative scripts shaping the sexuality’s circulation through bodies and institutions in the performing arts. These scripted repetitions interact with the material infrastructures determining which plays are produced, how actors are contracted, and what form rehearsal processes take. Advocates before the #MeToo Era fought to build a more equitable infrastructure for the staging of sex and violence, and their collective efforts inform intimacy choreographers’ interventions, which, perhaps counterintuitively, foregrounded sexual consent late in their development. Instead, they emphasized methods to manage theatrical repetition that, like Instant Chemistry, offer clear choreographic vocabularies and a divide between performer and character. With exercises like Instant Chemistry, intimacy choreographers attempt to help performers simulate not merely sex but also sexual attraction. Actors can sometimes form a connection through the process of shaping narrative. Sina sometimes describes the above as “Instant Chemistry and Comfort,” a name that suggests that chemistry is also a matter of shared trust. In other words, shared vocabulary and choreography can itself be the foundation of performers’ chemistry. During Sina’s workshop in Bethesda, some performers wore fitness trackers and were able to watch their heartrates rise during scenes of intimacy. Simulating sexuality had produced a felt response. Performance studies scholars describe this dynamic as performativity—the performance of fictions can produce felt truths. As gender is a “stylized repetition of acts,” so sexuality is an embodied negotiation between personal history and social structures.7 To close 5  For example, consider Sanford Meisner’s definition of acting as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” which emphasized acting on impulses as if experiencing them for the first time. Dennis Longwell and Sanford Meisner, Sanford Meisner on Acting (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 87. 6  Barclay, 123–141. 7  Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988), 519.

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the exercise, Sina walks between the two lines of participants and makes a chopping motion with her hands to sever the connection between performers. Even if chemistry appears one instant, she suggests, it can disappear the next.

2.2  Intimate Theatrics Before #MeToo The point at which one begins a history affects how one perceives it. The #MeToo hashtag of 2017 repeated Black feminist Tarana Burke’s earlier me too. movement without citing her work, and intimacy choreography might want to avoid erasing the earlier work of artists of color. As Black intimacy choreographers including Kaja Dunn, Teniece Divya Johnson, and Sasha Smith suggest, to begin the history of intimacy choreography with its development as a named practice is to overlook the work of black theater-makers including Barbara Ann Teer and Douglas Turner Ward who attempted to advance actors’ self-advocacy and autonomy before the language of consent gained cultural traction.8 At the same time, in reaching back to claim forebears of color, to what extent might contemporary intimacy choreographers mask the continued whiteness of the field? As these conundrums suggest, crafting a history of intimacy choreography is entangled with crafting its future. The history one tells about a field affects its shape. As performance studies scholars following Jacques Derrida have emphasized, a written archive too often serves to calcify a living practice, to attempt to fix it into a perceived permanence.9 For that reason, I frame this chapter as rehearsing a history of intimacy choreography. In the same way that a rehearsal is always an in-between space between the creation of a script and its final performance, I tell a history of intimacy choreography as the field develops in multiple directions in real time.10 This account does

 Fairfield, 28; Frederick.  Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 10  For excellent writing on the in-between time of rehearsal, see Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains, 88. 8 9

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not claim to foreclose history, as might a “closing” performance.11 In the same way that performance studies scholar Diana Taylor envisions a symbiotic relationship between an archive of written text and objects and the repertoire of embodied performance,12 so this written account of intimacy choreography attempts to make room for the field’s multiplicity. It aims to sustain material practices and offer different avenues of development for intimacy professionals. One could begin a history of intimacy choreography in the United States in a variety of moments. Before intimacy choreography's development as a named practice, numerous artists worked publicly to shape sexuality for theatergoing audiences. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, vaudeville and burlesque performers crafted corporeal performances that showcased women’s bodies as sites of fascination and desire.13 In that same era, blackface minstrelsy promoted sexual stereotypes around Black and white subjects but also gave Black and white performers permission to showcase women’s desires and queer desires forbidden in other settings.14 These artists worked on US culture’s erotic imagination in ways that continue to haunt the twenty-first century. One could also begin a history of intimacy choreography in the United States with Method acting teachers like Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner who coached performers’ sexualities and proto-feminists like Stella Adler who opposed the Method’s collapsing of performer and character.15 One could look to the 1960s and 70s, when theater influenced by the Sexual Revolution spurred performances like Hair and Dionysus in ’69, which featured nudity and sexually charged content. One could also draw a connection to feminist and queer performance makers in the late twentieth century including Annie Sprinkle, Isis Rodriguez, Valie Export, and Carolee Schneemann, who carefully managed their sexualities to redirect the male gaze and some of whom had

11  For further exploration of the idea of closing and “closing time,” see Shane Vogel, “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics of Harlem Nightlife,” in The Scene of Harlem Cabaret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 104–131. 12  Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 17–18. 13  See, for example, Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 74–125. 14  See, for example, Eric Lott, Love and Theft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 27. 15  Barclay.

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a background in sex work.16 Artists in these different eras each directed intimacy between performer and audience and saw their labor on sexuality as integrated with their artistic practice. They directed desire without necessarily seeing their work as a distinct specialization. However, the history of intimacy choreography as a named, specialized practice is a more recent phenomenon. Understanding intimacy choreography in its current form means understanding how intimacy began to be viewed as an object of unique concern for theatrical performance. In the brief history below, I argue that intimacy choreography developed from four different traditions—stage combat, movement directing, sex and relationship therapy, and Black theater practices—that have provided tools for a labor struggle that arts workers have waged in the twenty-first century. When social movements against sexual violence catapulted intimacy for stage and screen into a national spotlight, these pre-existing traditions provided a blueprint for the creation of intimacy choreography as a specialized practice. As Claire Warden emphasizes, intimacy choreography offered an answer to a “very big question” posed by the #MeToo Movement.17 However, it started developing that answer before the #MeToo Movement had framed the question of theatrical intimacy in particular terms. Today, intimacy choreography incorporates vocabularies and practices for addressing sexual violence that blend contemporary consent discourse with theatrical traditions before #MeToo.

2.3   Rehearsing Intimacy Choreography’s History The first known use of the term “intimacy choreography” comes from Tonia Sina, a movement coach and fight director who started using the term in 2006.18 In her MFA Thesis in Theatre Pedagogy at Virginia 16  See Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997); Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, Erotic Resistance: Performance Art and Activism in San Francisco Strip Clubs, 1960s-2010s, PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2018. 17  Ambam. 18  News articles and Sina herself regularly cite the term in connection to her MFA Thesis, but Sina does not actually use the term in the thesis itself. I am taking Sina’s account at face value. Stephanie Coen, “Staging Intimacy,” Stage Directors and Choreographers Journal (Summer 2019), 25, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5984c4a0cd39c369f61bbf0f/ t/5d2f54d53630df000191c1cc/1563383002575/SDCJ+Summer+2019+p25-30+Stagin g+Intimacy.pdf.

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Commonwealth University, “Intimate Encounters,” Sina called for “the creation of an approach to choreographing and directing sexual or intimate scenes for the stage.”19 Sina’s thesis compares intimacy directing to fight direction and proposes a similar standardization of industry practices. As part of her research, she directed a showcase of intimate scenes deploying methods that she ultimately called the “Intimacy for the Stage” technique. In 2014, after advancing this technique in theater and higher education in Oklahoma City, Sina published the article “Safe Sex: A Look at the Intimacy Choreographer” for The Fight Master, a professional journal for the Society of American Fight Directors.20 By then, Sina was not the only one to have written about sexuality for the publication. In the Spring 2011 issue, Adam Noble, a fight director and theater educator teaching at Indiana University, had published “Sex and Violence: Practical Approaches for Dealing with Extreme Stage Physicality.”21 Noble advocates in his account for an intentional approach to scenes of sex and violence in educational contexts based on boundaries, slow motion improvisation, and narrative analysis—known today in intimacy circles at the Noble Method. Importantly, these texts did not use consent as their starting point. Neither Sina’s thesis nor the two Fight Master articles even includes the word “consent.” Instead, the articles tend to focus on vocabularies from the movement directing and fight communities: “safety,” “boundaries,” “choreography,” and a division between actor and character. These decentralized efforts to formalize intimacy directing gained an institutional home in 2016, when Tonia Sina partnered with two other fight directors, Siobhan Richardson and Alicia Rodis, to found Intimacy Directors International (IDI).22 By Rodis’s account, the three founders “worked with directors, choreographers, psychologists, social workers, trauma experts, and other professionals to research and codify a system of

19  Tonia Sina, “Intimate Encounters; Staging Intimacy and Sexuality,” M.F.A.  Thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University (2006). 20  Tonia Sina, “Safe Sex: A Look at the Intimacy Choreographer,” The Fight Master (Spring 2014): 12–15. 21  Adam Noble, “Sex and Violence: Practical Approaches to Extreme Stage Physicality,” The Fight Master (Spring 2011): 14–18. 22  Amanda Duberman, “Meet the ‘Intimacy Directors’ Who Choreograph Sex Scenes,” The Huffington Post (May 13, 2018), https://www.huffpost.com/entry/intimacy-directors-choreograph-sex-scenes_n_5b0d87dae4b0fdb2aa574564.

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addressing the performance of nudity, simulated sex, and intimacy.”23 This work struggled to gain traction in large-scale arts organizations until the events of the coming years propelled consent discourse into the popular lexicon.24 When in October 2016 The Washington Post leaked statements from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump about sexual misconduct and in October 2017 allegations against entertainment executive Harvey Weinstein sparked the Me Too hashtag, media coverage of intimacy directing grew exponentially. By 2019, there were only 23 IDI-certified intimacy directors in the United States, but their practice had garnered articles in The New York Times,25 The Washington Post,26 The Los Angeles Times,27 The Chicago Tribune,28 Rolling Stone,29 Cosmopolitan Magazine,30 American Theatre Magazine,31 The Huffington Post,32 The Guardian,33

23  “Alicia Rodis,” Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, accessed Feb. 28, 2021 https:// www.idcprofessionals.com/bios/aliciarodis. 24  Consent discourse itself has a history predating the #MeToo Movement. Feminist activists worked for decades to advance consent within the realms of law and sex education. This work gathered momentum in the decade before #MeToo, which itself was a delayed recognition of this longstanding work. For a history of efforts to reform laws around sexual violence, see Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 25  Laura Collins-Hughes, “Need to Fake an Orgasm?: There’s an ‘Intimacy Choreographer’ for That,” The New York Times (June 5, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/ theater/need-to-fake-an-orgasm-theres-an-intimacy-choreographer-for-that.html. 26  Roger Catlin, “Meet the theater specialists who show actors the right way to make out onstage,” The Washington Post (June 27, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/ theater/need-to-fake-an-orgasm-theres-an-intimacy-choreographer-for-that.html. 27  Ashley Lee, “How do you make a sex scene sexy?,” The Los Angeles Times (Jan. 2, 2019), https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-intimacy-coordinators-sex-scenes20190102-story.html. 28  Nina Metz, “Sex Scenes in TV, movies: Who looks out for the actor? An intimacy coordinator,” The Chicago Tribune (Nov. 8, 2018), https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-mov-intimacy-coordinators-hbo-1109-story.html. 29  Kerr. 30  Marielle Wakim, “Hollywood’s New It Job: Intimacy Coordinators,” Cosmopolitan (Mar. 12, 2019), https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a26785851/ intimacy-coordinator-hbo-netflix-sex-scene/. 31   Carey Purcell, “Intimate Exchanges,” American Theatre, Theatre Communications Group, (Nov. 2018), https://www.americantheatre.org/2018/10/23/intimate-exchanges/. 32  Duberman. 33  Dale Berning Sawa, “’Take care of your actors’: the intimacy director keeping Netflix sex scenes safe,” The Guardian (Jan. 25, 2019), https://www.theguardian.com/tv-andradio/2019/jan/25/netflix-sex-education-teen-drama-intimacy-director.

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and BBC News,34 among other outlets. These publications often tied the work of intimacy directors to the #MeToo Movement: “Alicia Rodis Leads Production into Its Post-#MeToo Future,” one headline read.35 At the time of this media coverage, IDI listed consent as one of their “Five Pillars,” alongside communication, choreography, context, and closure. Consent discourse had become integral to the vocabulary of intimacy directing practice. During this same period when sexual violence was captured the national spotlight, a second organization, Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE), emerged with a philosophy for intimacy work distinct from IDI’s. In 2017, Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard founded TIE to promote best practices for researching, developing, and teaching stage intimacy.36 A director, educator, and fight choreographer, Pace had first heard the term “intimacy choreographer” in 2010, when, during her graduate studies at Arizona State University, she started developing practices for stage intimacy modelled on those in the fight community.37 Her co-founder, Laura Rikard, is a theater educator and movement specialist who similarly approached stage intimacy as choreography.38 By contrast to Intimacy Directors International, which invested specifically in establishing certified intimacy director positions, Theatrical Intimacy Education attempts to advance best practices for an entire creative team. As they emphasize, “We train the whole company, department, or ensemble in TIE Best Practices so that you aren’t on your own when the choreographer goes home. This is about culture change, not just choreography.”39 At a workshop I attended with Pace and Rikard in Los Angeles in February 2020, they emphasized that a certification process can exclude those who do not have the resources to travel to attend numerous trainings.40 Similarly, Pace suggests, certification neglects those who have been developing their own 34  “BBC News – With IDI Director Claire Warden,” BBC, Nov. 28, 2018, https://www. teamidi.org/post/2018/11/28/bbc-news-with-idi-intimacy-director-claire-warden. 35  Jude Dry, “Alicia Rodis Leads Production into Its Post-#MeToo Future,” Indiewire, accessed Feb. 28, 2021, https://www.indiewire.com/influencers/deuce-intimacycoordinator-alicia-rodis/. 36  “Mission,” Theatrical Intimacy Education, accessed Oct. 30, 2019, https://www.theatricalintimacyed.com/mission. 37  Coen. 38  “About”, Laura Rikard, accessed Feb. 28, 2021, http://www.laurarikard.com. 39  “Mission,” Theatrical Intimacy Education. 40  Laura Rikard and Chelsea Pace, “Theatrical Intimacy Education Workshop Weekend,” Workshop. Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. Feb. 22-23, 2019.

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best practices before the popularization of the label “intimacy director.” TIE’s approach employs both consent discourse and a choreographic vocabulary—ten “ingredients” that artists can use to compose intimate scenes.41 While intimacy directing in theater and intimacy coordination in film and television developed together, early adoption in film and television facilitated the spread of intimacy choreography in theater. A turning point in the industry occurred in 2018, when HBO hired Alicia Rodis to serve as intimacy coordinator for The Deuce, a series about the sex work industry around Times Square in the 1970s.42 Following the success of that production, HBO announced that it would hire intimacy coordinators for every production involving sexually charged scenes.43 This announcement grabbed headlines and set a precedent for other networks. The film and television industry, which are often better resourced than live theater, incorporated intimacy professionals more quickly than did many large-­ scale professional theaters. By July 2019, the union for screen actors, SAG-AFTRA, announced that it was working with Alicia Rodis to standardize requirements for intimacy coordinators across the industry.44 That same month, Broadway would premiere its first production with an intimacy coordinator, Claire Warden, who had already choreographed intimacy for television with HBO’s series Mrs. Fletcher.45 Television and film would help establish a precedent for intimacy directing in theater and convey that artists could find financial compensation for intimacy work. The sudden demand from television and film for intimacy coordinators meant that networks were looking beyond IDI and TIE for intimacy professionals, particularly in Los Angeles. Former sex and relationship coach Amanda Blumenthal began working for HBO in 2019 and founded the Intimacy Professionals Association (IPA), which offers intimacy  For an explanation of the ingredient, see Pace, Staging Sex, 39.  Actor Emily Meade had approached The Deuce’s showrunner David Simon nine months earlier about hiring an intimacy coordinator, in the months following the initial #MeToo allegations. In this case as in others, the successes of getting intimacy directors on production sets was due to actors’ advocacy. Breena Kerr, “How HBO is Changing Sex Scenes Forever.” 43  Kerr. 44  “SAG-AFTRA to Standardize Guidelines for Intimacy Coordinators,” SAG-AFTRA News Updates, July 20, 2019, https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-standardize-guidelinesintimacy-coordinators 45  “Claire Warden,” IMDb, accessed Feb. 23, 2022, https://www.imdb.com/name/ nm2554458/. 41 42

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coordinator certification programs, consulting services for productions, and connections to experts in gender and sexuality.46 Blumenthal had trained with the Somatica Institute of San Francisco, which provides training in sex and relationship counseling drawing on psychology, physiology, gender studies, consent theory, and analysis of various identities and sexual communities.47 This background enabled Blumenthal to articulate expertise about not merely best practices but also sexuality itself, including BDSM, queer, and trans intimacies.48 Having worked with survivors of sexual violence in a therapeutic context, Blumenthal emphasized that her skills could translate to trauma-informed approaches and violence prevention in film practice. Amanda Blumenthal was one of the primary contributors to SAG-AFTRA’s guidelines for intimacy coordination alongside IDI’s Alicia Rodis, and today Blumenthal still collaborates with SAG-­ AFTRA on their continuing implementation.49 Blumenthal and IPA have trained numerous artists working in television and film, including across international borders, with a specialization in creative processes for screen media. Although resources started to flow into the intimacy work following the proliferation of the MeToo hashtag, these resources have not been distributed equitably. The vast majority of the intimacy choreographers described above are white, and there have been calls in creating affinity spaces in the field for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) artists and survivors of sexual violence.50 In 2019, Ann James founded Intimacy Directors of Color, with the goal of “support[ing] and promot[ing] decolonized intimacy education and inclusive hiring practices in the entertainment industry.”51 James comes from a background in directing and theater education and is building a network to advocate for BIPOC artists 46  “About,” Intimacy Professionals Association, accessed Feb. 28, 2021, https://www.intimacyprofessionalsassociation.com/about-1. 47  “Training,” Somatica Institute, accessed Feb. 28, 2021, https://www.somaticainstitute. com/sex-coach-relationship-coach-training/. 48  “About,” Amanda Blumenthal, accessed Feb. 28, 2021, https://www.intimacycoordinator.com/about. 49  “About,” Intimacy Professionals Association, accessed Feb. 23, 2022, https://www.intimacyprofessionalsassociation.com/about-1. 50  The intimacy choreographers above are also all, according to Blumenthal, women between the ages of 30 and 50, which speaks to the need to think through additional aspects of identity. 51  “Intimacy Directors of Color,” Intimacy Directors of Color, accessed Feb. 28, 2021, https://intimacydirectorsofcolor.com.

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in the industry.52 Also in 2019, Theatrical Intimacy Education established the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Intimacy Initiative, which has sponsored scholarships for artists of color to participate in TIE workshops, hosted summits on anti-racism in intimacy practice, and built partnerships between TIE and historically black colleges and universities.53 Within Intimacy Directors International, now restructured as the for-­ profit Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, artists including Maya Herbsman and Teniece Divya Johnson advocated for the recruitment and training of more intimacy choreographers of color, and since then, Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (IDC) has moved to create scholarships and affinity spaces for artists of color. Directing Desire strives to highlight the unacknowledged intersections of race and sexuality that continue to shape intimacy choreography as a field.54 On March 15th, 2020, Intimacy Directors International closed its doors, claiming that it had accomplished its mission of establishing intimacy choreography in theater, film, and television. Many of its artists transitioned to working with Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, a new for-profit organization specifically dedicated to training and certifying intimacy professionals. The same week that IDI stated that intimacy directing and coordination had been firmly established in the entertainment industry, theaters and film sets around the United States shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.55

52  James has yet to work as an intimacy director or coordinator for a professional production; the majority of her work has focused on advocacy. This lack of experience has posed challenges for her ability to put intersectional approaches into practice. 53  “About the EDIII,” Theatrical Intimacy Education, accessed Feb. 28, 2021, https:// www.theatricalintimacyed.com/the-ediii. 54  The language of “intersectionality” comes from Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1990): 1241-1299. 55  Intimacy professionals are still hosting online trainings, which have sold out throughout 2020. Many intimacy workers have articulated hope that the industry will weather the pandemic. The question remains whether the entertainment industry will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic with an increased sensitivity to the labor of staging sexuality and the complexities of physical contact.

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2.4  Influences on Intimacy Choreography From this history leading into March 2020, I pinpoint four influences on the emerging field: fight choreography, movement directing, sex and relationship therapy, and Black acting methods.56 These practices predate the #MeToo movement, and only one of these influences, sex and relationship therapy, regularly cites the language of consent. The others approach consent obliquely from various vantage points. As I suggest below, even sex and relationship therapy sometimes looks to vocabularies beyond consent. Here, I analyze each of these four threads of influence and their continued impact, starting with fight choreography. Fight Choreography “Fight choreography” or “stage combat” describes approaches to staging fight scenes for theater with an eye toward safety and iterability. Fight directors are trained and certified artists who oversee specific moments in a rehearsal process. Stage combat has been practiced in theater since at least the seventeenth century in Elizabethan theater, Noh drama, and Kabuki, but it came into its current form in the United States in the late twentieth century with the formations of guilds.57 Today, stage combat is often specialized work, and many of the early intimacy choreographers came from this background and modelled intimacy choreography on their work in stage combat. As one would not want a performer to improvise a sword fight, so intimacy choreographers call for delineated choreography in order to preserve performers’ safety. While stage combat aims to protect physical safety, intimacy choreography aims additionally to protect emotional safety, which is sometimes easier to overlook in theatrical performance. One emphasis of fight choreography is repetition. Fight choreographers outline choreography that performers repeat not only in rehearsal but also in a “fight call,” a practice run of combat scenes before each performance. Similarly, some intimacy choreographers urge practicing an “intimacy call” in which actors run through the choreography for intimacy before a show. There is disagreement about this in the field, because an 56  Of course, intimacy choreography’s history continues into the COVID-19 pandemic, but I stop here to analyze the movement before the massive shifts that the pandemic has caused. 57  Letraunik.

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intimacy call can also cause actors to repeat charged or emotionally challenging content more than they would otherwise need. In addition to creating a fight call, some fight choreographers can designate a “fight captain,” a performer or member of the production team who is in charge of running fight calls and ensuring that choreography does not stray. There have been similar attempts to designate “intimacy captains,” individuals who oversee intimate scenes during a rehearsal process when an intimacy director cannot be present. The fight choreography model informs the imaginary of the intimacy choreographer role as one based on safe and specific choreographic repetition. The fight choreography model also informs the intimacy choreography's development as a specialized labor practice. Today, professional organizations including the Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD), Fight Directors Canada (FDC), and the British Academy for Stage and Screen Combat (BASSC) all offer training courses and certification for professionals in North America. Artists can get certified in short sword, broad sword, and hand-to-hand combat, for example. In a similar spirit, associations of intimacy professionals have emerged based on a similar model of training and certification, although some organizations like Theatrical Intimacy Education campaign against the certification model from stage combat as reproducing inequities.58 At the time of writing, Intimacy Coordinators of Color is offering an “intimacy captain” certificate. The company's training description explicitly compares an intimacy captain with a fight captain.59 Whether intimacy choreography will follow the same specialized model as fight choreography is an open question. However, it is certain that intimacy choreography and fight choreography rely on notions of safety, iterability, commitment, and specificity that inform its practice. Stage combat is not an expression of an individual performer’s desires or identity, as consent is often imagined in the sexual realm. By contrast, stage combat attempts to form a shared vocabulary that is safe, repeatable, and tells a story for an audience. As IDC's Tonia Sina argues, the longer she has spent time working on intimacy choreography and stage combat, the 58  Chelsea Pace, “The Certification Question,” The Journal of Consent-Based Performance 1, no. 1 (2022): 81-89. 59  “ICOC EDU is offering the Intimacy Captain Certificate,” Eventbrite, accessed Feb. 23, 2022, https://www.eventbrite.com/e/icoc-edu-is-offering-the-intimacy-captain-certificatetickets-142038259257#.

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more that she has realized that stage combat falls under the umbrella of intimacy (and not vice versa).60 Stage combat enlists performers in emotionally charged scenes that often communicate characters’ investments in each other. These investments merely surface as violence rather than as tenderness. While intimacy choreographers help performers manage their distinction between actor and character, stage combat uses a clear choreographic vocabulary to do the same. Movement Directing Focusing similarly on a choreographic vocabulary, “movement directing” is the specialized work of choreographing physical movement in theater. Like fight choreographers and intimacy choreographers, movement directors focus on moments and dynamics in which non-specialized stage director might lack expertise, such as dance, culturally or historically specific etiquette, inebriation, (dis)ability, or acrobatics. In this respect, movement directing combines dramaturgical work with choreography. A more common practice in the United Kingdom than in the United States, movement directing follows a specialized model like fight choreography’s, but it can emphasize qualities of movement as much as physical safety. While movement directors are most frequently found on high-budget and large-­ scale productions, movement directing in the United States often has a connection to actor training. For example, Tonia Sina, often credited as the founder of contemporary intimacy choreography, received her MFA in Movement Pedagogy from Virginia Commonwealth University. As the “pedagogy” in Movement Pedagogy suggests, movement directors can serve a pedagogical function and teach in educational settings. In the same vein, intimacy choreographers, beyond working on individual productions, can attempt to teach artists about staging intimacy. Movement direction draws on training methods from physical theater, including by artists who are not necessarily specialists in movement directing. Theatrical Intimacy Education, for example, teaches the use of notation to describe choreography for intimate scenes similar to techniques from physical theater and dance. In TIE’s approach, stage managers and performers notate which of the ten ingredients—opening and closing distance, counts, touch, shapes, destinations, weight, breath and sound, visible power shifts, and kisses—a scene is using, such that performers know precisely the  Warden, Sina, and Kaufman.

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stage movement they are performing.61 The goal then is to reproduce the choreography as faithfully as possible for the rest of a rehearsal and performance process. This use of notation resembles attempts from the dance world to describe physical movement. The Austro-­Hungarian dancer Rudolf Laban and his disciples developed Laban Movement Analysis, a system for notating physical movement based on body, effort, shape, and space. Laban’s goal was to create a language to describe physical movement so that it could be documented and recorded, not lost. Like intimacy choreography, Laban’s work attempted to solidify movement such that it would be repeatable, including across bodies and contexts.62 Intimacy choreographers have also incorporated psychophysical approaches from movement direction. Movement direction and physical theater traditions recognize that physical action can generate and/or bolster affect. While labels of “inside-out” and “outside-in” for actor training can create a troublesome dichotomy between mind and body, some schools of movement-based performance recognize that physical action can generate an embodied response; not all acting need to start from an actor's felt emotion. For example, Tonia Sina argues that choreography can create a “container” around stage intimacy.63 She adopts this language from the physical acting teacher Stephen Wangh, whose Grotowski-­ inspired techniques attempt to steer a performer's emotions. According to Wangh, his physical theater exercises are “forms that both evoke and contain emotional life.”64 In a similar spirit, intimacy choreography assigns actors circumscribed movements that can generate connection between performers rather than assuming they have a connection to begin with. Meanwhile, it creates rituals of closure to ensure that intimate feelings do not bleed into offstage life. Movement direction guides Sina and other intimacy professionals’ attitude toward attraction and repulsion as unreliable forces to be guided by choreography. In a similar spirit, intimacy choreographers from TIE and IDC alike teach exercises in boundary setting drawn influenced by contact improvisation, a dance form which recognizes that consent can change through an encounter with physical

 Chelsea Pace, Staging Sex: Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Theatrical Intimacy, in consultation with Laura Rikard (New York: Routledge, 2020), 39. 62  Ed Groff, “Laban Movement Analysis: Charting the Ineffable Domain of human Movement,” Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance 66 no. 2 (1995): 27–30. 63  Warden, Sina, and Kaufman. 64  Stephen Wangh, An Acrobat of the Heart (New York: Vintage, 2000), 81. 61

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contact.65 Volition sometimes emerges alongside or through movement rather than vice versa. Sex and Relationship Therapy Of the influences described here, sex and relationship therapy is the most likely to regularly deploy a language of consent. However, the field emphasizes much more than consent, and even those with a background in sex and relationship therapy sometimes use consent discourse strategically. According to the Intimacy Professionals Association’s Amanda Blumenthal, she often “talks around” consent with performers. In Blumenthal’s experience, talk of consent can feel like “sex education,” which alienates some artists who are simply trying to get work done on an already-tight filming schedule.66 As Blumenthal suggests, there are other ways to advance performer autonomy. Training in sex and relationship therapy, she says, allows her to work through performers’ shame and advocate for trauma-informed methodologies. She gives the example of helping a performer navigate her anxieties about performing kink and nudity.67 In this case, an intimacy choreographer works to manage the tension between individual preferences and the social incentives that make it difficult for bodies to perform intimate scenes for the public eye. Whereas Theatrical Intimacy Education employs the slogan, “Your boundaries are perfect exactly where they are,” those with a background in sex and relationship therapy sometimes opt to push individuals to question where discomfort comes from. At times, there can be a difference between a boundary and an emotional wall. Inhibitions can be the result of harmful social stigmas, which an intimacy choreographer can help a performer identify and dissect. Sex and relationship therapy often encourages individuals to judge desire with equanimity. Desire itself is not necessarily damaging; it is what individuals do with this desire and whether they use it to harm others. In a similar spirit, intimacy choreographers can help performers view intimacy more analytically rather than lumping all charged 65  Laura Rikard and Chelsea Pace, “Theatrical Intimacy Education Workshop Weekend,” Workshop. Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. Feb. 22-23, 2019. A video of IDC’s Sarah Lozoff leading actors through body mapping can be found at “OSF Intimacy Director Sarah Lozoff,” VICE News, Aug. 10, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=08B6Qe0FXKs. 66  Amanda Blumenthal, Personal Interview, May 4, 2021. 67  Blumenthal.

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material together as “dirty” or “uncomfortable.” Blumenthal states, “I don't know how anyone does this work without” training in sex and relationship therapy.68 A knowledge of offstage intimacy allows professionals with a background in sex and relationship therapy to more competently create scenes of intimacy for stage and screen. IPA, for example, offers consultations on queer, trans, and kink intimacies about which other members of a production team may lack expertise.69 Sex and relationship therapists also offer some of the field’s trauma-­ informed approaches. For example, IPA trains intimacy coordinators in mental health and trauma awareness.70 While intimacy professionals do not necessarily act as therapists, they incorporate techniques from therapy practices in order to avoid traumatizing artists or triggering trauma responses based on previous experience. IDC’s Rachel Flesher, for example, has developed a technique called “traumaturgy” to help performers recreate trauma responses such as panic attacks, shock, and overwhelming grief without relying on personal experience. This approach entails recognizing the psychophysical symptoms of a trauma response and recreating them impersonally for one’s character.71 In a similar spirit, intimacy professionals from IDC and TIE incorporate de-roling, a practice drawn from dramatherapy to help actors and patients distance themselves from challenging material. In de-roling, after finishing a rehearsal or performance, actors embody physical and verbal rituals to step out of role such that they can release the weight of performing intimacy or violence.72 Trauma is a somatic phenomenon, and trauma-informed techniques engage the body and the mind to identify and manage the stress of performance. Black Acting Methods A final set of practices that have influenced intimacy choreography in the United States are Black acting methods, performance techniques from the African diaspora. Black theater-makers in the twentieth and twenty-first century have generated strategies for navigating challenging material  Blumenthal.  “About,” Intimacy Professionals Association. 70  “Intimacy Coordinator Training Program,” Intimacy Professionals Association, accessed Feb. 23, 2022. 71  Rachel Flesher, Personal Interview, Sept. 19, 2021. 72  Savannagh Lassken, “Persona Non Grata: A Systematic Review of De-Roling in Drama Therapy,” Drama Therapy Review 3, no. 2 (Oct. 2017): 165–179. 68 69

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without falling back on the language of consent. IDC’s Sasha Smith, who began choreographing intimacy in Chicago years before the #MeToo Movement, states, “If you look at the roles usually given to Black people, it’s usually a narrative surrounded around trauma. . . . Sometimes putting ourselves in these positions for these narratives can either re-traumatize or bring up heavy emotions that we haven’t even processed.” As a result, Smith argues, Black theater-makers have long had to cultivate safe spaces for brave work.73 A tremendous resource for understanding these techniques is Tia Shaffer and Sharrell Luckett’s anthology Black Acting Methods. This collection details the work of black theater-makers including Rhodessa Jones, Daniel Banks, and Barbara Ann Teer to advance acting techniques that serve Black artists better than do those of white and European acting teachers.74 A central theme of the collection is self-advocacy. A self-advocacy framework is adjacent to consent, but it also relies on a different reference point than sexual consent. From the slave plantation to Jim Crow to twenty-first century enforcement, racially unequal laws have cast Black bodies as those whose consent is unheeded.75 Freedom struggle has been a recourse for unjust treatment, not merely appeals to legal rights.76 In an employment context in theater, Black performers operate under conditions of constrained agency. Material infrastructures affect whether a performer has the power to complicate or turn down a racially stereotyped role. One could speak of this challenge in terms of consent; few performers have the economic power to say no to roles that perpetuate problematic stereotypes. However, it is as apt to focus on the ways in which performers work to complicate stereotypes or erect their own alternative structures beyond white hegemony. This is the approach that Intimacy Coordinators of Color has taken in constructing an “affinity space,” a space specifically built for artists of color.77 Theatrical Intimacy Education has similarly aimed to create an affinity space for artists of color  Frederick.  Tia Shaffer and Sharrell Luckett, Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2016). 75  Amber Jamila Musser, “Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx and the Intractability of Black Female Sexuality,” Signs 42, no. 1 (Sept. 2016), 157. 76  Danielle McGuire, “The Maid and Mr. Charlie: Rosa Parks and the Struggle for Black Women’s Bodily Integrity,” 75-77. 77  Ann James, “Intimate Reforms: Making Space for Leaders of Color,” Howlround, Mar. 19, 2020. https://howlround.com/intimate-reform. 73 74

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with its Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Intimacy Initiative, crafted in consultation with Kaja Dunn and Brian Herrera.78 The initiative’s first virtual convening with Princeton University in March 2020 aimed to gather a group that was majority Black women and centered Black women’s perspectives.79 This work is particularly crucial in light of the stereotypes surrounding Black artists’ sexuality. IDC’s Teniece Divya Johnson states, the “hyper-­ sexualization of Black bodies is one [locus of advocacy]. If we think about the stories we tell onscreen, they’re monolithic.”80 Meanwhile, responding to hyper-sexualization, there can be a counter-response of de-­ sexualizing black characters. Sasha Smith states, “I feel like there’s a curated type of sexuality that’s promoted or else its hyper-sexual.”81 Black respectability politics can encourage an erasure of Black sexualities that are not normatively heterosexual, and this dynamic creates two competing stereotypes around Black sexuality: de-sexualization or hyper-­ sexualization.82 One of the strengths of Black acting methods is offering performers the analytical tools to dissect these stereotypes. Clinessha Sibley, for example, proposes a form of “Afrocentric script analysis” that analyzes not only individuals but also the collective identities and social forces that shapes their behavior.83 Foregrounding physical boundaries over psychological ones, white intimacy choreographers have sometimes missed opportunities to facilitate conversations around the intersection of racial and sexual stereotypes. However, script analysis and dramaturgy offer important tools that intimacy choreographers are already adopting. These tools offer the chance to reshape narratives, not merely craft them around performers’ physical boundaries. In this way, they can, in Shaffer and Luckett’s words, further “humanity, self-actualization, and freedom.”84

78  “The Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Intimacy Initiative,” Theatrical Intimacy Education, accessed Feb. 23, 2022, https://www.theatricalintimacyed.com/the-ediii. 79   Chelsea Pace, “Small Gathering Updates and Next Steps,” Theatrical Intimacy Education, Oct. 19, 2020, https://www.theatricalintimacyed.com/blog/smallupdate. 80  Frederick. 81  Frederick. 82  For one account of the challenges of respectability politics surrounding black women’s sexualities, see Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: Norton, 2019). 83  Shaffer and Luckett, 129–130. 84  Shaffer and Luckett, 5.

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2.5  The Adoption of Consent Discourse In the timeline of intimacy choreography’s development, it was only after the codification of intimacy choreography into organizational practices through IDC, TIE, IPA, and ICOC that consent became a central part of the public discourse around intimacy choreography. While Tonia Sina and Adam Noble utilized vocabularies from the fight and movement worlds, in 2016, organizations like Intimacy Directors International formed and artists sought input from social workers, psychologists, and trauma experts.85 At that point, consent became one of the five pillars that Intimacy Directors International used to describe their work. Today, leading intimacy organizations regularly deploy a language of consent. For example, IDC’s mission is to empower artists and organizations to create a “culture of consent in which intimate stories can be told with safety and artistry.”86 Strategically, consent serves as a demonstration of the need for intimacy choreographers in order to protect artists’ safety and mental health. In this way, artists and advocates justify intimacy choreography to producers as an ethical imperative and workplace intervention to prevent sexual violence. Intimacy choreography knits together ethical and artistic concerns, and intimacy professionals regularly use consent in both senses. Rhetorically, consent discourse has proven highly effective for advancing intimacy choreography in the #MeToo Era. However, when first conceived, intimacy choreography brought together a variety of influences that aimed to address the psychic challenges of staging physical intimacy. In her 2014 article for The Fight Master, Tonia Sina imagines a scenario in which an actor grabs his scene partner’s leg harder than on previous nights. She offers an imagined inner monologue for the scene partner: He just grabbed my thigh harder than he ever has. Is he grabbing me like that because he is actually attracted to me? I really like his aggression. Maybe I am attracted to him. I think he wants me to kiss him harder. Next time I am going to moan so he knows being aggressive is ok with me.

This inner monologue reveals the ways in which physical sensation can create encounters with abjection when staging intimacy. When confronted 85  “Alicia Rodis,” Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, accessed Oct. 8, 2022. https:// www.idcprofessionals.com/bios/aliciarodis 86  “About Us,” Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, accessed Feb. 23, 2022. https:// www.idcprofessionals.com/about-us

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with an unplanned level of touch, the actor collapses boundaries between character, self, and scene partner. In the scenario, the hazard is not necessarily a lack of consent as much as a lack of structure to manage the feelings that fictional intimacy can provoke. In such a scenario, conversations around consent could benefit the performers. The actors can discuss how hard the thigh touch should be, the pressure of the kiss, whether to include moaning. At the same time, tools from fight choreography and movement direction could help the performers establish a clear choreographic vocabulary such that they do not encounter expected movements that change the narrative. In their own ways, each of the four influences described above help performers manage abjection—the threats to selfhood that can emerge through performing in intimate work. Consider Tonia Sina’s Instant Chemistry exercise with which the chapter started. Before performing an improvised vignette in Instant Chemistry, participants check in with each other about whether during the exercise they will do a handshake, high five, or hug. This work involves consent, but as importantly it involves discussions of choreography. When participants plan clear choreography with each other and receive further instruction about the narrative to layer on top of this choreography, it creates a space in which actors can perform without the need to build on their past real-life intimate experiences. The exercise reflects stage combat and movement directing principles for guiding performers, which are part of Sina’s artistic background. While consent captures one aspect of intimacy choreography, intimacy choreography repeats exercises like Instant Chemistry that reflect a variety of influences. As importantly, intimacy choreography mobilizes erotic repetition, prescribed scripts with delineated narratives and boundaries such that intimate stories do not bleed into daily life. Exercises like Instant Chemistry underscore how intimacy choreography emerged as an effort of theater, film, and television workers to recognize intimate labor and improve the labor conditions for staging intimacy. As in Instant Chemistry, artists and advocates incorporated lessons and practices from fight choreography, movement direction, sex and relationship therapy, and Black acting methods to foster more clearly delineated and potentially more pleasurable conditions for laboring on intimacy in performance. They repeated work from earlier spheres and applied it to sexually and sensually charged scenes. The #MeToo Movement of 2017 was an important catalyst in the push to recognize sexually charged work in entertainment, and it’s easy to overlook that #MeToo was not merely an attempt to hold perpetrators to account but also an

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attempted cross-class coalition meant to address sexual harassment in a variety of employment types, including farm work and domestic work.87 #MeToo was itself a workers’ rights movement not sufficiently recognized as such because of the dominant culture’s refusal to view women as workers in the same way as men. When #MeToo amplified consent discourse, intimacy choreographers also amplified consent as a dimension of their practice. The post-#MeToo push for intimacy choreography has often combined the embodied forms of boundary-setting like Instant Chemistry with boundary setting in the form of contract negotiations. As I close this chapter, I emphasize the interrelation between embodied practices and written contracts. Both are tools for labor struggle, and they each serve a unique function in helping delineate the labor of staging intimacy. Contract negotiation happens at various stages in a production process. In audition notices and casting, intimacy choreographers often encourage a specific delineation of any nudity or intimacy required of a role. Audition forms can also ask whether artists open to witnessing nudity and intimacy, even if they might not play a role that involves it. Notices can specify kisses, simulated sex acts, partial nudity in a way that lets actors make more informed choices about whether to audition for a role than they could otherwise.88 After casting, actors can further discuss intimacy with an intimacy choreographer, director, and/or their agent, and together they can 87  Héctor Tobar, “The Time’s Up Initiative Built Upon the Work Done by These Labor Activists,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ innovation/times-upinitiative-built-upon-work-labor-activists-180970720/. 88  At a Los Angeles training I attended in February 2020, Rikard distributed a sample audition form, in which auditionees state their “openness” (or lack thereof) to participating in processes with stage intimacy. For various scenarios (“Performing or witnessing partial nudity?”, “Performing or witnessing simulated sexual assault?” “Performing or witnessing stylized simulated sexual assault?”), artists have the option to answer “yes,” “no,” or “more information needed.” These answers need not bind artists—that level of negotiating specifics is deferred to the process of signing contracts and staging individual scenes. However, this process does enable performers to start thinking about their boundaries, and it enables the production team to make informed casting decisions based on artists’ pre-articulated boundaries. In their use of the language of openness and their recognition that artists might need “more information,” TIE acknowledges a degree of uncertainty and negotiation. Consent can still coexist with exploration. Theatrical Intimacy Education, “Sample Audition Disclosure Form”( 2019), 1. Obtained following TIE’s February 2020 Los Angeles workshop. Laura Rikard and Chelsea Pace, “Theatrical Intimacy Education Workshop Weekend,” Workshop. Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. Feb. 22–23, 2019.

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create a nudity or simulated sex rider, which details the exposure and intimacy involved in an acting opportunity. These riders are more often found in television and film than they are in theater, since SAG-AFTRA mandates them as part of union contracts, whereas Actor’s Equity has no such mandate at time of writing. SAG-AFTRA requires riders to “outline descriptions of the intimacy they are agreeing to do on set and how it will be depicted in the final picture,” “include if the performer will be nude or partially nude, including which intimate body parts will be shown, and the simulated sex acts of each scene,” “be something agreed to in negotiation between the performer (or their representative) and production,” and “include script pages of relevant scene(s), if available.”89 In other words, the rider tries to build in informed consent on the model of a legal contract. In theater, contracts follow a similar model, although theaters with lower budgets may lack the legal resources and expertise to institute riders as a blanket policy. The rider frontloads consent into the early part of a production so that the production team has a better idea of what to expect from a performer, and the performer has a better idea of what to expect from the process. Providing consent in advance does not remove all uncertainty from a process. In keeping with Planned Parenthood's definition of consent, which practitioners from Theatrical Intimacy Education and Intimacy Directors and Coordinators both cite, some choreographers emphasize that consent is reversible.90 What a person once consented to may become no longer desirable, and they can withdraw consent. In the language of the contract, withdrawing consent is not explicitly an option, but it always remains one during rehearsal or filming. Per SAG-AFTRA contracts, if a performer withdraws consent, then the producer has free reign to use a body double—including through digital technology—to represent the

89  https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources/workplace-harassment-prevention/intimacy-coordinator-resources/quick 90  ”Reversable” is part of Planned Parenthood’s acronym FRIES, which emphasizes that consent should be Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific. See “Sexual Consent,” Planned Parenthood, accessed Sept. 21, 2021, https://www.plannedparenthood. org/learn/relationships/sexual-consent. I heard the FRIES model cited at three separate workshops—Intimacy Directors International’s July 2019 workshop in Bethesda, Maryland, Intimacy Directors International’s Jan. 2020 Dallas workshop, and Theatrical Intimacy Education’s Feb. 2020 workshop. Warden, Sina, and Kaufman; Noble, White, and Kaufman; Rikard and Pace.

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performer.91 The only stage in film and television at which one cannot withdraw consent is after filming, when the production company owns rights to the footage. The footage is the final labor product, from which, in Marx’s term, the worker is ultimately alienated. In theater, a performer can withdraw from a production, but they will lose their income source and production credit. If a performer leaves a production partway through, it can create difficulties for a production team in recasting, which can be costly for directors and producers. Consent is reversible, but reversing consent comes with consequences. While consent-based practices cannot shield workers entirely from the overall economic pressures shaping how artists tell stories of sexuality, they provide workers an opportunity to articulate boundaries on the type of work they are willing to perform.

2.6  Consent-as-Contract and Consent-as-Exploration Combining choreographic exercises and written contracts, intimacy choreography provides frameworks for artists to delineate the work they will and will not perform. However, when we view consent solely as a contract, we miss the ways in which desire and sensation are not entirely knowable in advance. Consent need not be understood as an expression of fully-­ formed desires but rather a willingness to explore the sensations that might emerge within pre-set boundaries.92 Like the Instant Chemistry exercise, the labor contract is a “container” that can never entirely contain the feelings that might emerge from a creative process. In this way, intimacy choreography combines two senses of how we use consent—first as an expression of agreement (consent-as-contract) and second as a tool for experimentation (consent-as-exploration). In focusing so much on the former, we may overlook the latter. Intimacy choreography’s influences focus on exploration rather than merely legal certainty. Signing labor contracts is its own choreographic exercise, which artists repeat over time with different effects. What artists thought was a boundary might become a

91  ”Nudity and Simulated Sex Rider Basics,” The Time’s Up Foundation (Feb. 2021), https://timesupfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ENT_02_Feb2021_ Entertainment-Safety-Materials_Second-Edition_Nudity-Rider.pdf, 2. 92  Judith Butler, “Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Law,” Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law 21, no. 2 (2012), 21.

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space for exploration over time, or what artists thought they could achieve becomes beyond their emotional and physical capacity. Theatrical Intimacy Education’s “boundary practice” exercise, mentioned briefly in the introduction, captures this uncertainty. Boundary practice describes the concrete process through which participants name parts of the body on which touch is off limits. In boundary practice, a performer demonstrates on their own body areas where they are open to being touched. Then, the performer guides a scene partner or partners’ hands over parts of the performer’s body. The performer lifts their partner’s hand off their body when passing over a part of the body that they do not want touched.93 For example, the performer might guide their partner’s hands down their chest over their stomach to the belly button and then skip over the groin area before setting their partner’s hand on their right thigh. In the process, they would establish their groin as a “fence,” a section of the body that they do not want touched during scene work.94 When the performer has passed their performers’ hands over all their body parts on which they consent to be touched, the performer’s partner then verbally states the fences, and the performer makes any corrections to the partner’s summary.95 Pace and Rikard emphasize that fences—a performer’s boundaries— can become “gates.” Over the course of a process, if a performer grows more comfortable, they can welcome a scene partner to touch a part of the body that had previously been off limits. In this way, TIE’s boundary practice recognizes a certain degree of indeterminacy. Performers can discover that a body part is a boundary through the process of running a partners’ hands over it. Similarly, performers can discover that a perceived boundary was not as much of sticking point as they thought it might be. TIE’s boundary practice is a “practice” in both senses of the word—an active process and an opportunity to make mistakes and learn. In intimacy choreography, embodied boundary practice is simultaneously a process of exploration and contract-making. After performers define boundaries through boundary practice, the understanding is that their scene partners can touch them where they do not have fences. Boundary practice is part of an agreement for how to interact in rehearsal; however, it can change if a performer realizes more about their limits.  Pace, Staging Sex, 17–31.  Pace, Staging Sex, 22–23. 95  Pace, Staging Sex, 25. 93 94

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In a similar spirit, the signing of the labor contract is its own repetition exercise, as over the course of a career an artist might shift the kinds of boundaries they have around performance. From this perspective, the principles of intimacy choreography are not new—artists have long attempted to navigate the types of labor they are willing to perform, including through fight choreography, movement direction, and Black acting methods. However, what is new is the decision to shift this work from the individual onto a specialized artist who facilitates a group discussion around boundaries. A growing awareness of emotional vulnerability has caused a field akin to fight choreography to emerge to protect psychological wellbeing. Psychoanalyst and queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich writes, “Discourses of both trauma and sexuality invoke the powerful fears of vulnerability that being affected by sensation or being touched can arouse.”96 In the aftermath of the #MeToo Movement, producers and artists who employ intimacy professionals are increasingly sensitive to the demands that touch places on performers. While a variety of stage actions are “intimate,” touch becomes the occasion that prompts an intimacy choreographer’s involvement, particularly touch applied to “private” parts of the body or parts understood to conjure trauma. At the end of Sina’s Instant Chemistry exercise, she walks between the two lines of participants and attempts to cut the connection between them. Her hands slice the invisible thread between participants like a runner slicing through the finish line ribbon at the end of a marathon. In principle, this ritual is supposed to remove the fictional circumstances of performance such that it does not linger on in performers’ bodies. However, part of the point of intimacy choreography is recognizing that performance does have an impact on performers, and through the repetitions that happen over the course of their artistic career, performers can learn more about their vulnerabilities and when they are worth tapping into. At a training in Dallas I attended in 2020, for example, IDC’s Adam Noble advised participants with the Latin phrase “temet nosce” (“know thyself”).97 In Noble’s account, theatrical intimacy and performance become easier when an artist recognizes their limits. Intimacy choreography employs  tools for boundary setting from stage combat, movement

96  Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 51. 97  Noble, White, and Kaufman.

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directing, sex and relationship therapy, and Black acting methods such that artists can discover the limits and joys of their work. Staging intimacy is thus necessarily embedded in repetition. Through repetition, artists come to know their limits and simultaneous refigure their limits. Against the tendency to view intimacy as entirely novel, I frame intimacy choreography as repeating practices from fight choreography, movement direction, sex and relationship therapy, and Black acting methods. These different practices have developed strategies for boundary setting, many of which acknowledge the potential for exploration. With the adoption of consent discourse since intimacy choreography’s standardization, it is key not to erase the field’s encouragement of exploration. The recursive process of exploration and contract negotiation can refocus attention to the incentive structures governing intimate performance (beyond an individual’s desires). It is to these incentives and repeated structures of desire that I turn next—particularly, the male gaze. While labor contracts may enable artists to negotiate their place within the representational legacy of the male gaze, artistic exploration offers tools for artists to analyze narrative and rework stories such that they carry different meanings about gender and sexuality. These tools go hand-in-hand in shifting not merely how stories are staged but also which stories are staged.

CHAPTER 3

Sexual Script Analysis: Sex Positivity and Authorship in Intimate Scenes

3.1   The Trouble with “Presence” If intimacy choreography builds on repetition, then from where do intimacy choreographers and performers draw their scripts? Do artists build on their own experiences or their perceptions of sexuality? In this chapter, I address the questions of “presence” and how artists analyze the stories they find in scripts and performance. Much of the writing about sexuality in theater focuses on the eroticism of presence. The performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan famously wrote, “performance’s only life is in the present.”1 In her 1993 account of the nature of performance, Phelan suggested that performance is characterized by its inability to be fully captured in writing or technology; performance’s transience is part of its value as an art form.2 Alongside this focus on performance’s life in the present is the performer’s live presence. That same year, in the essay collection Presence and Desire, Jill Dolan wrote that she finds “women’s presence onstage seductive.”3 For Dolan, given the exclusion of women from leading their own narratives, women’s location onstage has an alluring power. Dolan states that despite the poststructuralist deconstruction of the category “woman,” she “still find[s] radical [women’s] power to  Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146.  Phelan, 146. 3  Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 1. 1 2

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know, intellectually and psychophysically, how to wield the authority of stage presence, how to control the seductions inherent in the theatrical frame, and how to speak the language so that authority, seduction, and language mean something different about the status of women in culture.”4 Dolan defines presence as more than a matter of performers occupying space on stage; she suggests that actors “author” their presence. Dolan connects the seemingly static quality of presence with the active use of “authority, seduction, and language.” Presence involves an active wielding of pre-­existing scripts—in this case of womanhood—such that they “mean something different” in the future. Constructing presence can entail referencing cultural scripts and absent bodies that nevertheless exist in the audience’s imagination. It can also entail keeping parts of one’s body or experience invisible in order to control the meanings attached to one’s body. Crafting presence involves strategically managing absence. In the decades since Dolan wrote about presence and desire, performance studies scholars have emphasized the relationship between presence and technological mediation. As Phillip Auslander writes, the very conception of liveness developed in tandem with recording devices that enabled television networks to create “live” broadcasts.5 Liveness is co-­ constituted by recording that attempts to document the performance event. In a similar spirit, the idea of intimacy suggests a sphere of authenticity and privacy removed from public life, but intimacy is itself a product of social scripts about what constitutes human connection. In Lauren Berlant’s words, intimacy is “mass-mediated.”6 The intimate and the immediate, rather than synonyms, might be opposites. While performers may be present onstage, their presence is haunted by all the scripts of eroticism present in their own and audiences’ minds, including gendered, raced, and aged expectations about what attraction and attractiveness look like. Media like cinema, television, and pornography affect the perception of live performance, and thus structures such as the male gaze typically associated with screen media shape theatrical performance’s relationship to sexuality. One of intimacy choreography’s benefits is that offers artists a

 Dolan, 1.   Philip Auslander, “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective,” PAJ: Performing Arts Journal 34, no. 3 (September 2012), 4. 6  Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 282. 4 5

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vocabulary with which to understand these social scripts and author their presence in a way that centers narrative. At an intimacy training in the Dallas suburbs in January 2020, where artists gathered from around the country, I participated in an exercise called “sexy taffy” that reframed ideas of presence and attraction.7 The facilitator, Intimacy Directors and Coordinators’ Ashley White, led participants through a movement sequence in which artists establish a connection that reads to an audience as sexually charged. In sexy taffy, pairs stand close together and imagine a thread running between their pelvises the texture of taffy. When the pair moves away from each other while making eye contact, the thread stretches to accommodate the distance, although not without a certain amount of tension still pulling the pair together. As participants move throughout the room, they practice maintaining this energetic charge even while turning away from each other, losing eye contact, or encountering other people between them. Like Tonia Sina’s Instant Chemistry exercise from the previous chapter, sexy taffy removes the need for innate attraction and instead replaces it with a choreographic exercise. As importantly, like the imaged elastic thread between performers, it stretches the definition of “sexy.” Sexy taffy offers a helpful substitute to the vague imperative for performers to “act sexy.” Among intimacy choreographers, we often joke about how frequently performers hear this imperative from directors and how unhelpful it is, especially when bodies are laden with cultural expectations about what it means to be sexy. Theatrical Intimacy Education’s Chelsea Pace writes, “Social ideas of sexiness trick students into thinking sexy needs to look a certain way, sound a certain way, and move a certain way.”8 As a corrective, sexy taffy suggests that sexiness is relational. Awareness of being observed by a scene partner (and observing a scene partner) can make a performer feel attractive, and it can translate to an audience that characters are on the giving and receiving end of desire. In another exercise at the Dallas retreat, also led by White, we practiced visual poses adapted from modelling, which tend to have a person open one part of the body while closing another. One might cross one’s arms while spreading one’s legs. One might open up one’s shoulder while twisting 7  Adam Noble, Ashley K.  White, and Samantha Kaufman, “Three-Day Intimacy of the Stage Intensive,” Workshop, Eastfield College, Dallas, TX, Jan. 24–26, 2020. 8  Chelsea Pace, “The ‘Sexy’ Trap,” Theatrical Intimacy Education (Sept. 26, 2017), https://www.theatricalintimacyed.com/blog/2017/9/26/the-sexy-trap.

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one’s pelvis. Such poses tend to combine an invitation with an obstacle. The opening of one part of the body conveys an offering of vulnerability, while the closing off of another part of the body present a challenge to the viewer to imagine what is concealed. In this exercise, sexiness lives in a relationship between the viewer and the viewed rather than in the viewed person alone. While the direction to “act sexy” commands an actor to be more generically present, intimacy choreographers provide directors and actors tools with which to author an actor’s presence within the narrative. The exercise’s approach to intimacy choreography suggests that the path toward presence is through mediation. In this chapter, I frame this work of analyzing and crafting stories of attraction as sexual script analysis, and I argue that sexual script analysis allows intimacy choreographers to avoid some of laden cultural expectations that come with being told to “act sexy.” Intimacy choreography is coming of age at a time of avowed sex positivity, a set of beliefs that sometimes equates sexual desire with empowerment. However, as feminist thinkers such Amia Srinivasan, Katherine Angel, Christine Emba, and Nona Willis-Aronowitz have argued, contemporary sex positivity has come with its own set of expectations that can be onerous for those of all genders and particularly onerous for women.9 Many of these expectations are tied to the continued forces of the male gaze and reactions against it, which pressure women to be passive objects of desire and active agents of desire. In the twenty-first century United States, being sexy and being sexual are intertwined, and there can be pressure to be more sexually desirous than one is. By contrast, exercises like sexy taffy depersonalize the process by focusing on narrative and decentering desire for one’s scene partner. Intimacy choreographers help performers strategically reveal and conceal their bodies to tell a story of intimacy. In this way, they mobilize what the sociologists William Simon and Stephen Gagnon call “sexual scripts,” repeated performances that guide what we understand as sex and sexual connection.10 Intimacy choreographers offer frameworks for sexual

9  Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex (London: Farrar, Giroux, and Straus, 2021). Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (New York: Verso, 2021). Christine Emba, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation (New York: Sentinel, 2022). Nona Willis-Aranowitz, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution (New York: Penguin Random House, 2022). 10  William Simon and John Gagnon, “Sexual Scripts: Permanence and Change,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 15, no. 2 (1986): 97–120.

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script analysis, the process of dissecting narratives of intimacy and using them to craft relational choreography. To better understand sexual script analysis’s political interventions, this chapter highlights the fundamental relationality embedded in intimacy choreography, especially as it intersects with gender and the male gaze. To this end, I first outline film scholar Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze and define the male gaze as a narrative structure that guides audience spectatorship using recognizable patterns of identification. Next, building on accounts from intimacy choreographer Tonia Sina and performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider, I argue that the male gaze often relies on a sense of scarcity that leaves the audience wanting to see more—more presence, more nudity, more intimacy. In light of this representational history, intimacy choreography can strategically conceal and reveal a performer’s body to craft stories of sexual desire, crafting moments of scarcity and abundance that kindle or disrupt audience desire. I apply this approach to a reading of intimacy in Alice Birch’s 2014 play, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., which exposes the interconnection between intimacy choreography and the inequities that continue even in an era of supposed sex positivity. The chapter closes with a reflection on sex positivity and hope that intimacy choreography can help theater and performance envision an alternative vision of sex positivity that recognizes relationality as its own form of power.

3.2   The Male Gaze and Structures of Desire Intimacy choreography often involves concealing the body as much as revealing it. In Tonia Sina’s MFA thesis “Intimate Encounters,” one of the earliest articulations of intimacy choreography as a specialization, Tonia Sina writes that for the stage, the subtle suggestion of sex is more effective than showing as much as possible. . . . Subtlety was something quite different when applied to intimate versus violence scenes. When choreographing violence, I have found that the audience seems to want to see as much gore and pain as possible. . . (this is more the case with motion pictures than with theatre). With sex, the more that is shown, the more uncomfortable the audience seems to feel. I find this interesting and something that not all directors understand.11

11  Tonia Sina, “Intimate Encounters; Staging Intimacy and Sexuality,” M.F.A.  Thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University (2006), 13.

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According to Sina, concealing nudity or touch is part of the labor of creating theatrical seduction. Showing too much simulated sex interferes with audiences’ sense of the actor’s presence. In explicit scenes, the actor’s body can become “too present” for the audience, interfering with whatever fantasy an audience might project onto a scene. Sina provides the example of a scene in which a sex-crazed therapist comes onto a male client. Whereas originally, the director had directed the actor playing the client to take off his shirt and the therapist to unzip his pants to make them fall to his ankle, Sina suggests that this would create more comedy than sexual charge. Sina advised the director to have the actors clothed and thereby make the scene more “sexy.” In the new choreography, the therapist unbuckled the client’s belt and drew it around her neck, while “she never touched his skin.”12 For Sina, the production of erotic presence is also a production of absence. The scene created desire for the client’s body by keeping it distant—held at arm’s length, desired by the therapist but never touched. In a similar spirit, techniques for staging eroticism often function by withholding sex or nudity and kindling identification with a character in a moment of desire. In film scholar Laura Mulvey’s account of the male gaze, she argues that the male gaze “freezes the flow of action in the moment of erotic contemplation.”13 According to Mulvey, film that advances the male gaze tends, as Sina advises, not to show sex or nudity explicitly. It withholds sex and nudity from the frame, choosing instead to focus on a male character desiring a female character. For Mulvey, the male gaze is about more than men behind the camera; it is a structuring device that fosters identification with a desiring male protagonist and reduces women to objects of desire. While Sina’s example has a woman desiring a man, the opposite scenario could easily feel objectifying for women. Withholding sex from the frame can be part of fostering desire, for better or for worse. Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider states, “Desire is bought into, just as any tangible object is bought. Like a commodity, desire is produced. And like the commodities it facilitates, desire bears a secret akin to Marx’s secret of commodities. The secret of circulating, insatiable desire is the labor that goes into its construction.”14 It is exactly this labor of fostering desire that  Sina, 12–13.  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. by Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 33. 14  Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5. 12 13

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I foreground here, and the job of the intimacy choreographer is not always to reproduce desire but at times to interrupt it. The male gaze is one structure with which film and theater have constructed women’s presence, and it intersects in key ways with inequities among women of various identities. The Black feminist theorist bell hooks, for example, describes how as a spectator she saw few films that foregrounded Black women at all, let alone as the objects of desire.15 Thus, the male gaze does not construct straight men’s desire for all women, since film can still show bias toward white, thin women perceived as conventionally attractive by dominant beauty standards. hooks describes developing a model of “oppositional spectatorship” that bypasses identification and instead decodes the scripts at play.16 Intimacy choreographers working with larger artistic teams similarly demystify the work of staging sexuality. In addition to understanding narratives of desire, intimacy choreographers might also create work that flips the male gaze to have women look at men, applies the male gaze to those usually denied erotic attention, queers narratives by foregrounding same-gender desire, and shows gender non-­ conforming individuals excluded from the male gaze’s male/female binary altogether. It is worth understanding the male gaze’s narrative structure and how it continues to shape narratives of presence and desire, even in seemingly subversive contexts. Applying sexual script analysis and focusing on the stories they want to tell, intimacy choreographers can be more aware of when they want to foster desire and when they want to strategically intercept it. Sometimes by showing “too much” or failing to withhold explicit material can be part of telling a story that upends social expectations around desire. Not all intimacy choreography need make a scene “sexy.” There are multiple reasons productions include intimate scenes, including to show intimacy that is decidedly not sexy.

3.3   Visual Identification in Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again To highlight with withholding of explicit intimacy and how it intersects with narrative structures like the male gaze, I turn to a case study of Alice Birch’s 2014 Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Commissioned by the Royal 15  bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 118–119. 16  hooks, 122–123.

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Shakespeare Company and premiering in the United States at Soho Rep in 2016, the play has had productions throughout the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 election and #MeToo Movement, including at San Francisco’s Crowded Fire Theater, where I was an audience member, and The University of Iowa under the intimacy direction of Erica Wray.17 The play was part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Midsummer Mischief series responding to the Laurel Thatcher Ulrich quote, “well-behaved women seldom make history.”18 According to Birch, the prompt immediately irritated her. She wondered about the imperative to behave badly and what it meant for women’s daily lives. Birch read deeply feminist theory and wrote the play in a three-day whirlwind.19 Birch recounts drawing inspiration from Julia Kristeva, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, and Valerie Solanas, among others; her play examines the joys and demands of feminist bad behavior.20 The title itself comes from Julia Kristeva’s 1998 book Revolt, She Said, which imagines revolt as a constant state of questioning and self-transformation beyond the sphere of electoral politics.21 Each scene bears a title in the imperative urging a different kind of revolt: “Revolutionize the World (Don’t Associate with Men),” “Revolutionize the Work (Don’t Do It),” and “Revolutionize the Body (Start Shutting It Down),” for example. These imperatives are animating in their radicalism, yet they are also exacting for feminist subjects. With each of these commands, Birch shows the pressure on gendered bodies to “perform” in the wake of the sexual revolution. The play’s first scene, “Revolutionize the Language (Invert It),” presents an unnamed heterosexual couple having returned from a dinner party. When they walk in the door, we see a boyfriend and girlfriend in a private, domestic space that is seemingly authentic and unmediated. Meanwhile, in most productions, the scene’s title has been projected on the stage, and this digitally mediated presence draws attention to the scene’s language.22 The boyfriend recounts staring at his girlfriend across the room as the  Erica Wray, Personal Interview. May 1, 2020.  Laura Collins-Hughes, “Alice Birch Speaks Softly and Writes Loud Plays,” The New York Times, April 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/theater/alice-birchspeaks-softly-and-writes-loud-plays.html. 19  Collins-Hughes. 20  Alice Birch, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (London: Oberon Books, 2014), 5. 21  Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, transl. by Brian O’Keeffe (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2002). 22  This was the case in productions at Soho Rep, Crowded Fire, and Columbia University. 17 18

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dinner party conversation drifted to international politics. As the boyfriend offers his partner flowers and looks at her holding them, he says, “I have been thinking – All Day Long/ That I want to make love to you – don’t move, don’t move, just for a second just / could you stay exactly where you are?”23 The girlfriend starts to put down her bag, but her boyfriend insists that she stay in place so he can look at her since she is “perfection.”24 She offers to clean up the apartment, which is a mess, but he says she should not, since it would conceivably interrupt her “perfection.” In this sequence, the disjointed dialogue emphasizes the boyfriend’s desire to keep the girlfriend fixed as an object for appreciation. The girlfriend is a cipher onto which he projects a fantasy of perfection, which would allegedly be interrupted if she put her bag down or busied herself in the room. The boyfriend does not want to “make love to” her immediately; he wants to suspend himself in the moment of desiring. The girlfriend’s erotic presence depends on the absence of quotidian movement, in the withholding of intimacy and touch. There is a visual grammar to the gendered role-play of this scene, which feminists in the psychoanalytic tradition have described as “phallocentrism.”25 Phallocentrism is the attribution of meaning to an interaction based on masculine norms and language. A classic facet of phallocentrism is the male gaze. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey famously describes the cinematic devices that structure men as viewers and women as objects of visual pleasure. By fostering identification with an active man and passive woman, these devices establish women’s “to-be-looked-at-ness,” as the boyfriend attempts to do in the first scene of Revolt.26 While some might imagine that the male gaze would encourage depictions of explicit sexuality, Mulvey argues that the male gaze relies on the withholding of sex on screen—as mentioned above, freezing “the flow of action in the moment of erotic contemplation.”27 In that moment, the straight male spectator identifies with a desiring male proxy on screen lusting after the female object of affection. The male gaze  Birch, 21–22.  Birch, 22. 25  See, for example, Peggy Phelan, Unmarked and Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). 26  Mulvey, 38. 27  Mulvey, 33. 23 24

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unmasks the female body within public space to make its vulnerability a shared “secret” among a straight male public. In the first scene of Revolt, we see the girlfriend caught in the moment of erotic contemplations as the boyfriend attempts to perform his desire. The boyfriend is the proxy who encourages audiences to identify with his desire, and the boyfriend himself is repeating past scripts for male behavior. The consummation of desire is beside the point. The boyfriend acts on a desire to linger in the moment of wanting.28 As Mulvey and Sina’s accounts suggest, erotic presence is as much about the object of desire as about the one desiring. The girlfriend in this scene does not do much in this scene—in fact, it is her absence of movement that her boyfriend associates with his want. This is one tool with which intimacy choreographers craft storytelling: identification. Both Sina’s scene from “Intimate Encounters” and the above scene from Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. use proxy figures for the audience that guides the audience’s gaze toward the presence of the body who is supposed to be seen as attractive. In the scene Sina describes, the therapist takes off her client’s belt and wraps it around her neck, while directing the audience’s attention to the man she desires. In Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., the boyfriend looks at the girlfriend without touching her or asking her to move. In this way, the performances encourage the audience to connect to the character doing the watching. In the world of film that Mulvey describes, this gaze is amplified by the camera, but, in theater, audiences can watch an active character and follow their gaze toward a scene partner, setting that partner up as the object of desire. Of course, it is possible to identify with the character being watched, or not to identify with the characters at all. This is the kind of counter-spectatorship that bell hooks describes.29 However, one of the harms of the male gaze, at least according to Mulvey, is that it encourages to look on men as active agents of narrative and women as objects of spectatorship. When these cultural meanings become overly rigid, they reinforce a gendered language of performance and spectatorship that subordinates women.

28  The phrase “desire for desire” comes from Hegel. For an account of desire for desire, see Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 8–9. 29  hooks, 123

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3.4  Flipping the Script However, identification need not remain rigid, and performance can strategically shift identification or interrupt identification altogether. Alice Birch pursues this strategy next in Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. As the scene continues, the girlfriend takes on a more active role and challenges the gendered language of the male gaze. The boyfriend continues to outline his fantasy while the girlfriend “inverts the language” with which he describes her. Decentering individual identity, Birch does not list character names but instead marks each change in speaker with a dash at the start of a line. Freestanding periods indicate pauses. - All I could think about was coming home, laying you down on the bed . . thinking about you and.… laying you down upon that bed / And making love to you. / And making love to you. / Laying you down. And making love to you. - Or - No or - Or - There Is no Or – there is no other option - Yes but - I want to make Love to you - Or With? -. With. With. . With you – make love – I want to make love With you30

The boyfriend’s gaze structures the girlfriend as one to be “laid down on the bed” and “made love to.” She is not only the stage onto which the boyfriend projects desire but also the imagined object of sexual action (done to rather than with). Denying the possibility of the girlfriend’s “Or,” the boyfriend reifies the naturalness of a sexual script of male activity and female passivity, which he repeats as if to reassure himself. The boyfriend’s repeated lines highlight that heteronormative sexual scripts are themselves repetitive; they reference a grammar that has been developed and rehearsed  Birch, 23-24

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beforehand. The visual and linguistic elements of the scene expose the unidirectionality of normative heterosexual scripts, which bifurcate desirer and desired, doer and done. Unidirectionality is one of the limitations that restricts consent, even in a time of supposedly more liberal sexual norms. The feminist legal theorist Katherine Franke argues that legal theory around consent too often “construct[s] sex as something done to, not done by women.”31 According to Franke, much contemporary writing on consent tend to take women’s passivity for granted. Given the patriarchal dimension of many sexual scripts, Franke writes, feminist theory concerned with objectification tends to assert that “‘no’ is the only viable feminist answer to any sexual question.”32 According to Franke, much feminist legal theory has been unable to “theorize yes” in straight contexts as anything other than capitulation.33 This critique builds on earlier critiques from some strains of second wave feminism, including anti-pornography feminism from the 1960s to the1980s. Feminist legal thinkers like Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Brownmiller, and Andrea Dworkin have opposed objectification not only as a feature of pornography but of heterosexual life writ large. MacKinnon writes that in patriarchal visions of sex, “man fucks woman; subject verb object.”34 Like Birch’s scene in Revolt, MacKinnon ties gender subordination to phallogocentric language, which must be overturned or altered. Susan Brownmiller makes a similar observation about normative heterosexual sex; because normative heterosexual sex at times deploys scripts that objectify women, the line between degrading sex and sexual violence can be murky.35 In Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., the encounter between the couple can be both consensual and troubling. While the boyfriend is expressing his desires and starting a conversation around sex, there is something violent about his refusal to recognize languages of sexuality that do not objectify his partner. The girlfriend may be able to say “yes” or “no,” but her boyfriend neglects her “Or.”

31  Katherine Franke, “Theorizing Yes: An Essay on Feminism, Law, and Desire,” Columbia Law Review 101 (2001), 199. 32  Franke, 198. 33  Franke, 207. 34  Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 124. 35  Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Fawcett Books, 1975), 14–15.

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As the girlfriend in Birch’s scene insists on making love with her boyfriend, she searches for a new language of desire that insists on her agency. When her boyfriend asks her to spread her legs, she says no and insists that he spread his. When he asks to “press” his body into hers, she says yes and insists that her body is leaving an imprint on his. They go back and forth, each advocating for an active position. The boyfriend starts. - I am going to fuck you - I am going to fuck you straight back - And I’m going to take my cock / and - AndI’mgoingtotakemyvaginaandputitOnyouFIRST - What was that? - I get there first. - Yeah? - Yeah. I am On you before you are In me. … - And I’m pushing. - And I’m Slamming it back down with my organ. - And I’m - And I’m Enveloping you - Like. As in - I’m Surrounding you. - Surround me, okay, yes yes Surround me36

The woman in the scenario challenges the association between cisgender womanhood and receptivity, as pointed out in feminist critiques of phallocentrism. In Birch’s scene, the vagina becomes not passive “gap” but active “enveloper” poised to overpower the male subject.37 Their erotic play still involves objectification—each party identifies the self and the other with the “organ”—but the connotative associations with objectification change. Rather than finding an entirely novel language of sexuality, the girlfriend inverts her partner’s. She repeats his language with difference.  Birch, 24.  As theaters in the United States staged Revolt. during and after the 2016 presidential election, in which then-Republican nominee Donald Trump attested to “grabbing women by the pussy,” the scene resonated with the popular feminist counter-slogan, “this pussy grabs back.” The production in San Francisco staged this scene as a victory over patriarchy and Trumpist forces. Without those resonances, I could read the scene more ambivalently. In the face of objectification, the girlfriend’s only option is to mirror the boyfriend’s sexual bravado back at him. Grabbing back isn’t necessarily pleasurable or liberating. 36 37

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In taking up this critique of gendered vocabularies of straight sex, Birch reanimates ideas from Mulvey and second wave feminists such as Brownmiller and Dworkin, who she cites reading when researching the play. When confronted with the male gaze, Mulvey proposes “a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film.”38 Through that negation, Mulvey suggests that film might “conceive a new language of desire.”39 In Mulvey’s view, the negation of normative heterosexual scripts might yield a realm of desire beyond objectification. At the start of the scene, the theatrical frame encouraged identification with erotic desire for the distanced female body. Now, however, theatrical frame creates pleasure from the surprise of the inverted sexual script. Becoming more “explicit,” the scene unmasks women’s bodies and the limits of their traditional meanings. By most standards, the latter part of the scene is much more “pornographic” than the earlier part. However, the latter part’s explicitness interrupts straightforward erotic identification. It moves beyond the “suggestion of sex” upon which the male gaze relies. Unafraid to overwhelm the audience with a portrayal of explicit eroticism, Birch relishes in a playful inversion of sexual scripts. What type of language will the characters unmask? Will they reach a sexual language beyond patriarchy? Will the mismatch of sexual languages resolve itself? Against the pornographic and anti-pornographic assumption that sexual scripts are fixed, Birch turns sex into a linguistic game.40 As Birch’s scene suggests, showing more explicit material can interrupt the narrative pattern that relegates women to being objects of desire. Inverting the language, Birch shifts audience identification to the female protagonist, or, more accurately, she creates a tug of war between boyfriend and girlfriend for control of the gaze. This scene is not “sexy” in the way that Sina’s withholding of touch or the male gaze’s withholding of action are; Revolt does not freeze the action on desire. Rather, it shows desire as a field of gendered contestation. In such a scene, intimacy choreography that tried to make the action too sexually charged and neglected to show the scene’s playful upending of social norms would do the production a disservice. Revealing “too much” and having a female character  Mulvey, 30.  Mulvey, 30. 40   Here, I’m referencing the idea of a language game from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, transl. by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 38 39

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take on an active role are part of the storytelling and part of the scene’s humor. Rebecca Schneider notes the connection between “explicit” and the verb to “explicate.” Making scenes more explicit may help make visible the structures of signification surrounding women’s bodies: “Unfolding the body, as if pulling back velvet curtains to expose a stage, . . . performance artists peel back layers of signification that surround their bodies like ghosts at a grave.”41 In a similar spirit, Revolt. She Says. Revolt Again. uses this explicit encounter to reveal the underlying dynamics at the heart of the male gaze. At the same time, the production I saw at Crowded Fire and the production Erica Wray describes intimacy choreographing at the University of Iowa, the actors did not have genital touch, and they remained clothed for the action.42 The productions took nonliteral approaches that both concealed and revealed. They told a story of intimacy that discomforted the audience but was not so explicit that it alienated them entirely.43 Through this flipping of straight sexual scripts, Birch transforms the structures of identification from the start of the scene. Activity and passivity are a second analytic tool with which intimacy choreographers dissect and choreograph intimate scenes. How does a scene shift or remove identification with a character? Intimacy choreographers Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard with Theatrical Intimacy Education describe this analytic tool as a “visible power shift,” a “taking and giving [of] power that creates dynamic storytelling.”44 According to Pace, “Visible power shifts can be thought of as ‘giving the lead’ to the other actor by putting them in the position of focus.”45 Note Pace’s attention to visibility; a power shift alters audience’s focus and reworks structures of identification. In Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., Birch builds in a visible power shift to challenge the male gaze and position women as active participants in straight encounters. How much does flipping the male gaze alter the fundamental power structures embedded therein? By the end of the scene, Birch’s dialogue flips the flow of consent and objectifies the boyfriend. The girlfriend narrates, “I am Blanketing and Locking you and Draining The Life of you with my Massive / Structured / Beautifully built / Almighty Vagina.”  Schneider, 2.  Erica Wray, Personal Interview. May 1, 2020. 43  Such an approach would also more likely work within actors’ boundaries and ordinances prohibiting sex acts onstage. 44  Chelsea Pace, Staging Sex (New York: Routledge, 2021), 52. 45  Pace, Staging Sex, 52. 41 42

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After a moment, she pauses and asks the boyfriend, “Are you alright?” The boyfriend replies, “I just I” and “I. I. um with the. I. I feel. I.”46 The girlfriend’s bravura becomes too much for him to even articulate a coherent response. Whereas he spoke fluently the language of desire for his girlfriend in the doorway, the language of women’s power is unspeakable from him. His repetition of “I” emphasizes the need to assert a self when threatened by objectification. In her theory of the male gaze, Mulvey emphasizes its cultivation of women’s passivity, lest they threaten men’s egos.47 In a similar spirit, the girlfriend’s active stance in this intimacy disrupts the male gaze and inverts the script of men’s activity and women’s passivity. Although the ending of the scene in the production can be interpreted in a celebratory way, I read Birch’s ending ambivalently. To what extent did the two parties get pleasure from the exchange? To what extent was the boyfriend’s incoherence a sign of violation? Should “inverting the language” be the only option available to empowered feminist sexual actors? Birch’s scenario trades the unidirectionality in one gendered direction for unidirectionality in the other. At the end of the scene, the girlfriend apologizes (“sorry sorry”) and promises to “take [her] Vagina. Off [his] penis.”48 The girlfriend still asserts her vagina as an active, enveloping organ, but she backs up from the encounter. What is missing from this attempt to invert the male gaze is any vision of pleasurable objectification. Both the characters struggle for an active role, and neither is willing to understand themselves as passive. As the trans feminist critic Andrea Long Chu argues, contemporary sex positivity often has a vision of empowerment that does not account for the pleasures of submission.49 With the advent of a rights-based model of sexuality based on individual volition, neither character wants to assume the stereotypically “female” role of the objectified. Sexual scripts need not create extremes in which some sexual actors must actively desire and others must passively be desired. Consent in sexual encounters can be bi- or multidirectional. All parties can be agent and object in different moments of an encounter. The pressure constantly to desire can be as constricting as the pressure constantly to be desirable.  Birch, 26.  Mulvey describes this dynamic in terms of castration anxiety, but more broadly it can be seen as an aversion to vulnerability: “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.” Mulvey, 20. 48  Birch, 26. 49  Andrea Long Chu, Females: A Concern (New York: Verso, 2019), 64. 46 47

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3.5  Wanting to Want A later scene from Revolt dramatizes more fully the pressure on women to perform desire: “Revolutionize the Body (Make It Sexually Available. Constantly.)” Evoking the language of the sexual revolution (“Revolutionize the Body”), the title explores the gendered imperatives to desire as well as be desired. In the scene, a woman has lain down in a supermarket aisle with her dress above her head and starts to masturbate amid the watermelons. Two nervous grocery store workers approach her and ask her to put her clothes back on and leave. She remains wordless. When the workers hurl insults about her body, she finally breaks her silence. After trying to “fortify” her body for so many years, she has discovered that there is “No fortification strong enough. / Nothing to stop them wanting to come in.”50 Confronted with the threat of sexual violence, she finds no protection. The woman’s tactic, then, has been to reverse this fortification and become radically available. She surrenders, but she simultaneously couches her surrender as an act of defiance. The woman describes her movements in the imperative form, like the scene titles that govern the rest of the play: Lie down and become available. Constantly. Want to be entered. Constantly. It cannot be an Invasion, if you want it. They Cannot Invade if you Want It. Open your legs and throw your dress over your head, pull your knickers down and want it and they can invade you no longer. / Get wet. / Get wet. / Get wetter. / Turn on. Turn on. Turn on. / And want it. And want it. Constantly. Constantly. Constantly want it. Remove the edges of your body. Choose.… You cannot overpower it because I have given it you cannot rape it because I choose it you cannot take it because I give it and because I choose it I choose it I choose it.51

As the boyfriend narrated his desire for his girlfriend as a series of repetitions (“laying you down. And making love to you”), so the woman in the grocery aisle attempts to speak her desire into being. Vacillating between second-person imperative and first-person narration, the speech presents the character in double as both subject and object. She is the object commanded by discourse to make herself sexually available and the subject who assumes this discourse and asserts personal agency (“I choose  Birch, 49.  Ibid., 49–50.

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it I choose it.”). The monologue reveals the same connections between language and action as the play’s title: Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Characters speak their revolt in the imperative as if commanding their bodies to undertake revolt at all times. In light of the male gaze, one feminist response has been to invert the structure and create more examples of the so-called “female gaze.”52 To an extent, Tonia Sina’s example of choreography with the therapist and client attempts to invert the male gaze and position women as desiring figures. However, the impulse to invert patriarchal forms can generate new pressure on women to perform sexual desire in the same way that men have stereotypically performed it. This inversion helps create more diversity in the kinds of narrative told around human sexuality. In a country in which only 10.7% of directors behind top grossing films53 and 35.2% of directors in large-scale regional theaters productions are women in 2020,54 there is much work to be done around the hiring of women, trans, and nonbinary directors. However, creating the female gaze is not the same as insisting that women in our narratives always experience sexual desire or that desire is the same as empowerment. The scene from Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. demonstrates the potential harms that come from insisting that women always desire in the same way that men have. Although the character in the grocery aisle insists on her choice (“I choose it I choose it I choose it), consent occurs under the threat of sexual violence. A response to the male gaze, which often positions women as objects of desire, need to be an additional pressure for women both desire and be desirable, being “sexually available constantly.” Contrasted with Sina’s impulse not to show “too much” lest it make the audience uncomfortable, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. intentionally shows too much in an attempt actively to make the audience uncomfortable. The scene is decidedly not “sexy” in a traditional sense. By taking a 52  ”Female Gaze.” Oxford Reference. Accessed 5 Dec. 2022. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095814800. 53  “Inequality in 1,300 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ & Disability from 2017 to 2019,” Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Sept. 20202, https://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-inequality_1300_popular_films_09-082020.pdf. 54  Porsche McGovern, “Who Directs and Designs in LORT Theaters by Pronoun: 2020,” Howlround Theatre Commons, Dec. 22, 2020, https://howlround.com/who-designs-anddirects-lort-theatres-pronoun-2020.

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version of sex positivity to the extreme, the scene defamiliarizes cultural expectations around women’s sexuality. When staging intimate scenes, intimacy choreographers may want an audience to identify with a character’s desire but rather to expose a disconnect between desire and behavior. With her use of the imperative form (“get wet,” “turn on,” “want it”), Birch exposes the distance between what the characters wants and what she wants to want. The language with which individuals describe intimacy affects its shape. As the socialists William Simon and John Gagnon argue in their theory of sexual scripts, sexuality is a negotiation between individuals and preexisting social structures of intimacy.55 The character in the grocery aisle incorporates a pornographic vernacular of “getting wet” and “turning on,” and the repetitions edge toward climax before becoming like a broken record. When the character wills herself to “want to be entered” and emphasizes that she “choose[s]” invasion, she is not necessarily stating a fact. Rather, she is using language that attempts to perform an action, what J.L.  Austin calls “performative” language.56 In saying that she chooses sexual pleasure, she is attempting to conjure her choice into being. Austin writes that such performative language can either be “felicitous” or “infelicitous”—successful or unsuccessful at achieving their effect.57 The question is whether the character is able to know her desires or command them into being? By stating a desire, can she make it fact? The woman’s performance is infelicitous in that is illegible to those around her, and desire itself resists command. She assumes a pornographic habitus within the grocery aisle where it seems incongruous. Perhaps this is the point—patriarchal society expects women’s sexual availability even in sites seemingly unrelated to sex. On or offstage, women’s bodies are encoded with contradictions, caught in between pornographic mediation and the drudgery of domestic responsibilities. The grocery store setting ties this act of protest to commodification. Whereas commodity capitalism has often used women’s naked or semi-­ naked bodies to sell goods, here the character’s nudity disturbs a site of consumption. The woman in the produce section becomes undesirable precisely because she is sexually available. Renouncing her distance from  Simon and Gagnon, 98–99.  J.L.  Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 6. 57  Austin, 22. 55 56

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desiring subjects, the woman no longer becomes desirable. The melons beside which the woman pleasures herself lose their value. The employees state, “You will have to pay for those melons. We literally cannot resell those melons.” The melons become devalued, like the woman’s sexually available body. Rather than withholding her sexuality and preserving the impression of unavailability, she asserts herself as available and thereby interferes with the sexual economy constructed on scarcity. Her availability causes others to see her in terms of excess. The workers state, -

No one Asked see that No one Wanted to see your flesh in Aisle Seven People go to Aisle Seven to buy their dairy products. To select their yoghurts and their milk, their cheese and their cream Not to see your folds of skin . . . Or your flab. Quite frankly. Your curdled flab. The physical evidence of your regret at consuming probably an entire Wheel of Cheese every night since you were eleven was not what our unwitting shoppers had selected to see when they rolled into Aisle Seven to select their fat-free cottage cheese.

The workers use the same language of choice (what customers “selected to see”) that the women used in her assumption of sexual availability (“I choose it.”). They pit her choice against those of their shoppers and attempt to absent her explicit body from the scene. In this way, Birch ties sexual liberalism—a choice-based framework—to the limits of consumer choice. Birch’s scene underscores some of the shortfalls of consent culture’s choice rhetoric. If a yes happens under conditions of coercion, then it seemingly has no meaning. MacKinnon writes, “women have little choice but to become persons who freely choose women’s roles.”58 MacKinnon suggests that liberalism’s unit of analysis, the individual, is inadequate for considering the construction of social identities. The problem for MacKinnon seems to be not women’s objectification but their subjectivization. As Foucault emphasizes, power exerts itself not only through objectification but through the active process of generating desires and identities. In Birch’s play, the reclamation of female sexual agency masks further oppression. While MacKinnon offers a nihilistic vision of female agency, Birch’s character in the grocery aisle ends her monologue about  MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of State, 124.

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choice with a pause, after which one of the supermarket workers says, “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what happens now?” The character offers another pause. After all the effort to articulate desire, the woman is silent. She has ceased verbally trying to present herself as a subject, and the pause at the end of the scene provides a moment of relief. She is no longer attempting to articulate herself as actively desirous. Both the earlier scene, “Revolutionize the Language,” and this one, “Revolutionize the Body,” revolve around anxiety about objecthood in light of gendered mediation. While “Revolutionize the Language” depicts a woman’s attempt to hold constant power in the bedroom, “Revolutionize the Body” probes the expectation of women to emulate the stereotypically masculine ideal of insatiable desire. Constant desire—the imperative to “want it”—forecloses the possibility of sexual satisfaction and lends the woman in the grocery aisle a sense of desperation. The play exposes objecthood as only one component of gender subordination; the pornographic imagination now wants sexual objects to be insatiable subjects, active agents of desire. Under some forms of sex positivity, it is not enough to consent to sex; one must consent to sex because one wants it. In her ethnography of women’s sexuality in the contemporary United States, the gender studies researcher Breanne Fahs writes that the sexual revolution at times has enforced compulsory sexuality—the pressure on subjects, particularly women, to “perform” desire.59 Against this pressure, Fahs sees power in the articulation of a lack of desire.60 Rather than merely saying no, sexual subjects might say, “I’ve had enough.” This is one more axis with which to analyze sexual scripts—withholding and revealing. If the male gaze relies on a perceived scarcity of desire, some feminist interventions like Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. foreground excess. Rather than intimacy choreography always withholding intimacy to keep the audience wanting, as Sina suggests, intimacy choreography might depict explicit moments of intimacy that reveal a character’s journey or sensation beyond desire. The performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider imagines a politics of “confrontational satiability, . . . a refusal of the logic of infinite loss.”61 Satiability might imply a lack of 59  Breanne Fahs, Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women’s Erotic Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 10. 60  Breanne Fahs, “Radical Refusals: On the Anarchist Politics of Women Choosing Asexuality,” Sexualities 13, no. 4 (August 2010): 445–61. 61  Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 7–8.

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desire, an assertion distinct from resistance. Birch’s characters keep urging themselves to “Revolt” and “Revolt Again,” but the need for constant revolt is exhausting. Birch’s title also includes three periods, the marker she has used throughout the script to indicate pauses. Perhaps in the pauses between the articulations of revolt, there is power. One need not perform empowerment as perpetual desire; objecthood might be a welcome respite from compulsory desire. Intimacy does not depend on scarce authenticity but on plentiful fantasy. Intimacy is a bountiful resource. The Black feminist thinker Adrienne Maree Brown writes that activists can “generate power from the overlapping space of desire and aliveness, tapping into an abundance that has enough attention, liberation, and justice for all of us to have plenty.”62 “Aliveness,” like liveness, is as plentiful as mediation. Although presence might appear a scarce resource, others might view presence as renewable, something that actors and creative teams can produce through working on sexual scripts.

3.6  Sex Positivity and Its Discontents As the analysis of the above scenes suggests, identification, activity and passivity, and withholding and revealing can all take part in establishing a narrative of intimacy. While Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze comes from the realm of cinema, which can guide an audience’s gaze more completely than can a theatrical playing space, stage pictures and choreography nevertheless shape audience perception. An entire production team takes part in constructing erotic narratives and desire, from the lighting designers that focus the gaze to the costumers that affect how much skin is shown to the director who integrates intimate moments with the rest of the narrative, including sexual charges in moments that do not involve exposure or intimate touch. Sexiness onstage is not merely about an actor generating presence based on charisma, desire, or experience. The independent intimacy coordinator Acacia emphasizes that most producers think that intimacy professionals work only with actors, producers, and a director, while in reality they work with a variety of departments, including makeup, costumes, sound, and props.63 Calling attention to the  Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism (New York: AK Press, 2019), 12–13.  Acacia (@intimacycoordinating), Nov. 15, 2022, “Who Producers Think Intimacy Coordinators Work With VS Who Intimacy Coordinators Actually Work With,” Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck_ULnJutic/. 62 63

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broader work of crafting sexual scripts, intimacy choreographers help make crafting presence less of an individual project and more of a shared endeavor connected to a creative vision—a commons around staging of intimacy. As the scenes from Birch’s play reveal, not all intimacy has the goal of being sexy. Intimacy serves a variety of narrative and stylistic functions in performance. While culture might appear to have moved past the male gaze, the ways that we talk about sex and power are still shaped by it. Sex positivity, a set of beliefs that have concretized in the twentieth century to encourage an openness to talking about sex and validate sex between consenting adults, can still take the male gaze as a reference point. Insisting that sexual attraction is a source of power and that sexiness is connected to how desirous one is, sex positivity can urge women to take on the position of both the desiring man and the desired woman, to be both an active agent of desire and an object. Alternately, in seeking an entirely new language of intimacy free from the male gaze, sexual norms have urged women to seek new scripts so unfamiliar that they encourage improvisation and spontaneity. However, like the command to “act sexy,” this alternate approach can still make intimacy feel personal and individual while ignoring the social pressures that still guide sexual scripts. Sexual script analysis in intimacy choreography breaks from both of these approaches in that it depersonalizes the process of staging intimacy and focuses on collective storytelling. In intimacy choreography, actors need not generate work based on their own desires. In the remainder of this chapter, I explore intimacy choreography’s relationship with sex positivity and how it might reorient it for theatrical performance by focusing on choreography. The rise in intimacy choreography is as closely tied to consent culture as it is to sex positivity. As psychologists Chantelle Ivanski and Taylor Kohut, understandings of sex positivity vary, even across sexual psychologists.64 However, Ivanski and Kohut define sex positivity as an “ideology that promotes, with respect to gender and sexuality, being open-minded, non-­ judgmental and respectful of personal sexual autonomy, when there is consent.”65 This definition knits together consent culture’s emphasis on individual choice with an intersecting focus on undoing social judgment and disrespect around sexuality. Informally, sex positivity can also connote that 64  Chantelle Ivanski and Taylor Kohut, “Exploring Definitions of Sex Positivity Through Thematic Analysis,” Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 26, no. 3 (Dec. 2017), 216. 65  Ivanski and Kohut, 223.

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“sexual pleasure is a good thing.”66 In both these definitions, sex positivity is at least in part an oppositional ideology. Gaining increased usage after 2008, especially in psychotherapy communities, the term attempts to signal opposition to sexual conservatism, stigma and shame around sexual desires, especially those that fall outside of heterosexual marriage.67 As the sexual historians Estelle Freedman and George D’Emilio argue, the history of sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has seen a sustained conflict between sexual liberalism—a rights-based approach to sexuality—and sexual conservatism—an effort to stifle anti-­social or non-normative sexual practices.68 Sex positivity builds on this approach, and, in its emphasis on individual choice, it stands on the foundation of the rights-based framework that sexual liberalism laid out in the twentieth century. However, sex positivity has moved beyond merely emphasizing choice, and, when viewed uncritically, it can promote its own set of norms around sex and power. Ideologically, the sex positivity of the twenty-first century has some of its roots the feminist sex wars of the 1980s as well as queer activism in the 1990s.69 In 1982, a group of academics organized the now-infamous Barnard Conference on Sexuality. Responding to currents within feminist circles that opposed pornography and kink, the organizers including Carole Vance, Ellen Willis, Gayle Rubin, and Ellen Dubois hoped to illuminate potentials for women’s sexuality at the intersections of pleasure and danger.70 The conference organizers hoped to explore how sex need not be a site solely for violence against women or the maintenance of heterosexual reproduction.71 One of the central groups to criticize the conference was Women Against Pornography, who argued that pornography and sadomasochism promoted violence against women. In the 1970s and 1980s, WAP leaders including Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller advocated for bans on pornography, and, after hearing about the ­conference, WAP group members called university leaders urging them to 66  Margo Kaplan, “Sex-Positive Law,” New York University Law Review 89, no. 1 (April 2014), 90. 67  Ivanski and Kohut, 216. 68  Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xviii. 69  Carol Queen and Lynn Comella, “The Necessary Revolution: Sex-Positive Feminism in the Post-Barnard Era,” The Communication Review 11, no. 3 (2008), 281. 70  Carole Vance, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1984), 3. 71  Vance, 3–4.

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cancel the conference. WAP and other groups then attended the conference to protest. The Barnard Conference went forward despite protests and became a flashpoint for the Sex Wars that divided feminist circles in the 1970s and 1980s.72 It was a tipping point in debates about the circulation of women’s likeness and the public portrayal of sexuality at the twentieth century’s end, which were those that Alice Birch read when writing Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. In the battle between anti-pornography feminism and sex positive feminism, the latter emerged as the tentative victor in feminist circles shifting into the twenty-first century. The ideological success of sex positive feminist coincided with the Culture Wars’ attack on queer and sadomasochistic sexual practices from the political right in the 1990s. Less than a decade after the Sex Wars, Conservative congresspeople including Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato led an effort to deny federal funding of the NEA Four—Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller—a group of performance artists known for making sexually explicit, queer, and feminist work. The Congressional debate and a resulting lawsuit, NEA vs. Finley, gained national media attention and became a lightning rod for national conversations around performance art and sexuality. Given the attack on queer and minoritarian sexual practices from the political right, proponents of artistic freedom wrote in defense of the NEA Four and other sexually explicit artists who came under attack during the era.73 As the feminist theorist Breanne Fahs argues, the forces of conservatism and homophobia were as strong an impetus for the development of sex positivity as were the Sex Wars of the 1980s and 1990s.74 However, the defense of the NEA four was not always couched in term of feminism or gender analysis; it often became couched in terms of freedom of speech, and the Culture Wars helped sex-positive feminists solidify a rights-based approach to sexuality centered on individual expression.75 This battle has helped make free expression and consent some of the dominant terms with which

 Srinivasan, 33–34.  Peggy Phelan, “Money Talks, Again,” TDR: The Drama Review 35, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 131–141. Cynthia Carr, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 292–295. 74  Breanne Fahs, “‘Freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’: A new vision for sex-positive politics.” Sexualities 17, no. 3 (2014), 272. 75  Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. 72 73

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we define sexuality today, softening some of the earlier debates within feminist circles. At the same time as the Sex Wars and the Culture Wars’ ideological debates solidified sex positivity as a framework for third-wave feminism, technological changes have made the regulation of pornography and sexually explicit material less feasible. With the proliferation of personal computers and the world wide web from the late 1980s into the twenty-first century, the internet became a venue for the proliferation of cheap and free pornography. Efforts to regulate pornography ran into the challenges of an ever-moving target as videos and material could be pirated and moved site-to-site in cyberspace. This technological change meant that, despite legal regulations, many adolescents grew up consuming pornography, and, as they grew up, may have emerged more tolerant toward pornography.76 Meanwhile, film and television underwent their own transformations that increased the accessibility of sexual content. With the spread of high-speed internet in middle-class and high-wealth communities in the twenty-first century, platforms such as HBO and Netflix started releasing programming through streaming, a mode of viewership where audiences can watch episodes on-demand. Viewers no longer needed to watch television in a shared living room at a specific hour or venture to a crowded movie theater. Instead, they could watch screen media on their own devices in their own way. In this way, viewing has become a much more private experience. In the new media environment, individuals can consume sexually explicit material from film and television without others knowing. This technological shift may be one reason that television and film producers have been able to include content that has required an intimacy choreographer. Despite the potential opening for more sexually explicit content in film and television and their potential to spill over into theater, it is by no means clear that commercial performance will challenge fundamental framework of the male gaze, which relies on the withholding of intimacy from the frame. In a provocative writeup in Playboy, film critic Kate Hagen suggested that, if anything, cinema has included fewer sex scenes in recent years.77 Based on an analysis of films on IMBD, she argues that the  Srinivasan, 40–42.  By contrast, she suggests that the amount of sex on television has increased to its highest ever level. Kate Hagen, “The Playboy Symposium: Sex in Cinema,” Playboy (Dec 17, 2019), https://www.playboy.com/read/the-playboy-symposium-sex-in-cinema. 76 77

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percentage of feature-length films to include sex scenes is in fact at its lowest since the 1960s.78 Shortly thereafter, The New Yorker magazine to run an article, “The Sex Scene is Dead. Long Live the Sex Scene.”79 How do we reconcile the facts that a time of sex positivity has not necessarily coincided with an increase in the representation of sex in film? How much might the amount of representation on screen affect representation in theater? Perhaps sex positivity has encouraged art to center sexual desire without centering sex itself, to be caught showing desire without satiation. While the representation of intimacy might benefit from showing queer desire, trans desire, disabled desire, women desiring men, and desire for and among people of color, there are also benefits from showing intimacy that satisfies desire or that occurs without desire. How might art reveal bad sex, awkward sex, or sex that results in character development, not merely the anticipation of sex that stokes desire in an audience? Performing sexual script analysis, intimacy choreographers might help creative teams craft narratives of intimacy that do more than look sexy or foster identification with desire. If intimacy choreography is to support what Acacia calls “The Golden Age of Screen Intimacy”80 (and a golden age for theater, too), then intimacy choreography might help us tell more varied narratives of sex, some of which make an audience uncomfortable and disrupt desire.

3.7  Choreographing Intimacy Beyond Desire Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Says. Revolt Again. exposes the continued pressures on women under sex positivity, which result in part from sex positivity’s reliance on a rights-based framework from sexual liberalism. The characters in the play face two intersecting imperatives—the imperative to embody stereotypically masculine forms of sexual desire (inverting the male gaze) and the imperative to consent to one’s own objectification (asserting desire as subjectivity). Both these imperatives reinforce contemporary capitalism’s equation of desire with personhood; they encourage  Hagen.  Alexandra Schwartz, Doreen St. Félix, Naomi Fry, and Vinson Cunningham, “The Sex Scene is Dead. Long Live the Sex Scene” The New Yorker, Feb. 15, 2022, https://www. newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-sex-scene-is-dead-long-livethe-sex-scene. 80   Acacia, “The Golden Age of Screen Intimacy,” Jan. 6, 2022, https://acacia. gay/2022/01/06/golden-age-of-screen-intimacy/. 78 79

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people to identify with a character who views another with desire. The male gaze structures audience responses by providing them with a male character with whose viewpoint they should identify; feminist efforts to flip the male gaze still rely on audience identification with a surrogate who objectifies her scene partner. Meanwhile, social forces continue to objectify women and can encourage women to identify with sexually available subject positions; if women consent to otherwise unwanted sexual interactions, their consent can seemingly alchemically make unpleasant interactions more tolerable. However, there are ways of structuring intimacy that move beyond these pressures to mimic either stereotypically masculine desire or stereotypically feminine submission. What is often left out from uncritical forms of sex positivity is abjection itself. As Julia Kristeva defines it, abjection is that which challenges human subjectivity with the threat of objecthood.81 Intimate encounters can provoke sensations that challenge the self as a concrete entity stable and distinct from others—precisely the conception of self on which liberalism often relies. The queer theorist Leo Bersani writes that patriarchal norms attempt to shore up men’s conception of themselves as autonomous subjects: “Phallocentrism is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women.”82 The male gaze works to protect the male ego from the feeling of powerlessness. For this reason, the male gaze attempts to keep sex off stage and screen and hold women as passive objects; sex is seemingly threatening in its ability to undo subjects and expose their interdependence. While sex positive cultures may be more willing to depict sex on stage and screen (and again, more often than not, intimacy choreographers are called in to choreograph scenes that do not show explicit sex acts), the question is whether sex positivity is reinforcing the same values that anti-pornography feminists advanced before it—an insistence on spontaneity, individuality, and a denial of vulnerability. As the scenarios in Birch’s play suggest, such a narrow definition of feminist empowerment can too easily reinforce its own set of rules and pressures. Bersani asserts, “The ultimate logic of MacKinnon's and Dworkin's critique of 81  Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, transl. by Leon Samuel Rowdies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 1–2. 82  Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (Winter 1987), 217.

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pornography—and, however parodistic this may sound, I really don't mean it as a parody of their views—would be the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented.”83 Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. dramatizes a series of attempts to reinvent sex that nonetheless fail because they deny abjection. There is a danger in staging intimacy that artists, too, can advance a narrow vision of empowerment by insisting that performers come in with fully-formed desires for their scene partners. In light of this pressure, intimacy choreographers might strategically attempt to recalibrate theater’s orientation toward desire. Instead of insisting that performers embody their authentic selves, intimacy choreographers provide opportunities for performers to suspend selfhood and perform in character. Against the trend to insist that performers act on “impulse” or “chemistry,” intimacy choreographers provide choreographic vocabularies for performers to construct compelling narratives. If intimacy choreographers talk about actors’ own desires at all (and many choreographers do not), they talk about an actor’s desire for a narrative in which to immerse themselves. This desire is for neither total subjectivity nor total objecthood; it is for abjection, a liminal space in which they can experiment with alternative personas. Bersani describes sexual abjection in a way that sounds a lot like theater: “The self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self.”84 Might theatrical performance be a similar occasion in which individuals experience a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of self-consciousness? It is acting, with its simultaneous promise to expand the self and to annihilate it, that intimacy choreography facilitates. Thus, against the naturalistic turn for actors to perform sexual selfhood, intimacy choreography encourages performers to get on with the acting. It also provides them tools such as tapping in and tapping out, choreography, and de-roling with which to navigate the disorienting sensations that acting can provoke. The advances of sex positivity are going to be wasted if they attempt to ensure that actors must always align with their characters. Rather, intimacy directing might acknowledge all sexual actors’ continued interdependences and vulnerabilities. Decentering innate desire  Bersani, 214.  Bersani, 218.

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for others, intimacy choreography might emphasize the desire to explore sensations in the company of others. It might de-privatize desire and instead attempt to create a collective sexual commons that challenges artists’ and audiences’ sense that they have to generate erotic presence on their own.

CHAPTER 4

“Intermediate” Pornography Mediating Presence with the Intimacy Kit

Picking up on the discussion of mediation begun in the previous chapter, this chapter explores the technologies with which theater crafts erotic presence. The last chapter largely kept the focus on the director, intimacy choreographer, and actor and their use of choreography, while this chapter examines how objects and design can contribute to the construction of erotic narrative. To highlight the interconnection of intimacy choreography with technological mediation, I analyze the role of technology in Thomas Bradshaw’s 2014 play Intimacy, which interrogates performing bodies’ relationship to screen pornography. In the play, performers’ bodies appear livestreamed on screens as they perform actions onstage, and the audiences witness in double the process of crafting erotic identity. In this way, their bodies constitute what Sarah Bay-Cheng calls “intermediate bodies”—bodies that bridge various media and dynamically fuse mediation and presence.1 Analyzing the process staging of Intimacy, I emphasize that the director and performers used props and technology to construct intermediate bodies that blurred the lines for audiences between truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, while keeping these lines in place for artist. In a similar spirit, intimacy choreographers use a variety of objects—modesty 1  Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Intermediate Bodies: Media Theory in Theatre,” in Playing with Theory in Theatre Practice, ed. by Megan Alrutz, Julia Listengarten, and M. Van Duyn Wood (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 64.

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garments, prosthetics, barriers, screens, and costumes—to build erotic narratives that simulate sexuality rather than relying on unmediated selfhood. To close the chapter, I look at these “intimacy kits” as tools with which intimacy choreographers, designers, and performers author erotic presence. Intimacy and eroticism deploy material objects to activate shared fantasies and collective vocabularies in the sexual commons. At first glance, the objects with which intimacy choreographers mediate bodies appear to be what separate intimacy choreography from pornography and simulated sexuality from actual “sex acts.” In India, for example, the depiction of two actors completely nude with genitalia touching or the depiction of one actor completely nude and touching their own genitalia is classified as pornography and therefore illegal to produce.2 In the United States, it is legal to produce pornography, but according to SAG-AFTRA, the union for screen actors, their “contracts explicitly prohibit actual sex acts, meaning that at no time should a performer auditioning or working under a SAG-AFTRA contract engage in, or be asked to engage in, actual sex acts.”3 In 1969, the union for stage actors in the United States, Actors’ Equity, ruled out explicit sex acts as part of performances under equity contracts but left nudity and simulated sex acts to the actors’ discretion, a policy that remains in effect until today.4 To maintain this distance between simulated and genital sex, intimacy choreographers use modesty garments and barriers. Modesty garments cover a performer’s genitalia and match the actor’s skin tone to create the appearance of nudity. Barriers prevent actors’ genitalia from touching during an intimate scene. Modesty garments and barriers are so crucial to intimacy work that companies in Canada and the United Kingdom, the Modesty Shop and Intimask, have emerged specifically to sell these objects for intimacy choreographers.5 2  “Everything You’ve Wanted to Ask an Intimacy Coordinator,” Tweak India, Feb. 4, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjnMHITjtp4&t=147s. 3  “Quick Guides for Scenes Involving Nudity and Simulated Sex,” SAG-AFTRA, accessed Dec. 12, 2022, https://www.sagaftra.org/files/sa_documents/SAG-AFTRA_quickguide_ intimscenes_F2.pdf. 4  Jack Gaver, “Stage Nudity, Simulated Sex Acts Up to Actors, Equity Group Rules,” Desert Sun 42, no. 260 (June 4, 1969), https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19690604.2.34 &e=%2D%2D%2D%2D%2D%2D-en%2D%2D20%2D%2D1%2D%2Dtxt-­txIN%2D%2D%2 D%2D%2D%2D%2D%2D. 5  “About Us/Contact,” The Modesty Shop, accessed Dec. 12, 2022, https://modestyshop. ca/about-us-contact/. “Our Story,” Intimask, accessed Dec. 12, 2022, https://www.intimask.com/our-story.

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Beyond modesty garments and barriers, productions also use prostheses such as fake penises when showing acts such as oral sex or masturbation. The prohibition on genital touch can help create psychic divides that keep intimacy choreography from feeling like pornography or from falling under that legal category. However, even acts that don’t involve genital touch can feel sexual in nature. Artists and scholars in the field such as Hannah Fazio and Ariel Lipson have noted that intimacy professionals can learn from sex work and labor struggles from queer and feminist circles.6 In professional pornography, the sex acts may be real, but they are also the result of a strategic effort to mask the labor that goes into filming—long hours on set, having to hold difficult positions, maintaining erections, building up fan bases on social media. The job of the artistic team on a professional porn production to create the impression of spontaneity and authenticity for what is negotiated out in a contract in advance.7 In fact, the struggles to control the means of production for erotic artmaking that have characterized feminist and queer pornography predate efforts to institutionalize intimacy choreography in theater, film, and television, and struggles continue to advance pay equity for porn performers of color in a white-dominated industry.8 In live theater, staging intimacy can often be less explicit than in film or television, but as an intimacy choreographer I find myself working for similar principles of contracts negotiated in advance and whole creative teams mobilized to create the illusion of authenticity in a scene of intimacy. While sometimes intimacy choreographers work on scenes explicit enough to require modesty garments and the illusion of full nudity, at others they’ll simply work with the costume designer to ensure that an actor has a skirt under which they can mask sex acts or a light cue that stylistically suggests orgasm. These provisions help mediate the actor’s presence to establish character and tell the story without requiring “authenticity” from a performer. Now that intimacy choreography is getting a higher profile, its vocabulary is even circling back to the world of pornography. When Playboy magazine rebranded in 2019 with a millennial  Fazio teaches with Heartland Intimacy Design and I’ve spoken with Lipson at a training with Intimacy Directors International. 7  Heather Berg, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 64. 8  For an account of the labor struggle in the porn industry, see Berg, 3–4. For an account of pay inequities along racial lines in pornography, see Berg, 57–58. 6

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editorship and openly gay executive director, it adopted the framework of “consensual objectification.”9 One of the magazine’s first steps was to hire intimacy coordinators.10

4.1   Choreographing Intimacy Between Media This connection between intimacy choreography and pornography points to the objects and integrated media that a production can use to tell stories of intimacy. Intimacy choreography has developed at the nexus of stage and screen media. Although artists regularly differentiate the process of working in different media, intimacy choreographers and organizations often work across media. Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, for example, employs distinct terms: “intimacy directors” and “intimacy coordinators,” to describe those who direct intimacy for live theater and those who direct for television and film, respectively.11 IDC offers two tracks for training and certification—one for “Intimacy Directors for Theatre” and another for “Intimacy Coordinators for TV and Film.” Despite this distinction, collaboration between artists working in different media has been strong. As film and television production companies sought the expertise of intimacy directors in spring 2018 following the start of the #MeToo Movement and Harvey Weinstein allegations the previous fall, IDI co-founder Alicia Rodis codified practices for coordinating intimacy on screen. A trained movement director, stunt director, and fight choreographer, Rodis started choreographing intimacy in both theater and film and adapted Tonia Sina’s “Intimacy for the Stage” Method alongside her own techniques for screen media. When networks like HBO sought Rodis’s expertise, she and the other IDI co-founders consulted with psychologists, entertainment lawyers, social workers, and sex workers to hone their techniques.12 Meanwhile, some of the field’s most prominent ­intimacy choreographers with IDC and TIE including Claire Warden, Teniece Divya Johnson, Chelsea Pace, and Laura Rikard have all worked across stage and screen media. 9  Jessica Bennett, “Will the Millennials Save Playboy?,” The New  York Times, August 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/business/woke-playboy-millennials.html. 10  Bennett. 11  “Intimacy consultants” provide advice for a production on stage or screen but leave the task of choreography to the director. 12  “Alicia Rodis,” Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, accessed Feb. 28, 2021 https:// www.idcprofessionals.com/bios/aliciarodis.

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A main difference between the processes for each medium lies in the role of repetition. Intimacy directors prepare performers to repeat intimate sequences in rehearsal and performance; they use the language of the stage to reveal and conceal aspects of the performance. Meanwhile, intimacy coordinators prepare production teams for a limited number of filmic takes; they establish the conditions to reveal and mask a scenario for the camera. Although live performance might “become itself through disappearance,”13 actors often experience live performance as more repetitive than film work. Film actors, meanwhile, may perform many takes of a scene, but the filming intimacy is a one-off event that audiences can experience as repeated viewing. Repetition affects the degree of choreography necessary in each practice. Intimacy directing can go in depth into choreography and establish detailed blocking that a stage manager and “intimacy captain” ensure actors follow throughout the run. While intimacy coordination in film may leave greater room for improvisation within boundaries than goes intimacy directing, both coordination and directing involve the repetition of choreography. For this reason, intimacy choreography provides a fascinating lens through which to understand the repetitions embedded into sexual cultures more broadly. The kink studies scholar Ariane Cruz writes that pornography is built on “repetitive pleasure—a pleasure in repetition.”14 In her study of kink.com, Cruz notes the repetitive comments on videos and suggests that this repetition is a facet of sexual cultures; intimacy repeats histories of race and gender.15 The repetitions required in the production of erotic content are necessarily negotiations with the unchosen meanings attached to performers’ bodies. Video pornography is itself part of intimacy choreography’s history. As emphasized in the previous chapter, the proliferation of easily-accessible pornography influenced the spread of contemporary sex positivity, which helped facilitate the inclusion of sexually explicit content on stage and screen. Meanwhile, pornography also became a subject of early plays and films to incorporate intimacy choreographers. HBO’s The Deuce, for example, a series about sex work and the pornography industry in Manhattan of the 1970s, propelled intimacy choreography into the

 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146.  Ariane Cruz, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 213. 15  Cruz, 215. 13 14

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spotlight for film and television.16 Another early series to enlist an intimacy choreographer, HBO’s Mrs. Fletcher, depicts a single mother’s sexual reawakening as she discovers pornography once her son goes away to college. Artistic explorations of pornography like The Deuce and Mrs. Fletcher dramatize some of the central tensions in intimacy work between individual agency and collective representation, consent and inequity, subjectivity and objecthood. The sexuality studies scholar Ariel Lipson is investigating the commonalities between intimacy choreography and feminist and queer pornography from the 1970s and 1980s, and this is a rich topic for further exploration. However, it is clear that intimacy choreography and feminist/ queer pornography share an interest in thinking how performers can author their bodies to mean something different than the dominant social codes attached to gender, racialized, and sexualized bodies. As the connections between theater, film, television, and video pornography suggest, intimacy choreography is a craft that operates between media. Intimacy choreographers constantly translate visual vocabularies across media to stage scenes that will be legible to audiences. One of the founders of contemporary intimacy choreography, Tonia Sina, for example, referenced feminist pornography as research when crafting intimacy for the stage for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Bacchae.17 The media scholars Jay David Bolton and Richard Grusin describe this dynamic as “remediation,” the transfer of narratives and styles across media.18 As Bolton and Grusin argue, the acts of transfer across media often aspire to create the illusion of immediacy.19 Each medium, be it cinema with its close-ups or stage plays with their live audiences, has its own framing devices that present it as more “authentic” than other media. Thus, media often attempt to mask their references from 16  Intimacy Directors International’s Claire Warden emphasizes that HBO’s decision to enlist an intimacy coordinator was a turning point in the movement, and the channel now hires intimacy directors for all its shows involving sexually charged moments. Breena Kerr, “How HBO is Changing Sex Scenes Forever,” Rolling Stone, October 24, 2018, https:// www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/the-deuce-intimacy-coordinator-hbo-sexscenes-739087/. 17  Laura Collins-Hughes, “Need to Fake an Orgasm: There’s an Intimacy Director for That,” The New York Times, June 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/theater/need-to-fake-an-orgasm-theres-an-intimacy-choreographer-for-that.html. 18  Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 5. 19  Bolter and Grusin, 5.

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other media.20 In a similar spirit, intimacy choreography may create the illusion of unmediated sexuality, but it continually references a vocabulary drawn from broader culture. For this reason, I frame intimacy choreography as creating what the media scholar Sarah Bay-Cheng describes as “the intermediate body.” Writing of theater productions incorporating digital media, Bay-Cheng argues that the intermediate body exists between the seeming permanence of digital media and the seeming disappearance of the onstage actor.21 A performer appears both as an agential subject capable of crafting narrative and as an object affected by narrativized mediation. As the “inter” in “intermediate” suggests, the performing body always exists between these two positions in a state of productive tension.22 Intimacy choreographers help manage this tension as artists navigate the chosen and unchosen meanings surrounding performers’ bodies.

4.2  Thomas Bradshaw’s Theatrical Pornography Few plays in the contemporary United States present sex as abundantly as Thomas Bradshaw’s Intimacy. Like the woman pleasuring herself in the grocery aisle in Alice Birch’s play mentioned in the previous chapter, Intimacy moves far beyond the subtle suggestion of sex. The play shows a plethora of sex acts and intimacies multiplied by pornographic mediation. Written in 2014 by the same playwright whose piece Fulfillment required a “sex choreographer” (as described in the introduction), Intimacy explores pornography through the lens of domestic drama. The play follows a set of neighbors going through personal and interpersonal struggles, which begin to resolve themselves after a young man discovers that his neighbor is an adult film actor. Inspired by her work, he picks up a camera and begins filming a “neighborhood porn film” featuring his suburban community, which reconciles through this shared act of “intimacy.” Intimacy premiered at New York’s Acorn Theater as a production of the New Group under the direction of Scott Elliot. Given the play’s explicit material, it has not had further productions at time of writing. However, the play laid the groundwork for further sex-laden productions like Fulfillment. Moreover, David Anzuelo, who acted in explicit scenes and choreographed fights for Intimacy, went on to serve as a “sex  Bolter and Grusin, 5–6.  Bay-Cheng., 71. 22  Bay-Cheng, 71. 20 21

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choreographer” for several New  York productions, including Kid Brooklyn’s Encounters, a 2014 adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 La Ronde.23 Anzuelo’s company, UnkleDave’s Fight House, now provides stage combat and intimacy directing services to theaters in New York.24 Along with Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. and Slave Play, Intimacy is part of a group of contemporary productions combining theater’s allegedly live medium with the pornographic imagination. This kind of erotic production calls for techniques to choreograph its sexual moments, which intimacy directors have stepped in to provide. Bradshaw establishes all the ingredients for naturalistic drama before he takes the play in sexual directions. James has lost his wife and is feeling suffocated in a house that reminds him of her; Fred is remodeling James’s house but keeps bearing the brunt of James’s stinginess and casual racism; Fred’s daughter Sarah is trying to succeed in high school and meet the expectations of her immigrant parents; and James’s son Matthew is an aspiring filmmaker and slacker boyfriend who keeps getting distracted by his neighbor Janet. The play goes off the rails when we learn that Janet has been building a career as an erotic film actor, and Janet’s father and neighbors have seen her work. Part horrified and part fascinated, the neighbors build ever more elaborate fantasies around her. Matthew, inspired by Janet’s work, enlists his neighbors to film a frottage-themed porn film together. The play depicts their filming and its constellation of sex acts across families and generations, which start to heal the community’s fissures. As Matthew has just filmed Janet’s parents, he states, “When we began this artistic endeavor, I thought it was about frottage. But after being with all of you, and witnessing the emotional and transformative breakthroughs that we’ve gone through together, I now see what my film is really about. It’s about intimacy.”25 Intimacy, which gives the play its title, here unites the pornographic with the theatrical. Looking for a title for his film, Matthew picks Intimacy. Thus, Intimacy exists in double—as 23  Evan Caccioppoli, “Let’s Talk About It: An Exploration of Sex and New American Theater,” Howlround, Nov. 30, 2014, https://howlround.com/lets-talk-about-it. 24  “Company,” UnkleDave’s Fight House, accessed Jan. 14, 2019, https://www.unkledaves.com/company. 25  Thomas Bradshaw, “Intimacy,” in Intimacy and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2015), 150.

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the film-within-a-play and as the play itself. Matthew’s creation of pornography becomes a metacommentary on the creative process of directing. Directing their respective versions of Intimacy, Matthew, Bradshaw, and director Scott Elliot might be their own kinds of “intimacy directors.”

4.3  Amateurism and the Fantasy of the Immediate The play begins with a commentary on the voyeurism embedded in different forms of theatrical naturalism. At first, Matthew directs his video with a focus on authenticity. After Matthew’s father has given him a camera and the seed money to produce small-budget films, Matthew records Janet through her window without her consent. When she finds out, she confronts him: JANET: What the fuck is wrong with you? MATTHEW: What? JANET: You’ve been videotaping me. MATTHEW: How did you find out? JANET: Those videos you uploaded on YouPorn! How could you do that! MATTHEW: I’m sorry. JANET: It’d be one thing if you were just peeping into my window. That’s natural. But to videotape me and upload it onto the internet. . . . That’s messing with my livelihood! MATTHEW: I’m sorry. JANET: I feel really, really violated. Especially by the video of me—of me uh— MATTHEW: Masturbating in your bed. JANET (Vulnerable): Yeah. How could you? (Pause.) I know you make think it’s weird that this bothers me, given my line of work, but you have to understand when I’m on camera, I’m acting. I still have a private self and I feel that you’ve stolen that from me.

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MATTHEW: Janet, when I was watching you masturbate, for the first time in my life, I genuinely felt at peace.… There is something divine about sexual arousal. True sexual arousal. In most porn women you can tell that women are just faking it. But when you see a woman who is genuinely sexually aroused, there is divinity in that. That video shows you absolutely unmasked. You know, if you could learn to reveal your truest self while performing, I think you might become the most famous performer who ever lived.26 Matthew hopes that film can make hidden desire visible. Matthew’s ideal for acting is the revelation of the “truest self.” Matthew insists that actors’ awareness of filming during a porn shoot renders their performances inauthentic. According to Matthew, only when Janet is not aware of the viewer is she “absolutely unmasked.” However, Janet emphasizes that the filming was non-consensual. What Matthew experiences as an unmasking, Janet experiences as a violation. She is offended not by Matthew’s voyeurism, but by his control over the circulation of her image. Janet frames her private desires and backstage identity as a form of capital, of which Matthew denies her. Janet articulates a divide between her personage on screen and her personage off screen. Even if she is present in her porn shoots, she is always “acting.” In the exchange, Janet divides the body and the self; privacy is not solely a matter of nudity but of the persona presented when nude. Peggy Phelan warns against using the body’s exterior as the extent of the self: “Reading the body as a sign of identity is the way men regulate the bodies of women” and racialized others.27 Similarly, Matthew reads Janet’s body through her window as a sign of sexual authenticity. He authors her presence in the YouPorn uploads without giving her a chance to author her presence, as when she is acting. She does not control the means of production of her unmasking. The seemingly unmediated realm that Matthew idealizes appears to be a world without the performer’s labor; the primary labor in Matthew’s film is that of “vision.” Matthew performers the work of unmasking on Janet’s behalf. By Matthew’s account, the director must see that which is private and create the illusion of privacy with a public  Bradshaw, 123–124.  Phelan, 10.

26 27

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audience. The dynamic in Matthew and Janet’s debate pervades naturalistic theater, which places the audience in a voyeuristic subject position to unmask the privacy of interpersonal relations. While Janet recognizes ­voyeurism as “natural,” Bradshaw makes the audience’s voyeuristic gaze explicit through Matthew’s camera. The audience, like Matthew, seeks the immediate but necessarily experiences it in mediated form. The conflict between Janet and Matthew mirrors a dynamic in Bay-­ Cheng’s account of intermediate performance. According to Bay-Cheng, intermediate performance creates a dialectic between supposedly stable mediation and supposedly evanescent immediacy. Formally, the play includes both of these elements—simulated sex acts on stage and simulated sex acts depicted on video screens. As the characters shoot their “neighborhood porn film,” live feed from their cameras is also projected onto two small video screens on the stage. In this way, we experience the characters’ bodies in double—as “mediated” images on the screen and as “immediate” actors in the flesh. Bay-Cheng emphasizes that this doubling can expose a tension in mediatized culture. Digital culture’s mediatized images both promise unfailingly to reproduce presence and feature live bodies whose vulnerability might cause them to fail to be present or present in the right way. In this framework, objectification and mediatized presence appear to be positions of power while subjectivity and stage presence appear positions of vulnerability. In Intimacy, Janet vacillates between these poles, a larger-than-life performer who disarms those around her and a vulnerable 18-year-old whose insecurities manifest themselves around her neighbors. In this scene with Matthew, a stage direction tells us that Janet is “vulnerable.” As the audience watches Janet open up to Matthew about her sense of violation, the play provides a voyeuristic glimpse at a moment of emotional vulnerability not unlike the private moment of masturbation on which Matthew spies. Often, audiences want to see performers and characters not only as invulnerable objects of fantasy but also as vulnerable subjects who confess their insecurities. Performance relies on an intimate interplay of concealing and revealing. Aware of her intermediate position, Janet makes explicit her ambivalent relation to the camera. Similarly, Bradshaw explicates the audience’s gaze and unmasks the secret of the audience’s voyeurism. When a scene becomes “explicit”—either in terms of sexual content or emotional transparency—its explicitness changes an audience’s relationship to performance. As Rebecca Schneider argues, the nude, explicit body “explicates” the various meanings attached to women’s bodies: “performance artists

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peel back layers of signification that surround their bodies like ghosts at a grave.”28 Thus, the performance of intimacy can engage in two levels of seduction: the first around the revelation of the nude body and the second around the revelation of the meanings surrounding an exposed body. These two types of revelation rely on convergent ideals—the actor’s immediate presence (as in naturalism) and the acknowledgement of the actor’s mediation (as in Brechtian performance). In Brechtian theater, actors are still expected to bring aspects of themselves (their true attitude toward the character) and to provide authenticity by exposing theatrical artifice (mere acting). Like Brechtian distanciation, Bradshaw’s techniques emphasize the material dimensions of Janet’s “livelihood.” Creating a video of Janet’s private self, Matthew is interfering with her ability to sustain herself as a performer. Janet emphasizes that “on camera, [she is] acting.” In porn, Janet withholds aspects of herself that Matthew threatens to reveal. Matthew and Janet’s debate is a dialectic between withholding and revealing, between Brechtian and naturalistic ideals. The intimate sphere of theater relies on this dialectic, as artists withhold and reveal aspects of their characters to capture an audience’s attention. After Janet explicates the fantasy constructed around her body, Matthew creates a new fantasy in its place. Janet convinces Matthew to delete the video, and Matthew convinces Janet to be the star of his new porn film, which he says will be like films in the “seventies, when pornography was viewed as an art.”29 He extols the era when “they wrote scenes, and performed them, and the images were genuinely arousing. We were watching the actors connect. We were watching their souls connect.”30 Even while Matthew praises films that are natural, genuine, and unmasked, he bases his film on those of a past era. His effort to create something immediate itself relies on a pre-existing script. Matthew’s film is an act of recovery, a re-eroticization intended to restore genuine sexuality lost in seemingly inauthentic contemporary pornography. Matthew decides to shoot the film on a handheld camera “as an homage to Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves.” The handheld camera, he hopes, will “be able to capture the mise-­ en-­scène of an amateur porn film.”31 Ironically, Matthew is making an amateur porn film that tries to emulate amateur porn films. “Amateur”  Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 2.  Bradshaw, 125. 30  Bradshaw, 125. 31  Bradshaw, 137. 28 29

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etymologically stems from the Latin for “to love,” and here being amateur gestures to sincerity in filmmaking untainted by professionalism.32 At the same time, referencing acclaimed Danish film director Lars von Trier, amateur-ness allows Matthew to stake a claim to professionalism. For Matthew, professionals create the illusion of the amateur. If the amateur is one who loves too much, then Bradshaw’s dialogue, too, engages in an aesthetic of excess sincerity. The dialogue in Intimacy is often spelled out and on-the-nose, mirroring the dialogue in amateur porn films. Characters say exactly what is on their minds, explicitly. Several critics noted this direct quality in the writing—some in more charitable terms than others.33 In a review of Intimacy, Ariel Stess of The Brooklyn Rail writes, “When [Bradshaw] presents and then refuses to mediate . . . morally ambiguous interactions, he riles us up. We feel the shock, the visceral shock, of being abandoned by the theater, a theater that usually holds our hands and tells us how to interpret these events.”34 Stess views Intimacy as unmediated—perhaps not in the sense of lacking technological mediatization but in the sense of lacking moral judgment. Bradshaw presents so much intimacy that it can no longer exist within an audience’s usual frames of reference. The amateur is the one who creates for the first time, seemingly untainted by mediation or commodification. By contrast to the professional who masters subtlety and suggestion, the amateur fails at withholding. The amateur shows too much. The audience sees the shaky camera. The actors’ emotion goes too far. Theater and performance studies scholar Nicholas Ridout writes that the amateur aspires to Marx’s “realm of freedom” (love, friendship, and sensual perception) distinct from the “realm of necessity” (economics and material constraints).35 Giving too much, the amateur creates an impression of abundance. In reality, artists inhabit worlds with material constraints; they take part in 32  Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 29. 33  See Ben Brantley, “Thomas Bradshaw’s ‘Intimacy’ Makes Sex Neighborly,” The New York Times (March 8, 2014), https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/theater/thomas-­ bradshaws-­intimacy-makes-sex-neighborly.html; Ariel Stess, “Going Down for It: Thomas Bradshaw’s Intimacy,” The Brooklyn Rail (Feb. 2014), https://brooklynrail.org/2014/02/ theater/going-down-for-it-thomas-bradshaws-intimacy; Hilton Als, “Dirty Truths,” The New Yorker (Feb. 2, 2014), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/10/dirty-­ truths; Jesse Green, “Painful Intimacy,” Vulture (Jan. 29, 2014), https://www.vulture. com/2014/01/theater-review-painful-intimacy.html. 34  Stess. 35  Ridout, 29.

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wage labor inside or outside of the theater. However, professional artists at times have to render this commodified labor invisible and turn their performances into acts of love. This is the trouble Janet encounters with Matthew filming her without her permission; his amateurism prohibits him from understanding the material infrastructure that undergirds her livelihood.

4.4  Professionalism, Props, and Cyborg Sexualities In one scene, Janet’s parents, Jerry and Pat, sit together watching their daughter’s performance in one of her films. After Jerry has found about Janet’s film work and given Janet the silent treatment, Pat, a gender studies professor, urges Jerry to accept Janet’s career and to appreciate her work. Their dialogue satirizes an audience’s search for truth. JERRY: See, what’s happening now—I don’t know—it just doesn’t look real. PAT: You think she’s faking? JERRY: Yeah, I think she’s faking. PAT: It’s not entirely her fault though— JERRY: I agree. PAT: I mean that girl isn’t even licking her clitoris. She’s licking the lips, but how’s someone supposed to cum with anyone doing that? (Pause.) JERRY: This is starting to look more real. PAT: How can you tell? JERRY: From the way she’s breathing. PAT: Her breathing has become— JERRY: There she goes! PAT: Oh, that’s beautiful. Isn’t our daughter beautiful? JERRY: Now that was a real orgasm. PAT: She came for real because that girl started to lick her butthole while sliding her finger in and out of her vagina. JERRY: Indeed. Placing porn viewership within a family context where it seems out of place, Bradshaw creates an unexpected frame. In pornography, Pat and Jerry seek not fantasy but truth. They praise genuine behavior and “real

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orgasm,” dissecting the labor and performance beneath porn’s fantasy. As Janet’s orgasm appears more genuine, Pat and Jerry’s dialogue appears more fantastic. Pat’s explanation of why her daughter “came for real” is entirely anatomical, and Jerry responds with a pat “indeed.” Lending its dialogue the apparent emotional transparency that the parents expect of their daughter, the scene reveals that emotional transparency feels inauthentic. The dialogue removes the eroticism of porn and replaces it with the technical. Naturalistic identification with the porn character gives way to Brechtian awareness of the performer. After having parsed what makes for an authentic orgasm, Pat and Jerry share a moment of emotional connection that has a similar structure as the pornography before it. JERRY: PAT: JERRY: PAT:

Do you like having your butthole licked? I do. Who’s licked your butthole? You have. Sometimes you do it by accident if it’s dark in the room. One time I had my butt up in the air and you were giving me oral sex from behind, and you licked my butthole for like fifteen minutes. I think you were doing it by accident, but it was actually the most intense orgasm I’ve ever had. JERRY: Can I tell you a secret? PAT: What? JERRY: I was doing it on purpose. PAT: Really? JERRY: Yup. I always lick your anus on purpose. It’s never an accident. I’m actually kind of obsessed with it, but it embarrasses me that I like it so much, so I pretend I’m doing it by mistake. The characters unmask a lie and discover the “secret” truth beneath it. The characters have enjoyed sex under imaginary circumstances, but here the characters reveal their pretense. Whereas eroticism often relies on shared fantasy (Pat and Jerry’s charade of accidental analingus), emotional connection relies on the intimacy of dispelled fantasy (the bringing of the secret into the open). To use performance studies scholar Joseph Roach’s term, one form of intimacy “surrogates” another. According to Roach, surrogation in performance attempts to fill “cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure.” In eroticism, when fantasy threatens to lose its sheen (a metaphorical death), new forms of fantasy

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must emerge in its place. Here, cunnilingus loses its fascination for Pat and Jerry; they have to surrogate it with analingus. Similarly, “new” media may attempt to capture older modes of erotic performance and infuse them with novelty. Although surrogation may attempt to produce truth in place of fantasy, it always preserves an element of fantasy—in this case, what might happen when Pat and Jerry act on their shared sexual preference. The intimate “truth” that theater reveals is fragile, and future performance might challenge it. The staging techniques used to mount Intimacy themselves blurred the lines between truth and falsehood around desire. Two of the production’s choreographed moments of sexuality reveal how disparate staging techniques can yield the similar pleasure of discovery for an audience. In the New Group production, actor and fight choreographer David Anzuelo played Fred, a bisexual man looking for sexual connections outside of his straight marriage. Anzuelo recounts, “In the show, my character masturbates to gay porn. I was asked to actually do this, not simulate it. That play is about moments of sexual intimacy that everyone has, and of course, masturbation is among them. . . . I had to [focus] to be able to pull my underwear down and arouse myself to full erection in front of hundreds of strangers.”36 In the staging, Fred sat at his computer facing away from the audience and simulating masturbation under his desk as the sounds of a “hardcore” gay porn video fill the theater. He picked up his phone, swiveled his chair to face the audience, and chirped into the phone, “Hi, honey!” Once he swiveled the chair, the audience got a full view of the erection in a comic moment juxtaposed with his phone conversation. During one performance, Anzuelo describes a man in the audience shouting “yes!” upon seeing the erection. Another night, Anzuelo says, a woman said, “I’m so disgusted but I can’t stop watching!”37 The New York Daily News ran a brief article interviewing Anzuelo specifically about the masturbation moment: “Actor David Anzuelo opens up about showing full erection during off-Broadway play ‘Intimacy.’”38 While the erection was “real” every night, it was also a stylized moment of masking and

 Caccioppoli.  Caccioppoli. 38  Joe Dziemianowicz, “Actor David Anzuelo opens up about showing full erection during off-Broadway play ‘Intimacy,’” New York Daily News (Jan. 30, 2014), https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/anzuelo-rising-star-revealing-intimacy-article-1.1596414. 36 37

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revelation. The chair’s swivel allowed Anzuelo to prepare himself privately before the audience got a view. The production achieved a similar effect with a moment that staked much less of a claim to the real. Matthew and his neighbor Sarah want to hook up, but Sarah’s father has insisted that she keep her “virginity” and avoid pregnancy without birth control. As a result, Matthew and Sarah explore frottage—the rubbing together of body parts without penetration. The stage directions read, “Sarah and Matthew are in bed. Sarah’s legs are in the air with her thighs squeezed close together and Matthew is furiously pumping away between her legs. It looks like they are having sex but they are not.”39 The narrative device of frottage is convenient for the staging since it enables masking and easier simulation of sex. The direction that “it looks like they are having sex but they are not” has two meaning—first, that the characters are not having penetrative sex and second, that the actors are not having sex at all; they’re simulating it. Anzuelo emphasized that “you can’t have sex on stage (or) ejaculate” as an actor, that doing so would cross lines of ethical practice. As a result, the production used creative solutions.40 When Matthew climaxed, the production used a prosthetic that “ejaculated” fluid. Part of the audience’s pleasure came from the acknowledgment of stagecraft and simulation. The Daily Beast’s Tim Teeman began his review by describing the “almond milk” spewing from the prosthetic. He wondered, “When was a penis prosthetic used as opposed to the real thing? Cocks and crevices kept appearing on TV screens. Whose were they?”41 These “stage secrets” could hold as much interest as the visible erection. In this sense, it is not the truth or falsehood of intimacy but rather its strategic manipulation of mediation that could provoke an audience response. The labor scholars Joanna Brewis and Stephen Linstead imagine sex workers as “cyborg assemblages,” wielding prostheses—“fashion, cosmetics, images, costumes, condoms, etc.”— to craft a body always “yet to come.”42 Similarly, the production team of Intimacy created sexual assemblages whose props had stage presence as much as actual body parts. Objects (and objectification) are a part of presence rather than presence’s antithesis. The “money shot,” the moment of  Bradshaw, 95.  Dziemianowicz. 41  Tim Teenan, “New York’s Naughtiest Show (Maybe Avoid the Front Row),” The Daily Beast (Jan. 18, 2014), https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-yorks-naughtiest-showmaybe-avoid-the-front-row. 42  Brewis and Linstead, 200. 39 40

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climax, was visibly fake but was a satisfying moment of stagecraft. Presenting the explicit in performance can be as impactful even if what is revealed is perceptibly fake.

4.5  Simulating Sexuality with the Intimacy Kit Since the production of Intimacy, intimacy choreographers have developed a variety of objects and prosthetics with which to tell stories of intimacy. Like the prosthetic penis that shot almond milk in Intimacy, objects help intimacy choreographers and performers to simulate sex acts in ways that fit within performers’ boundaries and honor standards for professional conduct. The use of masking and prosthetics to craft intimate scenes has become widespread enough that companies have developed to sell materials for intimacy choreographers—most notably, modesty garments and intimacy kits. Modesty garments are coverings in a variety of flesh tones that mask genitalia for stage and screen. A recognizable example of modesty garments are pasties, which cover nipples during exposed performance. Beyond pasties, intimacy choreographers and costumers have developed a variety of other modesty garments, including groin coverings that can be attached with tape at the pubic bone and then wrapped around to cover the anus and taped at the top of the anal cleft. Larger modesty garments include thongs, dance-belts, and flesh-colored underwear, which mask more of the skin but also may be more visible to an audience or camera than a groin covering. Other modesty garments include so-called “hibue” and “shibue” strapless thongs with adhesive, which were developed in non-theatrical contexts to prevent visible panty lines. At the same time, designated manufacturers of modesty garments have developed their own products intended specifically for performance work, some of which adopt less gendered-language than the hibue and shibue. For example, Intimask, a UK-based company, provides so-called “Vega” products for performers with penises or external prosthetics and “Nova” productions for performers with vulvas and without external prosthetics.43 Such language helps avoid gendering performers based on genitalia. At time of writing, Intimask and the Canada-based Modesty Shop are two main providers of modesty garments in the United Kingdom and North America.

43  “Online Shop,” Intimask, accessed January 28, 2023, https://www.intimask.com/ online-shop.

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Modesty garments are one element of the more-comprehensive “intimacy kit” or “intimacy professional kit” that some artists, especially those in film and television, bring to production processes.44 Alicia Rodis, one of the co-founders of Intimacy Directors International, for example, describes that in addition to hibues and shibues, she keeps in her intimacy kit “Knee pads or elbow pads in case someone’s on a hard floor. Sticky tape, moleskin. Wet Ones, tissues, breath mints. Baby oil so they can take anything that’s adhesive off.”45 The Modesty Shop offers its own “intimacy professional kit” with modesty garments and tapes for a variety of skin tones and body types.46 The independent intimacy director Acacia, who uses a singular first name, details that her intimacy kit includes “adhesives,” “barriers and cover-ups,” hygiene tools like lip balm, breath mints, razors, and shaving cream, tools to support mental health like tea, chocolate, candies, and yoga mats, among other items.47 While modesty garments and adhesives are the most obvious elements of an intimacy choreographer’s toolkit, support for hygiene and mental health like mints, candies, and tea are also part of crafting a divide between performer and character. They are part of the reassurance that artists have support during a creative process, and they help performers to prepare to get in and out of role. In this way, intimacy choreographers and performers use intimacy kits together to author their artistic presence. As “cyborg” porn workers assemble their persona using an assemblage of props, media, and social scripts, so intimacy choreographers wield a variety of tools through which to help performers mediate their likeness. Crucially, modesty garments and prosthetics are for performers as much for an audience. These tools create a psychic divide for performers such 44  A company unrelated to intimacy choreography took out a copyright for the term “intimacy kit” for one of their products and sent a cease-and-desist letter to an independent intimacy choreographer using the term. This choreographer was able to prove that they were using the term in a different context and weren’t using it to sell productions, but the copyright still causes some intimacy choreographers to be careful around their language usage and opt for “intimacy professionals kit.” 45  Erica Tempesta, “The Special Kit Used by HBO’s Intimacy Coordinator …” The Daily Mail, August 7, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7329771/HBO-­ intimacy-­coordinator-reveals-special-kit-uses-sex-scenes.html. 46  “Intimacy Professional Kit,” The Modesty Shop, accessed Dec. 13, 2022. https://modestyshop.ca/product/intimacy-professional-kit/. 47  Acacia, “What is an Intimacy Coordinator’s Kit and What Is In It?” Acacia: Intimacy Coordinator, accessed Dec. 13, 2022, https://acacia.gay/2022/02/03/intimacy-­kit/#:~: text=An%20intimacy%20kit%20is%20a,Adhesives.

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that they do not feel they are participating in actual sex acts. As one example, if performers are supposedly having penetrative sex, an intimacy choreographer might place a “barrier” between performers (inside or outside their modesty garments) such that there is no genital touch during filming of a movie or TV show.48 One of the SAG-AFTRA guidelines for union TV and film productions is to never involve actual genital contact.49 Having this physical barrier can help actors keep a mental barrier between themselves and their characters. However, as psychoanalysts and queer theorists have been long to point out, the line between simulated sex and “true” sex acts is not always clear cut. The psychoanalytic philosopher Herbert Marcuse, for example, critiqued the organization of sexuality around “genital supremacy,” a reduction of sex solely to genital contact for the sake of reproduction.50 By contrast, he called for theorists to think of sex in terms of the whole body.51 Meanwhile, queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Warner have argued that queer intimacies can challenge the reduction of sex solely to genital contact.52 When does eye contact feel like sex? When can a touch on the wrist feel orgasmic? If one expands one’s definition of sex to consider the multiple physical sensations beyond genital contact that feel intimate, then the distinction between sex and simulated sex becomes much murkier. This is part of why intimacy choreographers combine the use of modesty garments and intimacy barriers with exercises of tapping in and tapping out or de-roling that create a psychic divide. The distinction between simulated sex and genital sex is important for labor contracts for theater and film and is crucial for how the law classifies different types of performance. However, the line between pornographic and non-pornographic performance blurs when we understand that sex is about more than sex acts. For this reason, pornography and intimacy choreography alike are involved in constructing not just simulated sex but what I call simulated sexuality. Simulated sexuality is the iterative and citational performance of sexual desire in a fictional frame. While theater at 48  Yarit Dor, “Tools of the Trade: Reflections on Modesty Garments and Barriers,” The Journal of Consent-Based Performance 1 (Spring 2022), 49. 49  “Quick Guides for Scenes Involving Nudity and Simulated Sex,” 2. 50  Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 48. 51  Marcuse, 201. 52  Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 113. Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29.

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times simulates explicit sex acts, it also simulates attraction and connection between characters through a variety of acts beyond simulated sex. Prosthetics help performers and artistic teams craft stories that say something about sexuality whether or not stories have sex as a part of them. The critical theorist Jean Baudrillard writes, “To simulate is to feign what one hasn’t . . . an absence. . . . Simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’”53 It is this element of simulation in the staging of intimacy that often poses a challenge for artistic teams. Directors sometimes insist on authenticity, like Matthew in Intimacy, or deny that simulated intimacy produces feelings altogether, like some intimacy choreographers do. By contrast, intimacy choreographers might recognize that intimacy is abject labor that blurs the boundaries between truth and falsehood and can challenge individual selfhood. There has been a push in some intimacy circles, especially in Theatrical Intimacy Education, to desexualize the process of staging intimacy. Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard, for example, call for “desexualized language” during an artistic process—asking an actor to “apply muscle-level touch to your scene partner’s chest on a five count” rather than more charged language like “groping a breast.”54 Alongside modesty garments and barriers, this can go a long way to make intimacy choreography feel less tied to selfhood. However, in desexualizing a process, intimacy choreographers should be aware of when they might unintentionally stigmatize those who are more likely to be viewed as sexual—queer and trans artists, Black indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) artists facing sexual stereotypes, and artists with a background in sex work or sex and relationship therapy. This chapter has offered an alternative in which the point is not to mark clear lines between sex work and intimacy choreography but rather to see the coalitional possibilities of forging solidarities. Intimacy choreography and sex worker activism alike are not necessarily trying to desexualize spaces but to depersonalize them, to make the labor not fall on the individual performer to be authentic or spontaneous.55 As much as separating simulated sex from sex acts, modesty garments, barriers, and other elements of theatrical design can emphasize that intimacy is happening for a 53  Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, trans. Shiela Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 3. 54  Chelsea Pace, Staging Sex (New York: Routledge, 2020), 10. 55  For a fuller account of this depersonalization, see Kari Barclay, “Impersonal Intimacies: Reflections on Desexualized Language in Intimacy Choreography,” The Journal of Consent-­ Based Performance 1 (Spring 2022): 24–34.

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character rather than an actor. When one has a modesty garment over genitalia, it can feel less like one’s offstage body is involved in intimacy and more like a character’s body is. Of course, depersonalization is never perfect. Actors are constantly faking it for the camera or an audience, but faking it can nevertheless produce felt truths. Intimacy choreography offers tools to manage the emotions that performance can evoke.

4.6  Remediating Erotic “Presence” On a thematic level, Bradshaw suggests that “faking it” forms the basis of neighborly relations. Bradshaw likens the ideal of amateurish sincerity in pornography to that of genuine communication in political community. By the end of the play, the collective, pornographic fantasy has resolved the neighborly and familial squabbles. The taboos of pornography seem to be the antithesis of the “familiar.” Familiarity implies a loss of mystery, and, rightly, sex between members of one’s family (other than spouses) is forbidden. Intimacy insists that the family and the neighborhood can be a site of mystery and fantasy. Pornography becomes a kind of community theater in which neighbors are able to act out their fantasies of good feeling. In his analysis of amateurism, Nicholas Ridout identifies “community” as the quintessential site of amateur performance. Amateur performance creates the impression of good feeling in a way that glosses over community differences and fissures. In Matthew’s porn film, young adults watch their parents and each other’s parents have sex, men discover and embrace their bisexuality, and people find “intimacy” through the breach of taboos. The play ends with an orgiastic reconciliation of neighbors and families. Pat and Jerry save their marriage thanks to a recognition of their shared love of anal sex. Sarah, who has been toiling away at school to lift her family out of poverty, gets a full scholarship at Princeton. Matthew’s father stops grieving his deceased wife and marries Janet, who is the same age as Matthew. When Jerry asks Fred to make repairs on his house (metaphorically mending the domestic space), the overblown comedic ending finishes in an antisemitic joke followed by an anti-Black joke, after which “everyone laughs” and starts dancing to “La Cucaracha.”56 In comedy as a genre, a central conceit is that love repairs a community’s rifts and generates good feeling around the other. Intimacy repairs frayed social bonds but leaves racialized loose ends. Lauren Berlant writes  Bradshaw, 155.

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of “collective intimacy [as] a public and social ideal.”57 Within the politics of affect, artwork can articulate the “demand for the traditional promise of intimate happiness to be fulfilled in everyone’s everyday life.”58 Placing a domestic and neighborhood drama in relation to pornography, Bradshaw emphasizes that naturalistic drama might share an affinity with pornographic fantasy. The fantasy of social cohesion in many theater traditions in the United States is the “money shot” of naturalistic comedic theater. As in stage intimacy, the presence of intimacy in the neighborhood relies on withholding—in this case, the withholding of challenges to white supremacy. Ridout asks, “Is it possible to experience such (intimate, public, political) feelings even when they are not explicitly summoned up in the name of a supposedly natural or authentic ‘community’?”59 Bradshaw’s ending necessarily challenges the natural-ness of community. Race mediates interaction in the public sphere. In a conversation with her boyfriend Matt, Sarah says, “I can feel people noticing my non-whiteness. I think that white people have a fascination with minorities that makes them stare whenever one comes along.” The “to-be-looked-at-ness” that Laura Mulvey identifies affects Sarah as a woman of color differently than it does white female bodies. She experiences being the object of spectatorship because of race as well as gender. The white, racializing gaze also seeks the “immediate” body as an entry point into authentic experience of “authentic” alterity.60 Performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz describes this phenomenon as the “burden of liveness.” According to Muñoz, privileged audiences often ask those from marginalized identities to “perform [their] alterity as a local, consumable spectacle.”61 Denied control of the means of production of mass media, minoritized people disproportionately face the task of “representing” their group for privileged eyes. While discourses around erotic performance often center on presence, presence is not distributed equally. Intimacy relies on shared fantasies, be they sexual, political, or both. Within the current political context in the  Berlant, “Intimacy,” 3.  Berlant, “Intimacy,” 2. 59  Ridout, 31. 60  Frantz Fanon describes a similar process as “epidermalization.” Epidermalization is the process by which meaning is attached to skin color and the visual marker of skin becomes a metonym of experience. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, transl. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press: 1987), 84. 61  José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 182. 57 58

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United States, the fantasy of a post-racial society is as unworkable as the fantasy of the immediate body unaffected by pornography. Performers can never be entirely present; they are always mediated by history and by collective fantasies for the future. Despite the sexual currency attached to the “first time,” erotic performance is always already a repetition. Directors and intimacy directors cannot guarantee that performers are entirely satisfied with the way that directors and audiences mediate performers’ bodies, but directors and intimacy directors can advocate for a more collaborative approach to mediation. “Remediation” has another meaning other than repeated mediatization: remedy. Building a more democratic approach to the mediation of bodies, one might start to repair the damaging representational legacies attached to gendered, racialized, and classed bodies. Such an approach necessarily recognizes the economies of mediation surrounding the performance of sexuality. Legal theorist Thomas Millar creates a distinction between a “performance model of sex” and a “commodity model of sex.” Millar argues that, historically, patriarchal societies have thought of sex as a commodity. Millar writes, “We live in a culture in which sex is not so much an act as a thing: a substance that can be given, taken, bought, sold, and stolen, that has a value and a supply-and-demand curve.”62 Many normative sexual economies view sex as a commodity for men to get from women, who, in the system, assert their value through withholding. Against this commodity backdrop, Millar asserts, “the better model for sex is the one that fits the musician: a performance model where sex is a performance, and partnered sex is a collaboration.”63 Rejecting the artificial scarcity of the commodity model, a performance model asserts that sex gets better with experience. Because one values rather than devalues a seasoned musician, Millar asserts that a performance model of sex eliminates the category of “slut” that has degraded female sexuality and made violence against women more socially sanctioned.64 Sexual repetition need not degrade a participant, and performing intimacy need not entail a cheapening. The experienced performer is successful precisely because it is not their first time. Rather than always subtly suggesting sex,

62  Thomas Millar. “Toward a Performance Model of Sex,” in Yes Means Yes! Visions of Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti (New York: Seal Press, 2008), 30. 63  Millar, 38. 64  Millar, 39–40.

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intimacy directors might promiscuously depict sex in all its pleasure and awkwardness and combat the impression of sex as a scarce commodity. Millar’s distinction between performance and commodity is helpful normatively for thinking through consent as distinct from yielding, but performance and commodification descriptively coexist in the sexual economy. A fetishistic valorization of the first time, amateurishness, and immediacy informs sexuality and performance. Millar’s dichotomy between performance and commodity aligns with Marx’s dichotomy between the “realm of freedom” and the “realm of necessity,” described by Ridout in the context of the amateur.65 Intimacy breaks down these dichotomies and suggest that freedom and necessity intermingle in performance. The space between the amateur and the professional is the “intermediate,” one that features both liveness and mediation. Within a space of constrained freedom, actors and directors can learn how best to navigate mediation. Perhaps, like the seasoned musician or sexually experienced individual, performers might improve their ability to create presence. Repetition might enable the ability to create the illusion of the first time. Audiences, meanwhile, might recognize that the sexuality that they see on stage and screen is never for the first time. Each repetition contains novelty based on what artists withhold and reveal on stage and screen. Performance, like pornography, can linger with the body after the climax.

 Ridout, 29.

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CHAPTER 5

Playing with Trauma: Race, Consent, and Culturally Responsive Intimacy

As objects and screen media construct erotic presence on the stage, a performer’s presence is always shaped by histories and audience perceptions that can be beyond a creative team’s control. Following the initial success of white intimacy choreographers at advancing their work, professional organizations in the field have pushed for a greater understanding of the intersections between race and intimacy. Theatrical Intimacy Education’s Kaja Dunn, for example, foregrounds the need for culturally-responsive intimacy choreography that recognizes the varied forms of intimacy found in different racial and ethnic communities.1 Intimacy Directors and Coordinators’ Maya Herbsman and Intimacy Coordinators of Color’s Ann James have advocated for affinity spaces for intimacy professionals of color to hone their craft.2 Given the overwhelming whiteness of the field, organizations including Intimacy Directors and Coordinators and Theatrical Intimacy Education have begun offering scholarships and pay-­what-­you-can options in their 1  “There’s something about cultural experience that can’t just be added on [to intimacy work],” states Dunn. “It can’t be an extra. It has to be one of the core things.” Kaja Dunn, Laura Rikard, Tonia Sina, and Joy Brooke Fairfield, “Intimacy Choreography and Cultural Exchange: An Interview with Leaders in the Field,” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34, no. 1 (Fall 2019), 82. 2  Maya Herbsman, Personal Interview, May 10, 2021. Ann James, “Intimate Reform: Making Space for Leaders of Color,” Howlround (Mar. 19, 2020), https://howlround. com/intimate-reform.

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workshops for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) artists.3 These initiatives speak to the need for intimacy choreographers to consider not merely physical boundaries on the body in sexually and sensually charged scenes but also the potential psychic impacts of working on productions, particularly when white supremacy has attributed damaging sexual stereotypes to bodies of color. In mediating a performer’s presence, how does a production team recognize the representational histories that shape how a performer shows up on stage? In the aftermath of the #MeToo Movement, it can be tempting to view sexuality through a presentist lens of progress. However, sexuality is enmeshed with history, knitting together past, present, and future. As I suggested in the second chapter, intimacy choreography builds on a theatrical history, including of Black theater practices, that informs and predates its working. In this chapter, I delve more fully into discourses of race and trauma in intimacy choreography and argue that trauma is an often-­ unrecognized scene partner that can be acknowledged in a rehearsal process. Of course, there is more to Black and BIPOC experience than trauma. Racial identity and community can be a cause of joy and belonging. However, this joy and belonging exists alongside trauma, and acknowledging trauma might be part of reclaiming positive affects.4 As intimacy choreographer Sasha Smith argues, “if you look at the roles given to Black people, it’s usually a narrative surrounded around trauma. That is something that already lives in our bodies based on the society we are in.”5 Teniece Divya Johnson adds that having more nuanced representation of characters of color and having more intimacy choreographers of color can help performers “move through trauma and into healing.”6 Although intimacy choreography on its face appears to be centered on corporeal boundaries and moments of physical touch, it can also foreground the psychic harms that performing in fictional intimacy can evoke, some of which stem from histories of race and racism.  “About the EDIII,” Theatrical Intimacy Education, accessed Feb. 28, 2021, https:// www.theatricalintimacyed.com/the-ediii. “Scholarship Program,” Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, accessed Jan. 1, 2023, https://www.idcprofessionals.com/scholarship-­ program#:~:text=IDC%20is%20proud%20to%20offer,coordination%20in%20the%20 United%20States. 4  For an excellent account of the politics of trauma and joy in Black theater, see Dominique Morisseau’s widely-discussed Instagram thread on the topic. Dominique Morisseau, “Black Joy,” Instagram, Oct. 26, 2021, https://t.co/7dkNQ7YOEj. 5  Candice Frederick, “What It’s Like to Be a Black Intimacy Coordinator in the Era of Consent and Political Resistance,” Elle, Sept. 8, 2020, https://www.elle.com/culture/ movies-tv/a33850492/black-intimacy-coordinators-interview/. 6  Frederick. 3

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Intimacy choreographers from a variety of organizations attest to their interest in taking trauma-informed approaches. IDC’s Zev Steinrock, for example, defines a consent-based space as being “trauma-informed.”7 IPA trains all its intimacy coordinators in “trauma and sensitivity.”8 IDC’s resource guide and IPA’s training both recommend psychologist Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, which emphasizes trauma as housed in the body and suggests somatic approaches to addressing trauma in the United States.9 In part, intimacy choreographers are so conscious about trauma because performing in fictional intimacy can provoke trauma responses. Physical touch—a connection between bodies on the surface of the skin—can touch psychic vulnerabilities in ways that challenge the boundaries between self and other.10 As intimacy choreographers move to recognize the impacts of sexual violence and trauma, intimacy choreography can also require an understanding of the unspoken traumas of racial history and continued racial inequity. Intimacy knits together gender and sexuality with race. Crafting culturally competent intimacy, including intimacy foregrounding joy and solidarity, may require a cognizance of the foundational traumas that went into crafting definitions of race and nationhood.

5.1   Kink Encounters in Jeremy O. Harris’s Daddy and Slave Play In this chapter, I analyze the entanglements of race and trauma in Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play and Daddy, two plays that put contemporary sexuality in dialogue with racial history. I analyze these two plays not only because they were some of the first productions in New York to feature intimacy directors but also because their fictionalized Bondage, Dominance, Sadism, and Masochism (BDSM) intimacies dramatize the tensions between consent culture and sex positivity in the context of social 7  Sydney Wood, “Intimacy Directing Facilitates Consent-Based Theater,” The Daily Illini, Feb. 9, 2022, https://dailyillini.com/sex-and-dating-guide/2022/02/09/intimacydirecting-facilitates-consent-based-theater/. 8  “Intimacy Professionals Association,” Intimacy Professionals Association, accessed Jan. 2, 2023, https://www.intimacyprofessionalsassociation.com/. 9  “Intimacy Coordinator Training Program,” Intimacy Professionals Association, 2022, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c85d73b7eb88c7b78d599e9/t/62739 91c51114b63b13deecc/1651743013645/IC+Training+Program+Info+Sheet+-+2022. pdf, 2. Marie Percy, “The IDC Resource Guide,” July 2020, https://static1.squarespace. com/static/5e1c12f49383f8245b857d01/t/5f2470bdc8a09c2a6c405251/159622372 9318/IDC+Resource+Guide.pdf, 12. 10  Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 49–50.

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hierarchy. Daddy and Slave Play complicate standard assumptions about power, providing nuanced accounts of role-play and pleasure in the context of social inequity. Building on Black feminist theories of BDSM practice from Ariane Cruz and Amber Musser and accounts from Black intimacy directors including Sasha Smith and Teniece Divya Johnson, I emphasize that painful histories can also be reworked and renegotiated into sites of pleasure. BDSM neither reproduces social inequity nor entirely upsets it; it plays with inequity and creates a space in which artists and audiences renegotiate their relationships to difficult histories. It is not the job of intimacy choreographers to heal trauma or move past it. Intimacy choreographers are not therapists, at least not in their intimacy work. However, holding space for how trauma lives in the body, intimacy choreographers can offer opportunities for performers to delve into difficult sensations within a fictional context bounded by narrative and physical boundaries that set it apart from offstage experience. In October 2020, Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play on Broadway became the most Tony Award-nominated play in American theater history. Set in contemporary Virginia on a former cotton plantation, the play centers three interracial couples performing in erotically charged scenarios drawn from histories of chattel slavery in the Antebellum South. Over the course of the play, through kink role-play and therapeutic “processing,” the characters negotiate their relationships to race, sexuality, and selfhood, discovering that, to paraphrase William Faulkner, the past is not always past.11 The script features enough simulated sex that it was the first play at the Yale School of Drama to enlist a specialized intimacy director—in fact, two intimacy directors (Claire Warden and Alicia Rodis) and an assistant (Teniece Divya Johnson).12 Claire Warden recounts reading the script for the first time on a bus, reaching the play’s final moment, and thinking, “how are we going to do this?” and then immediately afterward, “we have  William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage, 1950), 73.  Harris states, “When we did the show at Yale the first thing I said was that we couldn’t do the show unless we got an intimacy director, a female intimacy director. And my director and I, with the help of the administration, got Claire Warren and Alicia Rodis to come to the Yale School of Drama to make sure that everyone was taken care of. . . . one thing they did is that one of the assistants inside their company who is working to become the next Alicia and Claire is a Black woman [sic], Teniece Divya Johnson, and she was an assistant on both productions, and so there was care and rigor around trying to position Black women in and around that space of how we staged the sex.” Since the production Johnson has started publicly identifying as non-binary. Tonya Perkins, “’Slave Play’: Racism Doesn’t Have a Safe Word,” American Theatre (July 1, 2019), https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/07/01/ slave-play-racism-doesnt-have-a-safe-word/. 11 12

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to do this.”13 Warden recalls, “nothing had been done like that before in intimacy direction.”14 The play’s dramatization of sexually explicit, racialized role-play was something that IDC’s intimacy choreographers had not navigated when Warden got involved in the project. In part because of its sexual content, Slave Play has catalyzed controversy at various stages in its production process. During its off-Broadway run at the New  York Theatre Workshop, a change.org petition called to shut down the production for its “graphic imagery mixed with laughter from a predominantly white audience.”15 Meanwhile, a white audience member at the Broadway production at the August Wilson Theatre interrupted a talkback Q&A to articulate her frustration at the play for “guilting” her about her whiteness.16 After closing two months before the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, the play returned to Broadway in 2022 to an altered theater landscape following two years of social distancing and a national reckoning around racial inequity. One reason for the play’s polarizing responses was its depiction of racial and sexual violence in the context of comedy. While the play is not about sexual violence per se, at least in an explicit form, sexual violence against enslaved people in the African diaspora haunts the play’s consensual kink encounters. With its depiction of dominant and submissive intimacies across racial lines, Slave Play explores the complex dynamics of consensual non-consent as it intersects with histories of white supremacy.

5.2  Racializing Touch Slave Play is not the only production in the aftermath of the #MeToo Movement to grapple with histories of sexual violence. Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me took to Broadway in 2019 to recreate 13  Andrea Ambam, “Intimacy Directors Show Broadway a Gentle Way of Returning ft. Claire Warden,” More to Talk About, Podcast audio, Mar. 9, 2022, https://podcasts.apple. com/us/podcast/intimacy-directors-show-broadway-a-gentle-way/id1609713679?i= 1000553473575. 14  Ambam. 15  Ashley B., “Shutdown Slave Play,” change.org (Dec. 2018), https://www.change. org/p/abernalwbrc-yahoo-com-shutdown-slave-play. 16  Hannah Knowles, “Broadway-goer railed against a play as unfair to white people. The playwright responded,” The Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost. com/arts-entertainment/2019/12/01/broadway-goer-shouted-play-was-racist-againstwhite-people-playwright-responded/.

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a high school speech and debate contest. Restoring a site from childhood, Schreck reimagines the contest today as a debate about the US Constitution’s power to address violence against women.17 Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty opened regionally at Arena Stage in 2018 and highlights struggles against sexual violence and colonialism in Cherokee Nation during two moments in the history of the US Supreme Court.18 A revival of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive opened at Manhattan Theatre Club in March 2022 and reanimates a 1997 play to speak to resonances in our current moment.19 All these productions reach backward to history as a lens through which to understand contemporary movements, and their chronologies blur past and present in order to construct what Ann Cvetkovich calls “an archive of feelings” in the wake of trauma.20 Slave Play and these other works take up sites of memory abjected—or cast off—from the popular imagination of US nationhood. Julia Kristeva imagines the abject as that which must be excluded from self in order to secure a stable sense of identity. Neither active subject nor passive object, abjection makes individuals confront the fragility of borders between the human and more-than-human.21 As an example, the theater scholar Karen Shimakawa suggests that the othering of racialized bodies in US history has been “necessary to and mutually constitutive of national subject formation.”22 In the dominant imagination, marginalized subjects are a borderland between the dominant and the othered through which national identity is formed.23 For Kristeva and Shimakawa, the abject is a necessarily eroticized position. One can see this eroticization in the range of hypersexual or desexualized stereotypes applied to BIPOC communities in the United States. The liminality of abject bodies positions them as both threatening subjects and possessable objects; racial and sexual stereotypes operate in tandem to produce Black and Brown bodies as recurring scenes 17  Heidi Schreck, What the Constitution Means to Me, Production Recording, Prime Video (2020), https://www.amazon.com/What-Constitution-Means-Me/dp/B08KRB3FQ4. 18  Mary Kathryn Nagle, Sovereignty (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2020). 19  “How I Learned to Drive,” Manhattan Theatre Club, accessed March 30, 2022, https://www.manhattantheatreclub.com/shows/2021-22-season/how-i-learnedto-drive/. 20  Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 21  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 22  Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 3. 23  Shimakawa, 8–9.

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in the spectacle of nation-formation. Intimacy in performance sometimes invokes historical trauma both because trauma commands attention and because, in contrast to consent law’s focus on individual self-articulation, trauma’s reenactment creates opportunities for the dissolution of subjectivity, in which participants find themselves connected to communities and histories seemingly lost. Historical trauma is never entirely past; it touches bodies across history and reveals the coinciding pain and pleasure that can emerge from bodies’ continued vulnerabilities. Intimacy choreography can entail moments of racializing touch, physical contact that places artists in contact with race and its history.24 With this phrase, I suggest that touch is an agent of racialization. The postcolonial theorist Franz Fanon describes the skin as the medium onto which the colonial order attempted to encode racial meaning. Fanon described this process as “epidermalization.”25 For Fanon, epidermalization is a primarily visual process by which subjects learn to associate different traits and identities with skin color.26 However, racial formations also operate through physical touch, as tenderness and violence work in tandem with legal and cultural systems to mark the borders of perceived racial communities. As intimacy choreographers orchestrate physical touch between performers, they might acknowledge the legacies of racialization on bodies. With the idea or racializing touch, I also underscore that touch carries racial significance. Thus, even seemingly race-neutral interactions will contain codes and scripts that will affect actors’ and audiences’ experiences of performance. The sociologists Michael Omi and Stephen Winant argue that race is neither an essential biological trait nor an illusion beyond which society has progressed. Rather, race is being constantly constructed and contested through collective culture.27 Thus, race is not something that can be ignored in a society that imagines itself as “post-racial.” In theater, for the sake of creativity and personal wellbeing, it may serve artists to sometimes forget about the racial implications of their work.  With the idea of racialization as a process, I build on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theory of “racial formation” as an ongoing process of making racial meanings in the cultural and political sphere. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edition (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 13. 25  Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, transl. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press: 1987), 84. 26  Fanon, 84. 27  Omi and Winant, 110–111. 24

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However, all touch is racialized, including that of white artists who sometimes see themselves as “unmarked.” Racializing touch, I call attention to the sensations that racial formations can provoke when staging intimacy.

5.3   Power Plays and BDSM’s Status Question Hierarchy can pose key questions for consent that are not easily resolvable at an individual level. The central dynamic at the heart of Slave Play is what some members of kink communities call “race play,” the incorporation of racially charged dynamics into sexual role-play.28 While kink communities have more readily embraced race play that inverts historical hierarchies (with a submissive, white partner and a dominant, Black partner, for example), race play that aligns with historical inequities has been more controversial.29 When a Black woman chooses to play a submissive role opposite a white man, as the character of Kaneisha does in Slave Play, does the encounter reinforce white supremacy? Does an individual’s consent make such encounters “good” and thereby negate concerns over structural inequity? In Harris’s words, “is consent different when that consent intersects with the politics you perform in life?” The sexuality studies scholar Amber Musser writes that critics tend to view artworks engaging with Black women’s sexuality solely through the lenses of complicity or empowerment.30 By contrast, Musser suggests that critics need frameworks for studying the intersections between sexuality and violent histories that account for bodies’ simultaneous potential for pleasure and fragility.31 One reason that consent frameworks struggle to account for sensory complexity is because consent theory operates at the level of the individual who knows their own desires. Thus, individuals are either perceived as impaired and unable to consent or fully autonomous and able to decide for themselves. However, an individual’s agency sometimes lies in the middle; desire is often unknowable, and it can be hard to untangle authentic desires from what one has been socialized to want. For intimacy choreographers, this is a central concern. Intimacy choreographers often work to examine the unstated hierarchies in the room and 28  Ariane Cruz, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 21. 29  Weiss, 199. 30  Amber Musser, “Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphynx and the Intractability of Black Female Sexuality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1 (2016), 155. 31  Musser, 170.

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advocate for those with the last power. BDSM is a powerful lens through which to examine the intersections of consent and power. Among advocates for sexual justice, BDSM often holds a vaunted position. BDSM practitioners have developed frameworks such as “safe, sane, and consensual” (SSC) kink, “risk-aware consensual kink” (RACK), and “caring, communication, consent, and caution” (the 4Cs), all three of which foreground consent.32 BDSM’s consent focus has attracted the interest of those choreographing sexuality in performance. In their development of protocols for Intimacy Directors International, Tonia Sina and Alicia Rodis consulted BDSM practitioners, who, Rodis recounts, “work, and live, and love within guidelines that have to be very explicit.”33 As another example, in his work on Fulfilment, “sex choreographer” Yehuda Duenyas incorporated BDSM’s “stoplight” system of consent (green, yellow, and red), a system discussed later in this chapter.34 While BDSM’s techniques of pleasure foreground consent, they expose some of the limits of consent discourse’s focus on the individual. BDSM relies on socially circulating scripts and roles (slave/master, parent/child, butch/femme) that may reflect unchosen identities. In her account of kink, Margot Weiss writes, “Requiring nonconsensual social inequality and power differentials for erotic charge, but also the fantasy of the subject free to choose and ­perform in such scenes without social consequence, SM’s unstable and ambivalent relations between consent and non-consent highlight social tensions between agency and coercion.”35 Jeremy O. Harris’s Daddy and Slave Play stage this tension between consent and non-consent, particularly as it manifests in performance across racial difference. To set up the power play in Slave Play, I first analyze Harris’s play, Daddy, which he wrote when applying to the Yale School of Drama before he wrote Slave Play. First performed at New  York’s Pershing Square Signature Center in February 2019 under the intimacy direction of Claire Warden, the self-proclaimed “melodrama” explores the role in artistic 32  Joseph Fischel, Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 36–37. 33  Lizzie Feiderson, “The Sex Scene Evolves for the #MeToo Era,” The New York Times, (Jan. 14, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/magazine/sex-scene-intimacy-­ coordinator.html. 34  Nick Paumgarten, “A Sex Choreographer at Work,” The New Yorker (Oct. 5, 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/moves. 35  Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 228.

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communities of “sugar daddies,” older men who provide patronage and perks to young artists in exchange for sexual attention. In the play, a millennial black artist played by Ronald Peet meets an older white art collector played by Alan Cumming, and the two form a co-dependent relationship punctuated by simulated sexual encounters around a swimming pool that formed the centerpiece of the production’s mise-en-scene. When Franklin, a mid-twenties, black visual artist (Ronald Peet), meets Andre, a middle-aged, white art collector (Alan Cumming) at a drug-­ laced party in the hills of Los Angeles, the two form an amorous bond with all the parental dynamics of Harris’s title. Andre buys Franklin’s art and invites him to live with Andre at Andre’s Bel Air mansion. The pair’s foreplay embraces thumb-sucking and spanking, as Franklin manifests childlike dependence. Franklin uses his new “daddy” to fill the gap left by the absent father of his childhood, and Franklin’s mother tries to rescue Franklin from what she sees as a parasitic relationship with Andre. Daddy fantasies can make trouble for consent theory. Participants in “daddy play” take as their inspiration a parent-child relationship characterized by hierarchy and a lack of choice (a parent consents on behalf of a child until the age of majority). At the same time, daddy play between two consenting adults meets the legal requirements for an ethical sexual encounter. As Judith Butler argues, traditional understandings of consent either rely on an understanding of the freestanding individual or imagine the individual as a dependent in need of state protection from sexual coercion, and these sometimes-contradictory impulses can coexist within consent theory.36 Sexual play between adults across age difference is taboo in part because it troubles our understanding of “good” sex as between equals—Lynda Hart describes daddy fantasies as a “founding taboo” of Western society, and Daniel Tsang describes the “age taboo” within gay male communities around intergenerational intimacy.37 Despite the taboo, Gayle Rubin writes about the importance of intergenerational intimacies in stewarding queer culture and about the campaigns to eliminate these intimacies.38 Competing discourses make for consent’s “status prob36  Judith Butler, “Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Law,” Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law 21, no. 2 (2012): 18. 37  Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 35. Daniel Tsang, The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power, and Consent (New York: Alyson, 1981). 38  Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger, ed. by Carole Vance (London: Pandora, 1992), 147.

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lem”—the difficulty of determining whether consensual sex is ethical in the context of dramatic power differentials. Harris dramatizes this tension through the relationship between Franklin and Andre. When Andre first meets Franklin at a pool party, a stage direction describes, “Andre . . . begins to walk around Franklin taking stock of his body like he’s a sculpture ripe for procurement.”39 An older art collector who has an Alexander Calder sculpture in his living room and “a room full of Basquiats,”40 in this stage picture, Andre appears to hold power over Franklin. Age and wealth give Andre the position to objectify Franklin as another consumer good for acquisition. Within the context of an interracial relationship, the prospect of a white man objectifying a black man is particularly laden. Harris describes his play as a “melodrama,” and, in the genre’s Manichean dichotomy of virtue and vice, Daddy imagines Andre as an almost-­ predator. Andre’s white queerness appears, in the words of Hilton Als’s epigraph at the start of Daddy, “a pollutant further eroding the already decimated black family.”41 However, as the play progresses, the play reveals the ambivalences of their power relation. In their initial encounter, Franklin dissects Andre’s art collection and ridicules Andre for its lack of taste. Placing all the Basquiats in one room creates too much loud energy in one place, Franklin argues, and “owning a Calder / like a big Calder / is also gauche. / Especially / when you have like... / a Sherman in your office / And an Arbus in the bathroom?”42 As a young, outsider artist, Franklin can establish himself as an arbiter of taste. In a gay community and arts community that fetishize youth, Franklin carries the social currency to match Andre’s inherited wealth. After Franklin’s successful first gallery showing in which people start to murmur about his older partner, Franklin confronts Andre about the precarity of their connection. While Franklin enjoys the taboo of their relationship and how people look at them (“standing on the middle of the stage, lights burning down on us”), he fears that his whole life will be a stage on which they display their parent-child role-play. When Franklin threatens to leave, Andre smashes a glass and grabs Andre in “a surprising display of raw virility.”43 The gesture is simultaneously that of an  Jeremy O. Harris, Daddy, The New Play Exchange (2016), 7.  Harris, Daddy, 5. 41  Harris, Daddy, ii. 42  Harris, Daddy, 7. 43  Harris, Daddy, 47. 39 40

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abusive father and that of vulnerable last resort. Andre’s outburst successfully cows Franklin into staying. Toward the end of the play, Andre describes the moment they first met: I immediately became your dependent, when you started deconstructing my entire-my life’s worth essentially, I immediately knew I needed you. And more than that I needed you to need me.44

Franklin holds power over Andre in ways that defy the apparent hierarchies of race, age, and socioeconomic status. Even with the dominant role of daddy in the relationship, Andre still submits to Franklin. This form of dominant-submissive relationship can reproduce itself in the director-actor relationship. I call such an arrangement a patriarchal relationship because it imitates a stereotypical father-child dynamic, and it can operate along aged and gendered lines. In Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter, theater scholars Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement frame a troublesome kind of theater director as “Big Daddy,” an authority who provides young artists with much-­ needed approval.45 Like Andre in Daddy, he positions himself as an arbiter of taste (the “ideal spectator”) and has the resources to advance artists’ careers, which he can .46 According to Donkin and Clement, Big Daddy infantilizes performers and causes actors to “abandon their truths”: “Working to please him is a simultaneous act of seduction and being seduced. He is particularly disabling to women. . . . His pleasure authorizes the validity of their work and substitutes for their ability to authorize their own.”47 However, missing in Donkin and Clement’s account is the way in which even the most seemingly powerful of directors can still rely on performers for their approval. For a patriarchal director to maintain their perception of power, they have to have artists that rely on their authority. This role-play of a parental-child relationship not only infantilizes young artists but also turns the director into a “dependent” who will fickly throw a tantrum if they do not get what they want from  Harris, Daddy, 48.  Harris, Daddy, 129. 46  Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 4. 47  Donkin and Clement, 4. 44 45

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performers. Intimacy choreographers are often cognizant about how social inequity complicates consent, but, as Daddy suggests, hierarchies are rarely as rigid as they seem. The power that one person has over another in a theatrical context can shift when another person does not go along with the game. As intimacy choreographers work to interrupt power differentials and advocate for actors, the problem they address is not necessarily hierarchy (which will always exist) but rather hierarchy’s seeming immutability. When rehearsal becomes a game of giving and seeking approval, it can corrode not only a young actor’s artistry but also a director’s. The layers of codependence in Andre and Franklin’s relationship may appear to resolve consent’s status problem in Daddy, yet the play reveals the need to consider standards other than consent when considering intimacy across difference. In the case of Andre and Franklin in Daddy, the play portrays a damaging codependence that exacerbates the worst tendencies in each partner. Since the daddy play builds on Franklin’s absent father and Andre’s lack of a child, the role-play deploys each participant’s real-life vulnerabilities. As Franklin’s mother emphasizes, each party tries to fill the metaphorical hole left by the other’s social position. Through their intimacy, they only manage to widen the hole further. Franklin devolves into baby talk, while Andre becomes increasingly abusive. By the end of the play, the audience senses that the real injury is not from the intergenerational relationship but from structural inequality, which systemically separates Black families and devalues older gay men.48 In the closing image of the play, when Franklin’s biological father calls, Franklin sits helplessly by the phone, unable to pick up. Andre sits by, looking on and knowing that he can never be enough for Franklin.49 The play ends with ambivalence about the pair’s erotic daddy play, which neither purges the characters of their dependencies (as in Aristotelian catharsis) nor reproduces a healthyfather son relationship (as in Platonic mimesis). The problem with status sex is not necessarily its lack of consent but rather its potential to undermine autonomy. Legal scholar Joseph Fischel describes the need in BDSM encounters to consider not only consent but also “capacity diminishment.”50 48  For more information on white supremacy and its contemporary separation of black families, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” The Atlantic 316, no. 3 (2013), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/ the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/. 49  Harris, Daddy, 129. 50  Harris, Daddy, 129.

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When role-play lacks boundaries, it can harmfully follow participants into their lives beyond sexual encounters. Intimacy choreography puts a temporary bracket on role-play, both by creating psychic divides between performer and character and by creating processes that feel as if they are free from the power differentials present in other parts of the production process. Providing actors with a socially sanctioned opportunity to say no to choreography or nudity, intimacy choreographers temporarily suspend the broader incentives to seek a director’s approval and appear “easy to work with.” In this way, they offer artists a chance to question the conditioning that tells them to say yes to everything a director asks. One difficulty with age play in Daddy is that Franklin and Andre use it to avoid confronting their own histories of trauma. Over the course of the play, Franklin’s biological father, who has been absent in his life since his youth, tries to reconnect with Franklin, but Franklin refuses to return his calls. At the end of the play, Franklin sits by the pool as Andre holds out the phone for Franklin to answer. “It’s him,” Andre says; it’s Franklin’s father. However, Franklin shakes his head and does not want to answer. Andre exits, and Franklin sits alone and sings the words to George Michael’s song “Father Figure.” A “chorus of ringtones” reverberates in the background.51 Franklin has every right or motivation not to speak to his father, but here he is adopting an avoidant disposition. Meanwhile, Andre avoids confronting what Franklin’s absent father means for Franklin. At the end of the play, Andre realizes that as soon as he accepted Franklin’s love, he “would become worthless in [Franklin’s] arms” because Franklin would “carry [Andre’s] weight and toss it aside” when Andre had served his function as stand-in father.52 Both characters avoid confronting the trauma from Franklin’s past. Without a container, sexual role-play bleeds beyond its ability to be contained; it reactivates traumatic memory without enabling characters to confront the past.

5.4  Sleeping with the Ancestors Harris picks up on this theme of role-play and memory in Slave Play, which, like Daddy, uses sexual reenactment as a way to investigate traumatic histories. The premise at the heart of Slave Play is that three interracial couples have chosen to participate in Antebellum Sexual Performance  Harris, Daddy, 130.  Harris, Daddy, 128.

51 52

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Therapy (ASPT), a fictional program intended to kindle black participants’ desire for their white partners. Téa and Patricia, the two Yale researchers running the program, diagnose their black and biracial patients with a variety of disorders, allegedly stemming from the intergenerational trauma of transatlantic slavery. In ASPT, the couples travel to the MacGregor Plantation to reenact scenes from eighteenth-century enslavement in hopes of rekindling their sexual connections. In the first act, characters perform these scenes, which inevitably reflect the dynamics of their real-­ life dynamics. In one of the couples, Alana, who is white and enjoys taking on a dominant role in sex, constantly speaks over her biracial partner Phillip and tries to define his experience for him. Only able to see their interaction through a gender lens, Alana views their sex as feminist and gender-transgressive while overlooking its racial dimensions. As a biracial person, Phillip has sometimes felt caught between identities, and he wonders, “Maybe my dick only works / when I know I’m black.” For Phillip, playing a defined role in the context of role-play helps him feel in control of his racial identity. In another couple, Gary, who is Black, wants his partner Dustin to acknowledge Gary’s worth. However, Dustin, who is white-­ adjacent and refuses to specify his own ethnicity, merely views Gary as a prop to make Dustin’s progressive politics and non-whiteness visible. Through sexual role-play in which he plays a dominant position, Gary discovers what it feels like to be a “prize” for Dustin. Role-play in an antebellum context allows Gary to rehearse his rebellion against colorism in some gay communities that tend to value proximity to whiteness and devalue Blackness. Initially, the therapy’s Yale-educated facilitators place pathologies firmly on Black partners. They describe these failures with diagnostic terms like “anhedonia” (the inability to feel pleasure), “alexithymia” (the inability to express one’s self), “acute musical-obsession disorder” (an invented diagnosis of fixation on certain songs), and “Racialized Inhibiting Disorder” (an also invented diagnosis to describe all of the above). However, through their role-play and processing, the couples discover that the “disorder” is not only with Black partners but rather with white and white-adjacent partners, who refuse to listen to their partners or acknowledge the continued weight of race. For the couples, a turn to abject histories helps couples discover the racial dynamics that have been abjected from their relationship in an allegedly “post-racial” society. By inhabiting roles distinct from daily life, the characters can let go of their everyday dynamics and experience sensations they had previously numbed. As in abjection, these

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sensations are not entirely pleasurable. In fact, characters’ realizations threaten to break up their relationships by exposing white and white-adjacent partners’ inabilities to acknowledge race. Like Lorde’s erotic, the exercises provide Black participants to greater clarity and glimmers of pleasure. The exercises’ facilitators are correct in that white supremacy teaches marginalized subjects to ignore their feelings, but they are wrong in that they ignore white characters’ refusal to attend to their own corporeal histories. Perhaps the most ethically fraught encounter with abjection in the play occurs in Kaneisha and Jim’s relationship. Kaneisha consciously seeks out a submissive position with her partner that on its face seems to reinforce racialized and gendered hierarchies. At the start of Slave Play, Kaneisha sweeps the floor of the plantation house seemingly in search of a connection with her partner. As the sound of Rihanna’s Work wafts in the room, Kaneisha looks around, “as though in recognition.” She continues sweeping and twerks her hips in time with the song.53 She sweeps the floor: “work, work, work, work, work.” Work is a recurring motif in the play that braids together past and present. As she dances, the pleasure from Work intersects with the pleasure from “work,” the re-enacted labor she performs in the antebellum role-play. Even the slang terms “werk” and “twerk” contain this connection between pleasure and subjugation. Kaneisha torques historic subjugation into a source of pleasure.54 Rihanna’s Work is a recurring motif in the play that returns to Kaneisha in moments of anxiety, when she is seeking calm and connection. However, the music stops abruptly when her partner Jim enters the room. When he enters the role-play, he struggles to understand Kaneisha’s desire for submission. He does not hear the music. As Kaneisha calls Jim “massa” and goads him to beat her, Jim hesitates at the prospect. Jim asks to be called “mista” instead and emphasizes that he is an overseer, not master of the “big house.”55 Jim renounces his dominance in the context of intimacy, and, when the role-­ play gets too vivid, Jim calls his safe word (“Starbucks”) to escape the situation.56 Jim mistrusts consent in the context of racialized hierarchy. He is more comfortable with role-play that subverts power differentials than  Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2019), 9.  Etymologically, the term “queer” comes from understandings from torquing or twisting. There is something queer about Kaneisha’s orientation toward history, as I explore below. 55  Harris, Slave Play, 11-12. 56  Harris, Slave Play, 59. 53 54

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that which conscripts him as a white male into a seemingly powerful position. Some audiences shared a similar concern to Jim. The play confronts audiences with the politics of pleasure and whether it is ethical to get pleasure from the re-enactment of racialized captivity. For some, a depiction of Black female submission was too continuous with offstage dynamics. The creator of a petition to cancel the New York Theatre Workshop production stated, “As a Black woman I was terribly offended and traumatized by the graphic imagery mixed with laughter from a predominantly white audience. . . . I feel that the play’s writer and director, even as Queer Black men, were viscous [sic] in their depictions of slavery, Black sexuality, and specifically targets Black women [sic].”57 The critiques of white audiences and of the play’s potential to retraumatize audiences are worthwhile. However, an assumption at the heart of this critique is that a “vicious” presentation of slavery and submissive sexuality will reproduce racialized and gendered power differentials. Practitioners of BDSM have frequently run into this assumption that consensual BDSM enactments of violence are themselves violent, especially when they operate along lines of power.58 The Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe describes the “monstrous intimacies” uniting slavery with the present; for the creators of the petition, the intimacies in Slave Play indeed appeared monstrous.59 Another way to view this monstrosity is as abjection. In choosing to face this encounter— Harris reminds us that no one forced anyone to come see a production titled Slave Play60—how might Kaneisha and audiences submit to feeling challenging sensations denied in daily life? Even if the histories of sexual violence that haunt Slave Play are monstrous, their reenactment can serve a variety of functions. Slave Play’s BDSM intimacies are more than a repetition. Kaneisha’s desire for subjugation is in part an attempt to navigate her relationship to painful histories. As the sexuality studies scholar E. Ann Kaplan writes, “men have a far wider range of positions available [than women]: more readily both dominant and submissive, they vacillate between supreme control and supreme  Ashley B., “Shutdown Slave Play.”  See, for example, Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh. 59  Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 60  Maiysha Kai, “‘It should cost you something’: Jeremy O. Harris Sets the Record Straight on Slave Play as It Debuts on Broadway,” The Root, October 9, 2019, https://www.theroot. com/it-should-cost-you-something-as-it-debuts-on-broadway-1837972463. 57 58

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abandonment.”61 For Kaneisha, who experiences anxiety in part because of racist structures, the decision to submit to “supreme abandonment” can itself be an act of taking control. In a dialogue with Jeremy O. Harris, the actor Tonya Perkins states, “the dominant person in a BDSM scenario is actually the sub. The sub has all the control. The sub has the ability to say ‘more’ or ‘less’ or ‘stop.’”62 By contrast, Jim refuses to give Kaneisha this level of control over her erotic life. As Perkins argues, Jim takes on a “supremacist” position in which he paternalistically refuses to let Kaneisha be submissive.63 In the name of giving Kaneisha power, he actively takes it away. The sexuality studies scholar Ariane Cruz urges scholars to avoid pathologizing Black women’s submissive BDSM practices. According to Cruz, Black women at the intersection of “racial and sexual alterity” are more likely than others to be branded as “perverse” in their sexual practices.64 Yet as some disability studies scholars argue, disorders can also productively disorder societal expectations, including around the experience of time.65 The turn of histories may appear perverse or “vicious,” in part because it upends the assumption that sexuality is pro-social and future-­ oriented. By contrast, Slave Play takes up the anti-social and backward-­ oriented aspects of sexual abjection as opportunities to confront unspeakable pains and pleasures. Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy is a physical return to a locus of personal and collective identity formation. As the play progresses and characters unpack their roleplay, we learn that Kaneisha’s experience of the fantasy is rooted in childhood memory. Kaneisha recalls taking field trips as a child in Virginia to slave plantations. Kaneisha went on several of these field trips and was the only Black girl in her class. Although Antebellum Performance Therapy takes place at a different location than the plantation tours Kaneisha describes, it is a return to a foundational site in Kaneisha’s imagination. As Kaneisha recounts, every field trip was always already an iterative ritual, something that every child in Virginia

61  E.  Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), 27–28. 62  Tonya Perkins, “’Slave Play’: Racism Doesn’t Have a Safe Word,” American Theatre, July 1, 2019, https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/07/01/slave-play-racism-doesnthave-a-safe-word/. 63  Perkins. 64  Cruz, 11. 65  Petra Kuppers, “Crip Time,” Tikkun 29, no. 4 (2014): 29–30.

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undertakes “Three, Four, Five” times.66 Kaneisha recalls that the plantation was a place where she could encounter her “elders” as she walked through “the devil’s house.” Handing Kaneisha a white dress, her mother instructed her, “You wear this with your head held high / and [the elders will] come out and hold your hand / so none of the greasy-haired, / wildeyed children of them demons / will come pawing at you / in front of them. / Don’t let yourself be disgraced in front of the elders– / they’ve already suffered enough.”67 Kaneisha’s mother frames the plantation as a locus of violence against women of color past and present. Kaneisha recalls how other members of the class had formative moments “making out beneath the lynching tree / or being fingered behind the cotton gin,” but Kaneisha always stayed at a level of remove from sexual experimentation.68 Kaneisha recalls, “the little tingle / in the back of [her] neck / that bit of electricity / telling her [the ancestors] wanted to hold her hand.”69 Whereas the white children on the field trip experience intimacy with each other alongside the historical markers of white supremacy, Kaneisha has a moment of connection with her ancestors. Like abjection, the electricity that Kaneisha feels is not easily categorizable as pleasure or pain; it comes at the intersection of potential danger and a real feeling of connection to the dead. While Kaneisha may need to abject this sensation from her daily life lest it overwhelm her, Kaneisha uses race play on the MacGregor Plantation to reenact this moment in her past and recreate the “electric” feeling of connection with her ancestors. Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy is a return, both psychic and physical, to a location where Kaneisha can commune with ghosts. The built environment of the off-Broadway and Broadway productions highlights this encounter. In Clint Ramos’s scenic design, a line of mirrors on the upstage wall reflects the audience. As Kaneisha role-plays submission to her white British husband Jim in the first act, the audience watches ourselves watching, and the staging conditions foreground the theatricality of Kaneisha’s role-play. In the moments when Kaneisha describes her connection to the ancestors, the house lights come up on the audience, and we are meant to feel ourselves as the ancestors watching Kaneisha’s encounters. The sexuality studies scholar Lynda Hart writes that “desire is  Harris, Slave Play, 151.  Harris, Slave Play, 152. 68  Harris, Slave Play, 153. 69  Harris, Slave Play, 152. 66 67

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always in some sense ‘theatrical’” in that it takes place in a constructed space of fantasy between performer and spectator.70 In a similar spirit, Kaneisha orchestrates a spectacle to bridge the gap between herself and her ancestors. Kaneisha says that she was attracted to Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy. Because, baby, I realized, the elders watching me. They are watching me lay in bed every night with a demon who thinks he’s a saint. And the elders don’t care that you are a demon, they lay with them too… they just want you to know it. And me to know it. So I can lie with grace. So I can lie with their blessing.71

To make peace with her partner, Kaneisha realizes she needs to make peace with the ancestors, and she wants Jim to do the same. Like the set design, sex provides Kaneisha a “mirror” of history through which to examine her contemporary relationship to racist and sexual violence. Slave Play informs us that Kaneisha is sleeping with the ancestors as much as sleeping with her partner. In the spirit of Audre Lorde’s erotic, Kaneisha’s kink encounters in Slave Play serve a purpose other than the satisfaction of sexual desire for a partner. On first glance, Kaneisha’s desire appears directed at Jim. However, Kaneisha’s desire also bypasses Jim and goes straight to her enslaved ancestors. Jim is merely a prop within Kaneisha’s larger erotic performance. Having heard Kaneisha’s desire for proximity to her ancestors through the simulation of violence, Jim picks up the role-play with frightening conviction. He stuff’s Kaneisha’s mouth, grabs a whip, and hurls a racial slur in her direction. Kaneisha whimpers.72 On its face, the anger appears to stem from Jim’s frustration at being scorned as an object  Hart, 9–10.  Harris, Slave Play, 158. 72  Harris, Slave Play, 158. 70 71

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of desire. As he starts taking off his clothing, the specter of overseers’ sexual violence hovers over the scene. The role-play is a return to the erotic role-play of the first-act. However, Harris consciously builds consent into this moment. Early in the scenario, Jim asks Kaneisha if she understands that she’s in for a beating and says he’s going to “take it slow” so she can “get what [she] need[s].” As she still has the gag in her mouth, he prompts, “You can nod your head.” Kaneisha slowly nods.73 While the scene at first appears an expression of Jim’s anger, it is also a sign that Jim has listened to Kaneisha’s desire. He no longer paternalistically shields her from simulated violence. He embraces it. The question remains of whether the encounter is worthwhile for Kaneisha. As the role-play becomes more intense, Kaneisha calls out her safe word, “Starbucks,” and Jim backs off. Kaneisha starts crying gutturally. “Kaneisha is overcome,” the stage directions read.74 We are not sure if Kaneisha would want to enact the role-play ever again or whether she’ll stay with Jim. Soon, however, she laughs and goes over to kiss him. “Thank you, baby,” she says. “Thank you for listening.”75 For Kaneisha, this final encounter connects her to a history she has been searching for—both from her own memories of childhood field trips and the collective memory of chattel slavery. Kaneisha lets herself be “overcome” by the past. Sexual role-play provides an opportunity to let go of her everyday subjectivity and yield to history’s felt resonances. This is precisely the role of consent in the scene—to create the opportunity for Kaneisha to yield control, knowing the she still controls the limits of the encounter. She dictates the scenario’s terms and says her safe word when the sensations become too much. Again, this encounter is challenging for Kaneisha as much as it is erotically charged, but Kaneisha expresses gratitude for it nonetheless. Jim, too, reaches proximity to white ancestors within the history of the United States. The stage directions describe that he is “not sure what came over him, not sure why he did what he did.”76 He, too, experiences the role-play as a possession by ghosts. Whereas he had previously wanted to keep himself aloof, now he experiences some of the anger and aggression of overseers on plantations. Jim, like Kaneisha, begins to experience sex as a triangulated relationship between himself,  Harris, Slave Play, 160.  Harris, Slave Play, 161. 75  Harris, Slave Play, 161. 76  Harris, Slave Play, 161. 73 74

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Kaneisha, and the ancestors. Like Kaneisha’s, Jim’s proximity to slavery is simultaneously painful and pleasurable. Jim confronts histories of whiteness that he had been unwilling to confront before. Kaneisha and Jim return to history together rather than abjecting it from their consciousness. Leaning into the seemingly anti-social aspects of history and sexuality, they experience a connection to each other and to the ancestors. Slave Play calls an audience, too, to be a part of this raising of the dead and conscripts us to be ancestors watching the encounter. The placement of this simulated violence at the production’s end jolted some audience members. In her account of abjection, Julia Kristeva writes that societies develop strategies to manage encounters with atrocity.77 The play’s reenactment of sexual violence, even under consensual circumstances, may not have been paired with the context needed to shepherd audiences through an encounter with difficult history. Although the play’s different productions each incorporated intimacy directors to care for performers with consent-based and trauma-informed approaches, audiences may not have always had such a supportive environment in the theater. Despite Harris and the production team’s efforts to create BLACK OUT performances with all-Black audiences, performances with predominantly white audiences may have also left Black audience members feeling isolated and stung. Critic Aisha Harris describes vastly different experiences at BLACK OUT and non-BLACK OUT performances, as the former offered her more “freedom” and “fellowship” than the latter.78 Playwright Inda Craig-­Galván describes the play’s challenging material being “even more of a challenge” because of the predominantly white audience.79 Kaneisha goes through the final moment of simulated violence without any other Black women visible onstage other than the imagined ancestors in the mirror. In theaters with a largely white audience, audiences would see a sea of white faces rather than the Black female ancestors that Kaneisha describes. The experience could be just as isolating as Kaneisha’s field trips to the slave plantation. Slave Play’s re-animation of history was unwieldy in that it could not fully care for audiences in their encounters with violent histories. Jeremy 77  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 12–13. 78  Aisha Harris, “What It’s Like to See ‘Slave Play’ as a Black Person,” The New York Times (Oct. 7, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/opinion/slave-play-­broadway.html. 79  Inda Craig-Galván, “Removing the White Gaze from ‘Slave Play’ Eliminates a Hurdle in Unpacking It,” Los Angeles Times (Feb. 18, 2022), https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-­ arts/story/2022-02-18/commentary-slave-play-mark-taper-forum-black-out-night.

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O. Harris readily acknowledges that different audiences affected the production: “Audience itself changes the DNA of a play. That’s why this play is important to be seen in a litany of different ways.”80 The different audience experiences speak to the need to understand consent intersectionally.81 Slave Play is not merely about participants’ individual choices to enact role play or audience members’ individual choices to attend performance; it is about how power differentials shape the body’s feelings during fraught encounters. If one is returning to history, who are one’s travel companions? For Kaneisha, erotic re-enactment relied on an ancestral support structure to guide her and a partner who recognized his place in it. Riffing on the hashtag #oscarssowhite, psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou writes that Slave Play suggests that “#consentsowhite”—consent is built on legal precedents that cannot always accommodate racial histories.82 Can we think about consent as more than a legal framework of agreement—one historically denied to Black women in the United States? What background conditions are necessary for one to take a journey that touches vulnerability? The ability to let go and feel pleasure from vulnerability depends on the promise that one can contain vulnerability; if a loss of control overflows into daily life, then it can enduringly impact one’s sense of self. Baseline security may be one prerequisite to gaining pleasure from eroticism, but too often white supremacy—and its expression in audience demographics—deny this security to bodies of color. While Slave Play’s erotic return enables Kaneisha to reorient her relationship to the past and experience unfamiliar sensations as she consensually renounces control, not every audience may have gone with her on that journey. However, the play offers a vision of healing with history, in which audiences make home in atrocity’s wreckage and address the felt dislocations from body and community the reverberate into the present.83  Craig-Galván.  The language of “intersectionality” comes from Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1990): 1241–1299. 82  Avgi Saketopoulou, “#consentsowhite: On the Erotics of Slave Play in ‘Slave Play,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/consentsowhiteon-the-erotics-of-slave-play-in-slave-play/. 83  I incorporate this understanding of the wreckage of history from Joy Brooke Fairfield’s reading of Walter Benjamin in Joy Brooke Fairfield, “Introduction: Consent-Based Staging in the Wreckage of History,” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34, no. 1 (Fall 2019), 71. 80 81

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5.5  Trauma as a Scene Partner Slave Play was a touchstone in the intimacy choreography movement in part because it demonstrated that racial history lives in the body. Intimacy director Claire Warden emphasizes that what is “radical” about Slave Play is that it shines a light on “the intersection of race and racial trauma in this country now and our sexual and sensual lives, and I don’t think there are many plays that name that so clearly.”84 Abject histories haunt contemporary intimacy across lines of race, gender, age, and sexuality. Staging abject histories can be a challenge because these histories can challenge performers’ senses of self for better or for worse. Describing his original production of Slave Play at the Yale School of Drama, Harris states, “When we did the show at Yale the first thing I said was that we couldn’t do the show unless we got an intimacy director, a female intimacy director. And my director and I, with the help of the administration, got Claire Warden and Alicia Rodis to come to the Yale School of Drama to make sure that everyone was taken care of.”85 Warden and Rodis, who are both white, also enlisted Teniece Divya Johnson, who is Black and non-binary, as an assistant, which Harris suggests helped them provide better support for Black women in the creative space.86 As I have emphasized throughout Directing Desire, intimacy choreographers have been enlisted to manage the encounters with abjection that come when staging sexuality, and these encounters necessarily intersect with racial formations. To be able to bravely address material like the afterlives of chattel slavery, intimacy choreographers might attempt to hold space for the continued impact of foundational traumas on contemporary intimacies and the potential for pleasure in the aftermath of these traumas. Daddy and Slave Play show the hazards of two approaches to trauma in theatrical practice—1) building a performance on personal experience such that the lines between actor and role bleed into one, as in the role-­ play in Daddy and 2) urging characters to use role-play to move past their trauma even if those traumas are not entirely healed, as in the role-play in Slave Play. By contrast, I have argued that intimacy choreography can attempt to coexist with trauma and create space in theatrical performance for those whose trauma is not entirely healed. This lesson is particularly  Ambam.  Perkins. 86  Perkins. 84 85

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important when thinking about race in performance, especially since overly celebratory narratives of the Civil Rights Movement and abolition tend to project the trauma of anti-Black racism into the historical past rather than something that continues today.87 Intimacy choreography must not claim to be post-race, when race continues to impact American theater, including the roles available to performers and resources available to arts institutions. Acknowledging the continued force of racial trauma, intimacy choreography might create space for role-play which does not directly draw upon a personal experience of trauma but offers space for survivors of trauma to craft narratives based on choreography and character. Viewed from a disability rights angle, this approach is one facet of advancing access to theatrical work for those who might have challenges addressing charged material.88 I frame this approach as a chance to play with trauma and suggest that BDSM and intimacy choreography might learn from each other’s approaches to role-play. Some of the central practices of BDSM and intimacy choreography aim to bracket off role-play from quotidian experience. Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, for example, advance a process of “tapping in” and “tapping out” in which actors ritualize entry and exit from character before and after a performance. Similarly, IDC and Theatrical Intimacy Education propose procedures following a performance for “de-roling” by emphasizing similarities and differences between one’s self and one’s character. While there is no such thing as tapping in and out of race and gender, there is a possibility of tapping in and out of particularly challenging citations of race and gender in performance. For example, Kaneisha’s BDSM re-enactment of sexual violence is a particularly charged citation of Black American womanhood, a citation distinct from her performance of black womanhood in other moments of her life. The acknowledgment of role-­ play is its own version of tapping in and out in the context of intimacy. Margot Weiss argues that SM mobilizes play frames that bracket off some of the loaded signifiers of racial and gender hierarchy; slave shackles denote something different in “slave play” than they do in non-sexual contexts.89  Omi and Winant, 2.  Joseph Fischel describes an ethics of sexual justice in which one criterion is disability “access,” the ability of those often excluded from sexual sphere for reasons of ableism to find pleasurable intimacies. In theater, the ability of survivors of trauma to access participation in intimate narratives may be part of creating a more equitable culture. Joseph Fischel, Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 17. 89  Weiss, 151. 87 88

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According to Weiss, the play frame offers an “alibi, allowing practitioners to recode or experiment with familiar experiences of power in new ways.”90 Intimacy choreography’s bracketing frames may similarly allow for recoding and experimentation. BDSM’s “aftercare”—check-ins and healing following an encounter—may be another form of “de-roling” that enables challenging experimentation with historical inequity. While these tools are ethical imperatives, they also create spheres of artistic play that can touch on sensations often denied in quotidian experience. In the wake of historical violence, the sociologist Gregory Bateson describes the importance of “play frames,” framing devices that demarcate a fictional reality seemingly removed from everyday life.91 These play frames help participants manage encounters with abjection that might challenge their sense of selfhood. Of course, play frames can never entirely separate the onstage from the offstage. As Weiss argues, any “mastery over social inequality” that BDSM claims is “phantasmatic”; BDSM play cannot create a world entirely removed from real life dynamics.92 The creation of play frames for theatrical intimacy is needed in part because the actors’ distinctions between onstage and off are precarious. Nevertheless, these frames can create emotional shifts in performers. Sociologist Erving Goffman writes of the importance of “backstage” spaces where “the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character.”93 Play frames create the impression of a backstage space for performers—either when they “step out of character” or when they step out of their everyday selves and into a character where they can let go of aspects of their subjectivity. To constantly perform one’s identity as truth can be exhausting, so backstage spaces can help establish spaces to perform identity as fiction. A recognition of fiction is essential for survivors of sexual and racialized violence when performing material adjacent to trauma. Within intimacy choreography and BDSM, trauma is an unspoken scene partner, a potential collaborator that can emerge in unexpected moments. As Slave Play and Daddy suggest, injury can result from the refusal to  Weiss, 151.  Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 187–188. 92  Weiss, 152. 93  Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 122. 90 91

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acknowledge trauma as a continued force. In the desire to push into a post-#MeToo, prosocial future, what are the abject histories that survivors of racialized and sexualized violence are asked to silence? Instead of denying trauma, I propose playing with trauma and acknowledging the needs of survivors when entering into artistic spaces. Performance need not be a space to unearth the truth of one’s experience, and therapy need not be a primary function of performance. Darren Langdridge writes of two dangerous assumptions of viewing SM through a therapeutic lens: “first, that SMers have a need for healing and, second, that once cured[,] people will stop doing SM.”94 Although arguably most people could use healing, the healing narrative around BDSM can re-pathologize those who practice SM sexual scripts. Ariane Cruz warns that the problematic pathologizing of already-minoritized BDSM sexual communities “might be compounded by the minoritized racialized body.”95 If performing in intimacy for the stage can have a therapeutic effect, it is best to treat such an effect as oblique or indirect. Against the pressure to cure trauma through performance—witnessed in Téa and Patricia’s therapy in Slave Play—intimacy professionals might recognize that their work entails making artistic space more accessible for those with trauma. Intimacy choreographers need not solely encourage individuals to “move past” trauma.96 When artists pathologize trauma or insist that artists be immune to psychological harm, in what ways are they further excluding those most likely to have experienced trauma?

5.6  Returning to Sensation As Slave Play and Daddy suggest, foundational traumas can be sources of pleasure as much as pain. There is a reason why theater and performance often return to sites of trauma. Traumatic history continually fascinates audiences and helps them define or contest their identifications. Abjection is constitutive of selfhood, and thus pain and pleasure can develop in tandem. As intimacy choreographers attempt to racialize touch, recognizing the continued import of racial formations on contemporary intimacy, they 94  Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge, “Silencing Accounts of Silenced Sexualities,” in Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, ed. by Róisín Ryan Flood and Rosalind Gill (London: Routledge, 2010), 68. 95  Cruz, 68. 96  Ann Cvetkovich writes, “What’s required instead of [encouraging people to overcome shame] is a sex positivity that can embrace negativity, including trauma.” Cvetkovich, 63.

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must recognize that race touches all bodies, including those historically dominant. As in BDSM, it can be useful to incorporate play frames into the discussion of race in performance. Race is not only a product of trauma physicalized onto bodies but also a source of community, narrative, and joy. As Michael Omi and Gabriel Winant argue, race is necessarily a negotiation between past and present projects to make racial meanings.97 Race is played with and reworked. When race touches artists in the context of intimacy choreography, it requires negotiation. Intimacy choreography involves a movement between external frames—the material constraints shaping the labor process—and internal frames—the varying games artists play within the labor process. As in Weiss’s circuits of desire, nonconsensual social roles outside the play frame coexist with consensual roles within the play frame. Artists re-enact and renegotiate what directing and acting meant before. Despite the idea that individuals should be “present” with each other during intimacy, individuals are necessarily in conversation with history. Jeremy O. Harris’s Daddy and Slave Play suggest that intimacy re-enacts historic imaginaries with difference; it carries the pain and pleasure of inherited identities and hierarchies. Historian Donald Donham describes an “erotics of history” in which sexuality emerges from “an infrastructure of mediation, social interaction, and historical context.”98 When the infrastructure of sexual performance relies on unequal histories, intimacies may appear monstrous. However, legal scholar Katherine Franke argues, “Desire is not subject to cleaning up, to being purged of its nasty, messy, perilous dimensions, full of contradictions and the complexities of simultaneous longing and denial.”99 In contrast with consent rhetoric and BDSM discourse, which emphasize the importance of choice, subjects always operate within a realm of limited choice. Erotic desire is, after all, never fully one’s own choice; it builds on social structures and biological predilections.100 What we can choose how we negotiate inherited sexual scripts in dialogue with others. With each repetition, we reiterate and rework the  Omi and Winant, 13.  Donald Donham, The Erotics of History: An Atlantic African Example (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 99  Katherine Franke, “Theorizing Yes: An Essay on Law, Feminism, and Desire.” Columbia Law Review 101, no. 1 (April 2001), 207. 100  The trans feminist theorist Andrea Long Chu writes that desire can sometime feel like an invasion from the outside: “Most desires aren’t desired.” Andrea Long Chu, Females: A Complaint (New York: Verso, 2019), 79. 97 98

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scripts that came before and will shape future productions. Ariane Cruz writes that black women’s BDSM can be “a process, a movement forward and backward, that belies history.”101 Confounding past and future, intimacy is never entirely “present” for participants. Grappling with inequity requires treating intimacy as always already a re-enactment. The intersections of race and intimacy choreography point toward a further avenue of research for intimacy choreographers (and perhaps a return to a line of thinking in the history of intimacy choreography)—if intimacy choreographers can help performers manage the trauma of sexual violence, are there specialized artists who can help performers manage moments of racial abjection outside of the context of sex and sexuality? Ann James of Intimacy Coordinators of Color proposes such an avenue of further exploration. In an interview with director Jordana De La Cruz, James states that “intimacy is everything that [an] actor includes in their identity,” and intimacy choreography involves advocacy for boundaries and safe space outside of sexuality.102 Chelsea Pace of Theatrical Intimacy Education states that her work intimacy choreography has caused her to be interested in consent-based approaches’ application to narratives beyond intimacy.103 Intimacy choreographer Adi Cabral states, “intimacy coordination, direction, and choreography aren’t always about sex or romance. The amount of simulated intimate acts I choreograph is minimal compared to the amount of work I do helping actors navigate traumatic material for the stage.”104 Intimacy choreographers are already branching out beyond sexual intimacy to think about intimate content as that which can touch on trauma, including racial trauma. There are risks to expanding intimacy choreography’s definition. Clare Warden states, “I have a concern about the term ‘intimacy director’ being expanded to that because . . . intimacy directors train very specifically to handle stories of hyper-exposure and sex/sexuality.”105 While certain intimacy directors may be equipped to handle intimacy choreography’s intersections with various identities, there are roles of cultural consultants or  Cruz, 6.  Jordana De La Cruz, “ShopTalk #6: Ann James, Intimacy Director,” JACK, July 25, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/jackartsny/videos/603052850665162. 103  Chelsea Pace, “Lessons from a Decade of Staging Sex,” recorded lecture, Feb. 24, 2021, https://circa.umbc.edu/chelsea-pace-lessons-from-a-decade-of-staging-sex/. 104  Ann James and Adi Cabral, “Bringing Identity to Staged Intimacy,” Howlround, Sept. 1, 2022, https://howlround.com/bringing-identity-staged-intimacy. 105  Ambam. 101 102

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cultural advocates who can help productions foster better processes outside of intimacy. At a certain point, collapsing these roles into intimacy choreography risks erasing intimacy choreography’s specificity and encroaching on fields that merit their own development. Warden states, “I would love the lessons we’ve learned and the power we’ve gained and the forward momentum we have to be absolutely everywhere we can utilized to service people who are doing the same work within the care for race-­ based storylines or gender non-conforming-based storylines.”106 Thus, it is important for the intimacy industry to understand what it is and is not qualified to handle and how productions can better support actors in taking on difficult non-sexual material. The forward momentum from intimacy choreography might help expand further fields for advocacy and choreography in a rehearsal process outside of sexuality. Beyond the hiring of additional advocates, intimacy choreography’s understanding of trauma can intersect with a broader interrogation of the working conditions around staging challenging material. When Slave Play transferred to Broadway, it not only kept the original actors but also offered actors the opportunity to take a fully paid mental health day (during which understudies would play the roles).107 According to Warden, that was the first time on or off Broadway that she heard such a practice implemented: “It’s things like that that seem so radical … but could make such a difference.”108 Thus, while intimacy choreography gestures toward further fields of specialization, it also points to additional advocacy in the production space about artists’ contracts, pay rates, and labor conditions. Given intimacy choreography has at least some of its roots in the labor struggle of Black theater artists and of survivors of sexual violence (before and after the #MeToo Movement), intimacy choreographers can be part of further labor struggle around access and trauma-informed work more broadly, and labor struggle need not be confined to pushing for specialized advocates. It is toward this advocacy in the context of immersive performance that I turn next.

 Ambam.  Ambam. 108  Ambam. 106 107

CHAPTER 6

Immersive Intimacy: Violation and Transformative Justice in Immersive Performance

6.1   Immersive Theater’s Aesthetic of Intimacy What are creative teams to do when individuals do violate a boundary? How are intimacy choreographers attempting to mitigate harm when people go off script? Throughout Directing Desire, I have emphasized that consent and sexual violence occur not just at the individual but also structural levels. In this chapter, I present a vision of collective, transformative justice based on reforms in the immersive performance genre. In the twenty-first century, “immersive theater” has emerged in the dramatic lexicon to describe a variety of artworks from the commercial to the experimental. A category that defies disciplinary boundaries, immersive theater describes performances that use installation, integrated media, gameplay frameworks, promenade, and participation to “immerse” audiences in environments distinct from daily life. Productions including Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd’s You Me Bum Bum Train, and Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell have garnered critical acclaim for dissolving the proscenium arch and providing audiences an “intimate” connection with performers. A brief examination of recent scholarship on the topic reveals the genre’s interest in an aesthetic of intimacy. Alan Read’s Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement (2008), Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan’s Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance (2012), Josephine Machon’s Immersive Theatres:

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Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (2013), and Leslie Hill and Helen Paris’s Performing Proximity: Curious Intimacies (2014) all deploy the term “intimacy” to describe a facet of contemporary experimental and participatory performance.1 While there has been a burst of interest in immersive performance in the twenty-first century, neither participation nor proximity are novel elements of theatrical production. Since the nineteenth century, creators of symbolism and naturalism in theater have attempted to “immerse” audiences in the performance event.2 However, immersive performance creators have successfully cited a corpus of avant-garde performance traditions and influences from videogaming that have allowed immersive performance to crystallize as its own, innovative genre characterized by attempts at emotional and sensory intimacy. In part in response to the history of non-consent in immersive and participatory performance, intimacy choreographers have developed unique approaches for advancing consent and informed risk-taking in the genre. Scholar and intimacy choreographer Amanda Rose Villarreal of Theatrical Intimacy Education has documented and crafted frameworks for “unscripted intimacy” in immersive performance.3 Whereas some immersive performance has entirely pre-scripted audience interactions, other more improvisational immersive performances are harder to choreograph in advance. To address unscripted intimacy between performers and audiences, some theater companies and artists have developed practices to onboard audience members or train performers and staff in consent negotiations.4 The Denver Immersive Summit, a convening for leaders in immersive and participatory theater in 2018, featured a panel on agency 1  Alan Reed, Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Palgrave: New York, 2009); Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan, Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance (Palgrave: New  York, 2012); Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave: New  York, 2013); Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, Performing Proximity: Curious Intimacies (Palgrave: New York, 2014). 2  Consider, for example, the Swedish theater maker August Strindberg, who in 1907 named his theater building in Stockholm Intimateater (Intimate Theater) and bring audiences in close proximity to stage action, or French theater maker André Antoine, whose production of The Butchers in 1888 featured bleeding beef carcasses whose smell filled the theater space in attempt to immerse middle class audiences in working class life. 3  Amanda Rose Villarreal, “Unscripted Intimacies: Negotiating Consent in Gamified Performance,” PhD Dissertation, UC-Boulder, 2021, https://www.proquest.com/ docview/2572572945?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true. 4  Villareal, “Unscripted Intimacies,” 236–239.

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and consent in immersive work with Villarreal as a speaker.5 Intimacy Coordinators of Color’s Ann James states, “Immersive theater has found a way into theatrical culture, and when we’re talking about consent in those spaces where you can reach out and touch an actor or they can reach out and touch you, we have to look at consent in a completely different way.”6 As James suggests, immersive performance raises questions for intimacy choreography that require reframing consent or even thinking beyond consent toward other interventions that advance artists and audience wellbeing. Theater scholar Gareth White writes, “The rise of immersive theatre might be read as the return of techniques of audience involvement that last captured the imagination of the theatre-makers and audiences to such a degree in the 1960s and 1970s, but this time shorn of political imperatives and allegiances.”7 While contemporary immersive performance might not ally itself as explicitly to social movements as performance art from the 1960s and 1970s, the field’s interest in sexuality and intimacy speaks to its own political investments. What happens if one views intimacy not as an escape from politics but as a necessarily political encounter? In this final chapter, I examine some immersive performances’ attempts to cultivate an “aesthetic of intimacy” and how performances in the genre have deployed eroticism to construct intimate publics. “Immersive intimacy,” a term I use to describe the intentional deployment of sexually charged scripts in contemporary participatory performance that attempts to activate an interchange between self and other, individual and social, private and public. Conceptually, like the play frames from the previous chapter, “immersion” brackets off a private experience distinct from daily life that can unmask performers’ and audiences’ authentic subjectivities. However, not all encounters within immersive performance have been consensual or pleasurable. Failing to reach agreement on the contours of sexual conduct in the public sphere, publics in immersive performance have become flashpoints for theaters’ conversations around sexual violence. Here, I focus on performers’ and staff’s allegations of sexual misconduct that emerged against audience members in Punchdrunk’s Sleep  “Agency and Consent in Immersive,” Panel. Denver Immersive Summit (Nov. 10, 2018), https://www.denverimmersivesummit.com/timetable/event/agency-consent/. 6  Ann James and Carly Weckstein, “Episode 107: Consent and Audiences,” Intimacy Coordinators in Conversation, podcast audio, Oct. 26, 2020, https://podcasts.apple.com/ us/podcast/icic-episode-107-consent-and-audiences/id1526968836?i=1000496069833. 7  Gareth White, “On Immersive Theater,” Theatre Research International 37, no. 3 (2012), 222. 5

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No More and what they might reveal about the ethical challenges of immersive intimacy. I analyze the immersive “frames” that Sleep No More and its New York producer Emursive have deployed to build performance as a site of extra-daily sexuality.8 These frames attempted to heighten an audience’s impulses and agency, but the production’s understanding of performance as a private consumer experience left it unable to confront the public ethical fallout of sexual violence. Reading the interaction between sexual liberalism and consent culture in Sleep No More alongside the history of Happenings and participatory live art, I suggest that the misconduct in Sleep No More relates to the broader history of sexuality in avant-garde immersion and participation. Immersive performance often attempts to incorporate chosen moments of consent and unchosen moments of surprise. While participatory performance gains much of its power from its ability to place audiences in unanticipated positions that prompt discomfort, it does not necessarily have procedures for acknowledging or addressing harm when discomfort causes serious damage. Acknowledging the difficulty of navigating boundaries rather than hiding it, immersive performance might facilitate ethical encounters in the public sphere. Performance can be a place to rehearse the difficult work of boundary-setting, negotiation, and apology. As I conclude, I emphasize that addressing harm in immersive performance requires not only identifying individual perpetrators but also (1) interrogating the aesthetic structures of immersive performance and its predecessors, (2) renegotiating the actor-audience contract, and (3) advocating for change at the level of the employment contract.

6.2   Intimate Unmaskings in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More In February 2018, five months after the MeToo hashtag went viral and accusations against high-profile figures like Harvey Weinstein gained visibility, Buzzfeed News broke a story in which eight former performers and staff members from the immersive performance Sleep No More reported audience members groping and sexually assaulting them on the job.9 The 8  Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986). 9  Amber Jamieson, “Performers and Staffers at ‘Sleep No More’ Say Audiences Have Sexually Assaulted Them,” Buzzfeed News, Feb. 6, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ article/amberjamieson/sleep-no-more#.cgyMmDMxvr.

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performance, directed by the British company Punchdrunk, stages a night of sexual thrills and murderous horror as audiences wander the darkened halls of New York City’s McKittrick Hotel in skull-like face masks. Around a banquet table in one room, a nude Macbeth, two topless female witches, and a male witch wearing a bull’s head simulate sex as a bass soundtrack thumps and a strobe light pulses.10 When the ghost of Banquo appears, he menaces Macbeth before joining the theatrical “orgy.”11 In a different space, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth kiss and caress each other in a bathtub. The next moment, they choke each other and throw one another across the room. Spectators surround them.12 Lady Macbeth removes her lingerie top and crosses toward an audience member. Leaning in, her lips inches from an audience member’s face, she grabs a dress from a peg above the audience member’s head, her nipple grazing the audience member’s shoulder before she moves away.13 Providing opportunities for voyeurism and the thrill of erotic permissiveness, the production has succeeded commercially, and critics praised it for its formal innovation.14 Sleep No More in New York sustained seven shows a week from 2011 to 2020, when it went on hiatus due to COVID-19 (even with a $95 per person ticket price),15 and reopened in February 2022. Building on previous engagements in London and Boston, Sleep No More sparked a further iteration in Shanghai running since 2017.16 Celebrities including Justin Timberlake, Margot Robbie, Bono, Beyoncé, Johnny Depp, Jennifer Lawrence, and Chris Pratt have appeared at the production. The New York Post reports that pop  Brian Moylan, “How to Find All the Nudity in Sleep No More,” Gawker, Dec. 8, 2011, https://gawker.com/5866346/how-to-find-all-the-nudity-in-sleep-no-more. 11  Colette Gordon, “Touching the Spectator: Intimacy, Immersion, and the Theater of the Velvet Rope,” Borrowers and Lenders 7 (2012), 5. 12  Brittany Zaborowski, “The Immature Person’s Guide to Sleep No More,” Thought Catalog, July 19, 2011, https://thoughtcatalog.com/brittany-zaborowski/2011/07/ the-immature-persons-guide-to-sleep-no-more/. 13  Zaborowski. 14  Meg Paradise, “The Aesthetic of ‘Sleep No More,’” Salon (October 11, 2011), https:// www.salon.com/2011/10/11/sleep_no_more_imprint/. 15  Gia Kourlas, “‘Sleep No More,’ But Move Nonstop,” The New  York Times, Sept. 6, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/arts/dance/sleep-no-more-is-theater-­­ embedded-with-dancers.html?_r=2&pagewanted=al& 16  Josephine Machon and Punchdrunk, The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2019). 10

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star Adele and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended the show on the same night, the latter traveling room to room with security detail in tow.17 Sleep No More has thrived in part because of its management of proximity. Dispensing with traditional theater architecture, the performance encourages audience members actively to seek erotic encounters and celebrity frisson all behind the comfort of a white, plastic mask that covers the full face. The mask is a central feature of the production. It dominates the visual landscape of the production, as every encounter with a fellow audience was an encounter with a masked face. Moreover, the production allows audience members to keep their masks after the performance. Masks have become a souvenir and the central image in spectators’ social media posts about the production. Spectators cannot post original photos of the production, which has a no cellphone policy, and instead many spectators post photos of themselves after the show wearing or holding masks.18 The mask keeps the production a mystery to outsiders but signals entry into an intimate public who has experienced the performance. Intimacy affectively thrives on the perception of privacy in public, and here masks allowed participants to publicize their private experience of the performance.19 While the masks give performers an entry into physical proximity with sexual thrills and mysterious strangers, masks also have a distancing effect. Audience members can exist in the shared space of performance more or less anonymously until they made their experience public after the performance. Under the cover of masks, performers can roam the space freely and seek experiences without the usual scrutiny of public life. Upon entry into the McKittrick Hotel, a concierge offers each audience member one of two cards and proclaims, “Tonight will be a night of choices.” Once the spectator takes the card, receives a mask, and enters, the production encourages them to follow their impulses and customize their experience. “Fortune favors the bold,” a host emphasizes. With the protection of a mask, audience members can indulge in voyeuristic ­behaviors otherwise frowned upon. Masking audience members’ faces, 17  Johnny Oleksinski, “You may not even know you’re with celebs at this off-Broadway show,” New York Post, Oct. 9, 2016. https://nypost.com/2016/10/09/you-may-not-evenknow-your-sitting-with-celebs-at-this-off-bway-show/. 18  See the sleepnomore hashtag on Twitter for examples. “#sleepnomore,” Twitter, accessed March 13, 2020, https://twitter.com/hashtag/sleepnomore. 19  Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1.

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Sleep No More promises to unmask audience impulses, erotic or otherwise. The production’s combination of proximity and distance performs an intimate unmasking of a theatrical public’s supposedly truest desires. Not every intimate unmasking proved fortuitous for performers. Depicting sex and violence in close proximity, the performance unmasked sexual violence on the part of some audience members. Whereas audience members were masked, performers were unmasked and sometimes nude or partially nude. Performers and staff told reporters that attendees had grabbed them by the genitals, attempted to insert a finger in their anus, groped their breasts, and rubbed crotches against them.20 From 2011 to 2017, men and women alike alleged 17 total incidents of nonconsensual sexual contact, of which Punchdrunk confirmed 7.21 This alleged sexual misconduct occurred despite safety protocols that the company put in place and trainings that they hosted. According to Punchdrunk, each actor had a guide for how to exit scenes and gain assistance from a crew member.22 Nevertheless, performers at times decided not to report incidents for fear of reprisal from other members of the industry, and, when they did report, some had to sign non-disclosure agreements, the legal shields requiring silence from survivors.23 In a performance with no spoken words, Punchdrunk and co-producer Emursive limited public speech to ensure the mystique of the private experience. Meanwhile, the mask, the stage element intended to produce an intimate experience, became a metaphor for the anonymity of some alleged perpetrators. Production protocol insisted that staff members or performers would remove the masks of participants who violated the rules of the performance: a literal unmasking. Then, staff would then escort the offending spectator to the lobby, where three staff would discuss the incident with the spectator and decide whether to readmit the alleged offender. According to a Sleep No More performer and staffer, the production neglected to blacklist offenders from attending in the future, and alleged offenders would sometimes reappear in mask to seek more nonconsensual touch. One repeat attendee was so notorious for his aggression that staffers gave him the alias, “Johnny Bravo,” and he bragged to the reporter at Buzzfeed of attending the show

 Jamieson.  Jamieson. 22  Jamieson. 23  Jamieson. 20 21

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over 100 times.24 Despite the production’s promise to unmask offending patrons, to “save face,” the production seemingly preserved patrons’ anonymity and their privileged positions as observers of the spectacle. When the Buzzfeed story broke about the alleged misconduct, it followed the structure of other stories in the #MeToo era—allegations (some anonymous, some not) on the part of workers, a denial on the part of management or the accused, and quotes from accusers about the need for institutional accountability. During the #MeToo movement, reporting often took the form of an intimate unmasking bringing the “open secret” of misconduct into the public eye. Cultural critic Andrea Long Chu describes media coverage of #MeToo allegations as “Bad TV.” Her phrase has two meanings: First, that the allegations revealed the problem of sexual violence in the entertainment industry (that TV was “bad”) and second, that the allegations played out as a mediatized spectacle for a viewing public (“bad TV”).25 Everyday television spectators became affectively invested in the unmasking of perpetrators and the satisfaction of seeing wrongdoing revealed.26 The Sleep No More allegations share much in common structurally with the other allegations in the #MeToo era, but they lacked the key element of other narratives of sexual violence: the known perpetrator. Performers’ allegations did not unmask individual culprits but rather unmasked the institutional politics behind Sleep No More and the dynamics in theatergoing publics. Readers did not get to take pleasure in seeing the perpetrator removed from power; the perpetrator could be any masked spectator. Scholars Joanna Brewis and Stephen Linstead argue that public identification of individual sexual bad actors “makes good” the remainder of sexual conduct.27 By contrast, the lack of identified “bad actors” at Sleep No More troubled the innocence of the production’s theatrical public. The physical proximity in Sleep No More was no guarantee of emotional proximity. As I analyze the sexual scripts at play in Sleep No More’s New York City production, which I attended in January 2020, I emphasize that immersive theater is often premised on intimacy, but not all of immersive theater’s intimacy is pleasurable or consensual for performers and audiences.  Jamieson.  Andrea Long Chu, “Bad TV,” n+1 31 (Spring 2018), https://nplusonemag.com/ issue-31/politics/bad-tv/. 26  Chu, “Bad TV.” 27  Joanna Brewis and Stephen Linstead, Sex, Work and Sex Work (New York: Routledge, 2000), 84. 24 25

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While intimacy can connote emotional connection, it can also connote the shared vulnerability that characterizes most public life. In her account of corporeality in Precarious Bodies, Judith Butler writes, “we are constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies; we are constituted as fields of desire and physical vulnerability, at once publicly assertive and vulnerable.”28 To assert oneself publicly as actor or participant in an erotically charged performance is to open one’s self to potential injury, trusting that fellow members of the public will accept one’s boundaries and that institutions will have procedures to address violations of one’s boundaries. In the work of theatrical intimacy, a performer creates an impression of vulnerability, hoping that one will not be actually wounded. Feminist legal theorist Katherine Franke writes, “It is precisely the proximity to danger, the lure of prohibition, the seamy side of shame that creates the heat that draws us toward our desires, and that makes desire and pleasure so resistant to rational explanation. It is also what makes pleasure, not a contradiction of or haven from danger, but rather a close relation.”29 Building on this association between eroticism and vulnerability, Sleep No More constructed the impression of danger and structured itself as a series of intimate unmaskings, yet the producers found themselves unable to manage potential injuries and adjudicate encounters between actors and participants. In the winter of 2018, Sleep No More added a line to their introduction requesting audience members to “maintain a respectful distance.”30 The erotic proximity on which the production relied clashed with the respectful distance required to ensure performers’ and staffers’ safety.

6.3  Re-eroticizing the Senses The idea of a “respectful distance” is a challenge for some immersive and participatory performance, whose unstated goal is often intimacy beyond that of theater with a proscenium arch. Dissolving traditional spatial boundaries between performer and audience, immersive performance opens a broader variety of modes of engagement than in proscenium 28  Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 20. 29  Katherine Franke, “Theorizing Yes: An Essay on Feminism, Law, and Desire,” Columbia Law Review 2011, 207. 30  Franke, 207.

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theater. In a search for greater intimacy and sensory immersion, artists have used eroticism as a proxy, and now, as consent culture gains more traction, artists and audiences are questioning on whose terms intimacy occurs. If performance is to be a bounded experience of losing control, who gets to set the safeguards and boundaries? One of the central aesthetic principles of Sleep No More was disorientation, something that actively seeks to make participants vulnerable. After standing in line on a sidewalk in Chelsea outside the McKittrick Hotel, participants encounter a darkened antechamber. Company founder Felix Barrett states, “Darkness immediately intensifies an event, magnifies its impact. Darkness establishes a sense of threat. It reawakens that childlike fear of the dark. The mythic, the folkloric, exists in the dark because your imagination fills in the gaps.”31 Darkness pervades most of the experience of Sleep No More, and, according to Barrett, its intended effect is to heighten the imagination. As the audience member masks herself, the darkness masks the production, lending it a mysterious aura that invites investigation. The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia explains, “In Punchdrunk worlds, smell, sound, and touch are vital and often prioritized above the visual where darkness and shadows are employed.” Hoping to emphasize the senses other than sight, Barrett and Punchdrunk cite a repertoire of experimental performance-­ makers before them. These performance-makers challenged the Ancient Greek idea of theater as the “seeing place”32 and hoped to reactivate the senses by breaking the actor-audience contract and its usual respectful distance. In the mid-twentieth century, reacting in part to the threat to theater from the development of cinema, some European and North American artists sought greater physical intimacy between performer and audience than found in traditional theater structures. In the early twentieth century, Antonin Artaud called for a “theater of cruelty” that immersed the audience in the performance event and accosted their senses.33 In the 1960s, Allan Kaprow and other students of John Cage staged site-specific Happenings that blurred the boundaries between life and art to heighten

 Machon and Punchdrunk, 52.  The Greek term “teatron,” from which the English term “theater” derives, translates to “seeing place.” 33  Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, transl. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: The Grove Press, 1958), 57. 31 32

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audience sensation.34 These artists refused the physical distance between audience and artwork in cinema and attempted seamlessly to integrate art and life. To reject the comfort of aesthetic distance, these artists specifically violated actor-audience contracts, and they employed what I call an “aesthetic of violation” in relation to the audience. These artists specifically used a metaphor of assault to describe the experience of performance, sometimes specifically in relation to sexuality. Artaud, whom Barrett cites an influence,35 urged artists to “attack [the audience’s corporeal] sensuality by physical means it cannot withstand.”36 Like cruelty, force would seemingly re-enchant audiences and animate publics to experience life in a more embodied way. In The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud writes, “We can now say that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly identified with sexual freedom which is also dark, although we do not know precisely why.”37 As readers, we might not know precisely why sexuality is dark either, yet Artaud thinks that sexual freedom involves imposing one’s erotic will on others and transcending social taboos. Creating eroticized encounters in the dark alongside simulated violence, to what extent is Punchdrunk referencing this dark sexuality as well? Performance artist Jean-Jacques Lebel elaborates on the aesthetic more explicitly. In 1968, Lebel published “On the Necessity of Violation.” A manifesto for the burgeoning Happening movement, “On the Necessity of Violation” called for visual art to dismantle the performer-audience divide and offend the bourgeois sensibility of the commercial art world. Seeking a metaphor for art’s function amidst the social upheavals of the 1960s, Lebel settles on “violation,” which he elsewhere paraphrases as “rape” or “force.” Lebel imagines non-consent as the fundamental premise of immersive performance. A longtime interlocutor of the Living Theatre and participants in antimilitarist and leftwing social movements, Lebel took issue with moral censure of his time, which he equated with political conservatism in all its forms. He writes, “The Tokyo happenings, and those of Amsterdam or Paris, seem to have a point in common: the advent of sexuality. In this domain more than any other, spontaneity is

34  Allan Kaprow, “Education of the Un-Artist,” in Essays on the Blurring of Life and Art (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Press, 1993), 97–109. 35  Machon and Punchdrunk, 28. 36  Machon and Punchdrunk, 81. 37  Artaud, 30.

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forbidden by the coercive moralism of our society.”38 Following Nietzsche, Lebel imagined an artwork that transcended morality and expressed the artist or audience’s true self. While it seems to reference a primitivist return to “natural” sexuality, Lebel’s emphasis on the “advent of sexuality” itself echoes the relatively recent notion in the United States and Europe of sexuality as an identity that must be expressed rather than a behavior distinct from selfhood.39 Lebel cites Freud’s thesis that “whenever there is prohibition, it must have been motivated by an unconfessed, unconscious desire or longing.”40 Lebel argues that in light of Freud, “the function of art in relation to society becomes clear—it must express, at all costs, what is hidden behind the wall.”41 Happenings could stage intimate unmaskings “at all costs.” Although artwork was not necessarily violating the audience or performers, it was violating taboo zones that threatened to keep art conservative. Latent in Lebel’s argument is an assumption that the bourgeois art world is a realm of comfort and choice. Lebel laments the relegation of art to the realm of “private property” and of artistic consumption to detached contemplation.42 In the sphere of commercial art, an audience can choose what to consume and keep its response to that artwork private. Moralism seemed to bifurcate artwork from public life. By contrast, in Lebel’s vision, the avant-garde visual art world must force its audience beyond private choice to heighten the audience’s perception. Happenings can transport private artistic experience into the public sphere and activate “collective dreams” of intersubjectivity. Art would generate an intimate public from disparate individuals. Lebel suggests that public life is nonconsensual. He writes, “All language turns on violation, and all art is founded on unveiling. The dialectical, supremely ambivalent nature of violation can never be 38  Jean-Jacques Lebel, “On the Necessity of Violation,” TDR: The Drama Review 13, no. 1 (Autumn, 1968), 98. 39  This insight that sexuality as identity is a relatively new invention has been influentially expressed in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which argues that “we have arrived at the point where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many centuries thought of as madness; the plenitude of our body from what was long considered its stigma and likened to a wound; our identity from what was perceived as an obscure and nameless urge.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, transl. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 156. 40  Lebel, 90. 41  Lebel, 90. 42  Lebel, 89.

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sufficiently stressed. Violation is at once birth and unbirth, the goingbeyond and the return, accomplishment and death. All transmutation begins with a rape, with a reversal.”43 In Lebel’s account, communication, transformation, and the construction of publics cannot be entirely consensual. For Lebel, sociality brings together what psychoanalysts call the lifedrive and the death-drive (“accomplishment and death”), a simultaneous desire to impose upon others and be imposed upon. Lebel is correct that sociality—human interaction itself—involves imposition; people live in a political community that is often not of their own choosing. Daily interactions obey tacit, collective rules that one never determines singlehandedly. However, framing artmaking as rape overlooks the ways in which political community involves opportunities to withdraw consent and to negotiate individual relationships with shared social norms. While society creates interdependence and folds individuals into a collective, it need not do so in ways that inflict psychic harm or interfere with bodily autonomy. To achieve this goal of forced collectivity, Happenings and other precursors of immersive performance placed audiences in environments found with smells, physical sensations, and sensory experiences that interrupted the illusion of isolation available only to bourgeois subjects. Sensation signaled one’s connection to sociality and non-rational impulses. As far back as the classics, Aristotle saw the most rational senses as sight, hearing, and smell, and theater etymologically as a “seeing-place” and locus for scripted text has historically privileged sight and hearing.44 By contrast, Happenings could impose smell, touch, and sometimes taste on an audience to give them an experience closer to life. Performance scholar Josephine Machon describes immersive performance as “quintessentially (syn)aesthetic,” blurring the senses in a mental and corporeal experience.45 In predecessors to immersive performance, the erotic was another nonrational sensibility that performance could heighten by force. Directing audiences into unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable intimacies, immersive performance and Happenings would immerse audiences in seemingly new ways of seeing the world whether they were ready or not. However, the erotic stimuli that Happenings provided did not play equitably across all bodies. One of  Lebel, 90.  Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.980a, trans. Hugh Tredennick, vol. 17 & 18 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1933). 45  Josphine Machon, (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 14. 43 44

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the images in the published version of Lebel’s “On the Necessity of Violation” depicts a Lebel performance, Dechirex, in which a soldier eats cabbage leaves off of the partially nude body of a “badminton girl.”46 In its push for multisensory experience, Lebel’s performance pairs visual consumption of women’s bodies with the consumption of food. The public that an aesthetic of violation animated was hardly equitable. Shannon Jackson writes, “the number of ‘naked girls’ who appear in the documentation and descriptions of the happenings of Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Richard Schechner, and others is somewhat overwhelming. Meanwhile, the spectacle of mostly white participants performing all-too-familiar ‘rituals’ of circling, drumming and sacrificing testifies to the primitivist fascination that propelled the search for the real. Such reifications did not go unnoticed at the time.”47 As they gestured toward a reanimation of the senses, creators of Happenings cited primitivist assumptions about “dark” sexuality and repeated familiar sexual scripts. An aesthetic of violation attempted to heighten senses, and it imagined eroticism as one means toward that end.

6.4  Optimization in the Experience Economy When Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More deployed darkness, nudity, and eroticism, it similarly encouraged spectators to activate their senses and follow their impulses. The production exposed participants to a variety of stimuli, many of which were erotically charged. Sleep No More performer Tori Sparks states, “The theme is so dark, and the work is so dark—everything is so aggressive and erotic and primal.”48 Sleep No More deployed a kink vocabulary of dominance and submission that signaled transgressive and forbidden sexuality to an unfamiliar theatergoing public; characters engaged in blood-spattered intimacies, and the host laid out ground rules for the performance with the forcefulness (and outfit) of a dominatrix. Like the Happenings before it, Sleep No More attempted to show erotic taboos and encourage audience members to unmask the environment around them. The performance’s setting in a hotel offers a landscape of intimate spaces— bedrooms, parlors, chapels, a bathtub—that straddled public and private.  Lebel, 92.  Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 131. 48  Kourlas, “Sleep No More.” 46 47

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The hotel as a site of consumer privacy offered opportunities for voyeurism into characters’ private lives. As performers run away from a scene, audience members must impulsively choose whether to run after them or stay in an environment without characters. Audience members wander up the stairs, through doorways, and over obstacles to discover new rooms and layers in the performance’s built environment. At one point in the performance, I looked through a window to a woman writing a letter at a desk. The only way to get a better look was to open a closed door and enter her room, where I encountered four other spectators—all seemingly men— who had opened the door to do the same. The woman then climbed into an armoire and disappeared through a hole in its back. I stepped inside, too, and rustled through her clothes on hangers to enter a personal office, where a new scene began. The production’s architecture featured a series of architectural masks, which Sleep No More invited audiences to remove and discover new sensations. From that standpoint, it might be no surprise that some participants took the performance as an invitation to touch to unmask performers’ and staffers’ clothes and touch skin. Sleep No More immersed participants in an unfamiliar environment and encouraged audiences to actively seek out sensation. While this dynamic of encouraging active participation reflected politicizing drives of earlier eras, it also invokes cultural dynamics of the present era. Citing Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s term, performance scholar Jen Harvie describes immersive performance’s tendency to construct spectators as neoliberal “prosumers,” simultaneously producing and consuming the experience of which they are a part.49 Beneath the mask, participants could seek to maximize their experience and generate stories to tell on social media, to fellow audience members, or to friends and acquaintances. Upon entry into the space, a host tells participants that Sleep No More is an individual experience and that performers should not hold hands or otherwise group themselves within the performance. As a “night of choices,” Sleep No More emphasized the role of consumer choice; the production thus established a frame of individual experience for the production, eliminating the more social goals of Happenings and other immersive events. When I attended Sleep No More, audience members regularly shoved past each other to get a better view of the performers. Several times, I bumped into other audience members unintentionally and had to stifle an apology lest I break the rule 49  Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance, and Neoliberalism (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 77.

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of not speaking during the performance. The production challenges the possibility of verbally connecting with other audience members and mostly assigned participants the role of the individual consumer. The performance likewise incorporated opportunities for individual contact between performers and audience members in the form of what Punchdrunk calls a “one-on-one.” In one such encounter in Sleep No More, a nurse escorts a single audience member to a bed, where she tucks them in and examines their body closely. In another, a half-naked male witch takes a lone participant’s hand and leads them down a staircase, at the bottom of which he strokes the participant’s cheek before disappearing into a ballroom. In a third, a brokenhearted Porter weeps in an audience member’s arms.50 The Encyclopaedia states, “the one-on-one is a prototypical Punchdrunk form that has been an essential component of the practice and vocabulary of Felix Barrett’s vision since his undergraduate experiments with the format. . . [the one-on-one] is designed for one audience member, as participant in the work.”51 Aimed at creating intersubjective encounters and amplify participation, the one-on-one amplifies the sense that the performance is a unique experience for each audience member, and the production encourages audience members to seek out one-on-ones. One-on-ones sometimes include moments of physical touch, and when performers take spectators into more private spaces, they may unmask spectators for a moment of more seemingly intimate contact. Once a performer selects an audience member, according to Jessica Machon, the performer can “invite them in to a one-on-one – giving them the opportunity to refuse  – a non-verbal gesture, extending your hand, checking consent is given through that -- a tentative game . . . Nothing happens without the opportunity for the audience member to say no. The one-on-one will involve a constant process of negotiation and reassurance. Trust on both sides is paramount.”52 Punchdrunk’s rhetoric around the one-on-one emphasizes intersubjectivity, consent, presence, and negotiation, and Barrett recounts preparing performers for one-on-ones in the same way that one would train for a moment of stage intimacy: generating

50  Stephen Purcell, “‘It’s All a Bit of a Risk’: Reformulating ‘Liveness’ in Twenty-First-­ Century Performances of Shakespeare,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 293. 51  Purcell, 203. 52  Purcell, 203.

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specific choreography that responds to the participant’s body language.53 However, there is no guarantee that the participant will devote the same attention to the performer. Within a production that already emphasizes voyeurism and intimate unmasking, the one-on-ones were the subject of much audience conversation; discussions on the internet surrounding the production framed getting selected for a one-on-one as a sign of getting an optimal experience. Recognizing actors’ tendency to choose audience members for one-on-­ ones based on body language, bloggers on Tumblr and Metafilter shared tips on how to get performers to choose you: “stand close, lean in, plant the feet squarely, cock the head curiously.”54 Theater scholar Colette Gordon reports, “Now, on any night of the show, one can see masks tilting furiously in an effort to attract the performers.”55 Online spaces prime audience members for how to engage with performance. A writer for Gawker even published a voyeuristic guide, “How to Find All the Nudity in Sleep No More.” The writer went as far as to describe the length and quality of different male performers’ genitalia. When the “boy witch” character chose the writer for a one-on-one, the writer bragged about getting physical contact: “I grabbed his ass because I’m like that. It was wonderful.”56 In online spaces, participants performed their identities for a virtual public, and masks allow them to rehearse those online identities in person with seeming impunity. In the circuit between online and offline identity, participants managed masks and faces in the construction of self. Insofar as audiences were simultaneously producers and consumers of Sleep No More, they produced themselves in online spaces as desiring subjects who had optimized their viewing experiences. Even as Sleep No More deals in live art’s valorization of “liveness,”57 the production cites a repertoire of digital genres, including video gaming. Punchdrunk has recently started collaborating with app-based game designers, and the company’s artists express interest in how gaming and immersive performance influence one another. Creative director Steven Dobbie states, “With masked shows, repeat audiences work out that it’s  Machon and Punchdrunk, 208.  Quoted in Colette Gordon, “Touching the Spectator: Intimacy, Immersion, and the Theater of the Velvet Rope,” Borrowers and Lenders 7, no. 2 (2012), 4. 55  Gordon, 4. 56  Brian Moylan, “How to Find All the Nudity in Sleep No More,” Gawker (Dec. 8, 2011), https://www.gawker.com/5866346/how-to-find-all-the-nudity-in-sleep-no-more. 57  Purcell, 193. 53 54

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not entirely random where the one-on-ones are. Like a game, the fans crack how to get them, crack where and how to be in the right-place-right time, and the kind of behavior that would make a performer choose them.”58 As in a video game, audiences wander around in space interacting with the environment, and a mask ensures a similar anonymity to video games. As interactivity and anonymity provide an illusion of choice and freedom, the production’s options are pre-determined and carried out algorithmically until an audience member departs from the script. The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia reports, “You cannot improvise a one-on-­ one.” The form is carefully constructed on a set vocabulary of “intuitive and improvisational responses” to audience input.59 In this way, while interactivity and choice seem to be a hallmark of immersive and live performance, one-on-ones reflect the rise of the algorithm. I bring up Sleep No More’s affinity with gaming not as a mark against it; any immersive performance requires pre-planning and boundary-setting to strengthen its power. Rather, I note this affinity to point out how audience members may attempt to “game the system” and exercise individual choice beyond those boundaries. A performance built around the illusion of choice is going to run into difficulty when people choose an experience beyond the scope of the production, and audiences’ understandings of “getting their money’s worth” will affect how they interact with the event. Participants approached the performance within an intimate economy modeled on extraction. Punchdrunk has experience blurring the lines between performance and commodity. In Fair Play: Art, Performance, and Neoliberalism, Jen Harvie writes of Punchdrunk’s performance at the Louis Vuitton store in London as a bridge between commodity culture and the “experience economy.”60 At the performance, Telegraph journalist Sheryl Garratt describes being guided “behind a pillar where a woman straight out of a film noir . . . barks at me to sit down at a table for two. She pours two brandies . . . and commands, ‘Drink!’ Then suddenly we’re standing again, she has me pinned against the wall, gloved hands at my throat and her lips

 Machon and Punchdrunk, 84.  Machon and Punchdrunk, 208. 60  Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance, and Neoliberalism (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 187. The phrase “experience economy” comes from B. Joseph Pine II and James Gillmore. The Experience Economy (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1999). 58 59

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brushing my cheek.”61 Of the same performance, Vassi Chamberlain describes standing in the dark, “disoriented. . . . What follows is the closest I come to a multi-partner sexual encounter as two women snog, caress and writhe within millimeters of my mouth and body.”62 Part of Punchdrunk’s aesthetic is the disorientation that Chamberlain experiences and the whirlwind of submission that Garratt describes. Within the context of a private store opening, the performance links eroticism with consumer goods and turns eroticism itself into a consumer good for purchase. Of the experience economy, B. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore write, “work is theater and every business a stage.”63 Performers taking care of the audience members is part of “customer service”; providing audiences with a unique, personalized experience allows customers the feeling of consumer choice. The McKittrick operated its hotel bar alongside Sleep No More, and the two were meant to support each other. According to Buzzfeed’s Amber Jamieson, when she attended the performance and waited in the bar beforehand, a performer circulated encouraging audience members to “get drunk.”64 Performers and staffers cited audience intoxication as one of the main causes of audience unruliness.65 The priority of consumer wellbeing overrode the importance of worker wellbeing, and fielding sexual contact appeared part of the performer’s job.

6.5   Performance Frames and Procedural Justice Together, these dual interests in unmasking audience impulses and optimizing consumer experience begin to explain why patrons would overlook performers’ boundaries and seek nonconsensual touch. While the production had some exit plans in place for performers and staffers in case of problems, several workers at Sleep No More found the producers’ responses to sexual violence inadequate. When considering consent and violence in 61  Sheryl Garratt, “Punchdrunk theatre company opens Louis Vitton’s new Bond Street store,” The Telegraph, June 2014, 2010, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/7843548/Punchdrunk-theatre-company-opens-Louis-Vuittons-new-Bond-Street-­ store.html. 62  Vassi Chamberlain. “Oh What a Night! Louis Vitton’s Lavish Bash.” Evening Standard. May 26, 2010. https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/oh-what-a-night-louis-vuittonslavish-­bash-6473839.html. 63  Pine and Gillmore, i. 64  Jamieson. 65  Jamieson.

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immersive performance, there are two levels of procedure to consider— the frames that set expectations for performer-audience interaction and the frames for what to do when someone violates the performer-audience contract. In theater with a proscenium arch and a clear actor-audience divide, consent tends to go unstated. Basic rules of theater etiquette determine where people sit and how they behave. Actors’ salaries and contracts seemingly indicate their willingness to perform. Show descriptions, reviews, and a theater’s reputation all set expectations for a performance, such that an audience generally knows what they are getting into. Gareth White describes these assumptions as a production’s “horizon of expectations,” which help establish an unstated actor-audience agreement for performance.66 He writes, “The theatre is an institution made up of a myriad of institutions each understood by its constituent public—there are traditions in which we understand the conventions and thus imply consent to them when we attend, and there are other sites—festivals, venues, companies—where the challenging of conventions is to be expected, and thus a degree of consent also implied.”67 The actor-audience agreement makes itself known most visibly through its breach, when a show’s form or content causes audience members to walk out partway through a show or when an audience’s unexpected response takes the performers out of the theatrical world. Rules of conduct establish not only expectations but also procedures to follow when those expectations are not met. In immersive performance, the actor-audience contract becomes more of a challenge to establish. White describes the dynamic of “procedural authorship.” Procedural authorship is the creation of rules of engagement between performer and audience over the course of a performance event. White expands, “The exchanges that can happen between performer and participant are extremely complex, so that control—and authorship—is shared and passed back and forth between.”68 As a participant enters the world of a participatory performance, they encounter a script largely created without their input but in which they can determine their involvement. As in human interaction with the infrastructures and institutions of daily life, interaction with an immersive performance offers a prescribed vocabulary of engagement. To abandon the pre-authored procedure 66  Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of Invitation (Palgrave: New York, 2013), 59. 67  White, Audience Participation, 90. 68  White, Audience Participation, 164.

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entirely is to risk social sanction from fellow participants or expulsion from the performance. To cooperate with the pre-authored procedure is to incorporate the self into an unchosen environment. Participation thus often acts along a spectrum between total choice and total prescription. The degree to which one is satisfied with the performance may depend on how much one can engage with the procedure and how much one thinks the procedure is compelling. Alongside this aesthetic quality is an ethical one. Political and legal theorists describe the quality of “procedural justice”—fairness in the process of how a system distributes rewards and sanctions. Political theorists in the tradition of John Rawls juxtapose procedural justice with distributive justice, the final distribution of goods in a society.69 Although a final distribution might be unequal, a just procedure can justify the inequalities that do exist in a system. In participatory performance, likewise, individuals may not all have the same opportunities to participate or enjoy participation to the same degree, yet if the process seems fair, they may be more willing to grant faith in the performance. At one point in Sleep No More, I attempted to exit to an area that was reserved for actors, and a staffer blocked my movement by stretching out her arm. Although the staffer exerted a firm limit, I felt the procedure was fair since it helped demarcate the playing space from the backstage space. When creating an immersive performance, artists will not be able to guarantee consent at all times. The narrower the horizon of expectation and the fewer the risks, the less opportunity for shared authorship. As Punchdrunk’s philosophy suggests, part of what makes performance and intimacy exciting is their uncertainty. With uncertainty comes the risk of missteps and non-consent. Collaborative procedural authorship and circumscribed procedural justice may exert competing pulls on a production. In the case of Sleep No More, performers and staffers who alleged sexual violence objected not only to the performance frames that set the horizon of expectation but also to the procedure for dealing with violation of performers boundaries. Those speaking to Buzzfeed complained of the culture around alcohol and the “fortune favors the bold” slogan, which framed patron expectations.70 They also objected to the procedure for handling misconduct. When repeat offenders could keep attending 69  Cristina Lafont, “Procedural justice? Implications of the Rawls-Habermas debate for discourse ethics.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 29, no. 2 (2003): 163–181. 70  Jamieson.

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performances, producers seemed to signal a commitment to profit over employee wellbeing. Psychologists describe as “institutional betrayal” the feeling among sexual assault survivors that the institution of which they are a part has inadequately addressed their allegations.71 Sleep No More is not the only work in recent years to face reports of sexual violence. When British production company The Guild of Misrule staged an immersive The Great Gatsby in London, staff called the police after two reported cases of sexual assault on performers by audience members. Following the assaults, The Guild of Misrule gave each actor a “panic alarm,” instituted a set of codewords to flag unruly audience members and adjusted pre-­ show briefings to include rules for audiences. When the company staged an immersive performance adaptation of The Wolf of Wall Street, they went a step further and hired a “safeguarding, consent, and inclusion coordinator.”72 The company started to imagine an intimacy director for immersive performance. Sleep No More’s procedure to remove audience members and the Guild of Misrule’s panic alarm are welcome interventions, but they do not necessarily address the root problems. Of these anti-violence interventions, Amanda Rose Villarreal writes, “these efforts to cease instances of sexual assault are reactionary in that they train targeted individuals to signal or seek help after assault occurs, and are insufficient in that they predominantly serve performers—only half of the performance’s interacting population.”73 The efforts to remove perpetrators neither involve performance staff nor attempt to adjust audience, staff, or actor behavior before violence occurs. Like #MeToo’s intimate unmaskings of high-profile perpetrators in the media, they envision accountability as the removal of offenders from the public. In the contemporary United States, transgression of boundaries is, like the “panic alarm,” a cause for panic, and it prompts denials from institutions and individuals alike. When publics do identify wrongdoing, the criminal justice system and institutional sanction often become the dominant forms of engaging with sexual violence; each centers the determination of individual innocence and guilt rather than a collective examination of social frames around sexuality. In a similar spirit, 71  C.  P. Smith & J.  J. Freyd, “Institutional Betrayal.” American Psychologist 69, no. 6 (2014), 575–587. 72  Lanre Bakare, “Immersive Wolf of Wall Street Actors Get Alarm Systems,” The Guardian (Sept. 2019), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/sep/16/immersive-wolf-of-wallstreet-production-to-introduce-safeguarding. 73  Villarreal, 7.

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efforts in immersive performance focused on individual perpetrators can miss the broader aesthetic choices that a production makes and how these might enable harm. Part of the challenge of Sleep No More’s system around perpetrators is that it instantly separated transgressors from performers and staffers and took them to the lobby while the performers and staffers kept working. Apology and remedy were kept out of the performance frame. By contrast, other forms of performance in which participants are less anonymous might be able to foreground the tentative negotiation of the actor-audience contract and acknowledge that misunderstanding boundaries happens but should be addressed before serious harm is done. True apology requires potential perpetrators to be able to unmask themselves, expose their vulnerability, and offer recourse to those harmed before a dynamic creates lasting damage. However, because of the aesthetic frame of anonymity, Punchdrunk’s system did not build an opportunity for intersubjective encounters like that promoted in their one-on-ones.

6.6   Transformative Justice in the #MeToo Era In the legal and critical theory field, scholars and activists emphasize the distinction between “retributive justice” and “transformative justice.”74 Retributive justice emphasizes punishing wrongdoing in order to discourage harm. Sleep No More, by allowing audience members to return to later shows after harassment or non-consensual touch, was not inflicting serious retribution on alleged perpetrators; the punishment of missing the rest of a show without a refund is not an enormous deterrent or even one made public beforehand. The Guild of Misrule’s decision to call the police after audiences harassed and assaulted performers is a more substantial engagement with the criminal justice system and retribution. Alongside these tools to discourage harm or punish perpetrators for wrongdoing, transformative justice encourages a reassessment and transformation of the systems that enable harm. By contrast to the focus on individual wrongdoers, transformative justice emphasizes working with victims/survivors to hear their proposed solutions. Activists and scholars, particularly those who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, have developed transformative justice as an alternative to racially biased “carceral feminism”—a reliance 74  See, for example, Leah Laxmi Piepsna-Samarasinha and Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice (Chico: AK Press, 2020).

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on the judicial system to address gender-based and sexual harms.75 Because immersive performance is dealing with a rotating audience, it rarely has an opportunity to engage perpetrators or potential perpetrators in a sustained way (and it could use some retributive measures like blacklisting disruptive audience members). However, immersive performance can heed transformative justice’s call to look beyond the individual perpetrators and heed performers’ and staffers’ call to transform its aesthetic choices in a way that addresses harassment and sexual violence. Intimacy choreography is one such transformative justice intervention aimed to shift the culture in theater and performance around sexual violence. During training workshops with Theatrical Intimacy Education’s Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard and Intimacy Directors and Coordinators’ Tonia Sina and Claire Warden, intimacy choreographers emphasize that anyone in a production process can unintentionally violate another’s boundaries; intimacy choreographers themselves admit to having made mistakes around consent and having had their own boundaries violated.76 Without clear communication, it is easy to misjudge another performer’s boundaries. Intimacy choreography’s is not to adjudicate between “innocent” and “guilty” individuals but rather to recognize that vulnerability is a facet of human interaction, aim to reduce harm, and shift behavior when harm occurs. When an individual refuses to recognize that they have caused harm, as superfan “Johnny Bravo” did during his repeated attendance of Sleep No More, then there is cause to ban a person from a production. However, Sleep No More’s focus on liberating repressed impulses made it challenging to negotiate the more quotidian injuries of bumping into fellow spectators, misjudging an actor’s invitation, and objectifying performers in online accounts of the work. Interventions from intimacy choreography in the immersive space might attempt not just to provide performers with backup plans but to discuss the framing of immersive events and the forms of immersive intimacies involved. In January 2020, based on requests from performers and staffers, producers invited 75  Elizabeth Bernstein, “Militarized Humanism Meets Carceral Feminism,” Signs 36, no. 1 (2010): 45–71. 76  Claire Warden, Tonia Sina, and Samantha Kaufman, “Three-Day Intimacy for the Stage Workshop,” Workshop. Flying V Theater, Bethesda, MD. July 19–21, 2018. Adam Noble, Ashley K.  White, and Samantha Kaufman, “Three-Day Intimacy of the Stage Intensive,” Workshop, Eastfield College, Dallas, TX, Jan. 24–26, 2020. Laura Rikard and Chelsea Pace, “Theatrical Intimacy Education Workshop Weekend,” Workshop. Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. Feb. 22–23, 2019.

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intimacy choreographers Claire Warden and Rocío Mendez to lead a week of workshops and collaboration with performers, administrators, and staff with the aim of improving workplace culture. Warden and Mendez ­introduced the team to Intimacy Directors International’s “Five Pillars” of intimacy work and explored the concept of consent for immersive performance.77 However, according to Warden, the collaboration did not involve a reshaping of choreography or shifts in the production’s framing. In immersive performance, transformative justice may involve a variety of interventions, including training in interpreting audience behavior, safety plans, and counseling resources for performers and staffers if they do encounter audience misconduct. However, more than these interventions, transformative justice requires a shift in the actor-audience contract. “Immersion” in performance can connote an escape into a fictional world. Punchdrunk’s New York co-producer of Sleep No More goes by the name Emursive—not an escape to but an escape from. As the cases of alleged sexual violence in Sleep No More reveal, neither sexuality nor performance are private domains free from ethical obligation. While participants and actors may don masks in theatrical contexts, their actions can have consequences beyond the theatrical frame. When considering those consequences, creators of immersive performance should consider the two frames through which they manage performer and audience experiences— the aesthetic shaping for performer-audience interaction and the procedures for what to do when someone violates the performer-audience contract. It is a tall order to ask that immersive performance enact transformative justice for serious wrongdoing during a performance itself, but immersive performance can facilitate more low-stakes ethical encounters. Villarreal emphasizes that the need for immersive performance to shift from an understanding of itself as a consumer experience to a vision of itself as an opportunity to reshape perception.78 She argues that many new immersive audience members are searching for “personal significance” at immersive shows by trying to optimize their own experience in a way that they can show to others (like the Sleep No More audience member who wrote about finding all the nudity at the performance).79 By contrast,  Villarreal, 89–91.  Noah Nelson and Amanda Rose Villarreal, “Episode 173: Consent and Agency w/ Amanda Rose Villarreal,” No Proscenium, podcast audio, Nov. 6, 2018, https://noproscenium.com/nopro-podcast-173-consent-agency-w-amanda-rose-villarreal-bb9023a46664. 79  Nelson and Villarreal. 77 78

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Villarreal argues for “returning to a way of life where we’re interconnected.”80 As she argues, immersive performance can place people in sensory environments that get people to question the narrative they’ve grown up in: “questioning the experience they’ve been brought up in will lead to more openness to dialogue.”81 Foregrounding ethically charged encounters, immersive performance might be a rehearsal from challenging encounters in real life. In immersive performance, it is impossible to obtain consent for all moments of a production—after all, much of the pleasure of immersive performance derives from its surprises. Gareth White writes, “The ethics of audience participation . . . aren’t as simple as removing all significant risk or ensuring explicit or implicit consent. At times effective participation—and politically challenging participation—will be that which puts participants in compromising situations.”82 To be in a compromised position is to experience the interdependence that characterizes sociality. What the creators of Happenings such as Lebel and scholars of immersive performance such as White and Villarreal imagine for theater is an encounter with abjection, a sensory-rich rupture in the logical order through which one perceives the world and self. Often, erotically charged content has been a shortcut through which to challenge audience subjectivity. However, without communication or planning, encounters with abjection can disproportionately harm those in already vulnerable positions— employees, women, people of color, and queer or gender non-conforming people in immersive performance. When immersive performance frames itself solely as a consumer experience in which participants get a sojourn into a seemingly upper-class world of sexual licentiousness, then it misses out on the opportunities for participants, performers, and staffers to encounter each other as moral equals with boundaries and expectations. As intimacy choreographers enter the space of immersive performance and respond to the history of sexual violence, what they can offer are strategies for managing abjection, which include but are not limited to consent. While intimacy professionals cannot choreograph all the intimate encounters between performers and audience members in advance, they can set ground rules for how performers and audience members coordinate choreography between each other—should movement be in slow motion?  Nelson and Villarreal.  Nelson and Villarreal. 82  Gareth White, Audience Participation, 92. 80 81

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Should participants check in with eye contact? What level of intoxication is acceptable? What are participants’ exit plans or safe words? If a performer or audience member becomes too uncomfortable or shocked, they will emotionally withdraw from a performance.83 However, by establishing clear boundaries and expectations that help avoid emotional withdrawal, intimacy professionals can help facilitate the kinds of compromising positions that challenge and excite audiences.

6.7  Contract Negotiations and the Actor-Audience Contract Some of this work is coming directly from intimacy choreographers, and practitioners across the field are examining their performances’ relationship to consent and collaboration. Companies such as Denver’s Tradition Be Damned (TBD) Immersive,84 Boston’s Green Door Labs LLC,85 Denver’s Meow Wolf Immersive,86 and Baltimore’s Submersive Productions87 are working to implement strategies to honor participants’, staffers’, and performers’ consent and agency. Noah Nelson, editor of the publication about immersive performance No Proscenium, calls consent “immersive’s biggest issue.”88 In addition to Villarreal, researcher and immersive creator Roby Johnson, who studied under IDC’s Adam Noble, is creating protocols for consent-based dramaturgy in immersive performance. I foreground these cases of violence and transformation in immersive performance because it captures how industry-wide change happens not merely at the level of specialized intimacy professionals but also with whole creative teams. Like the movement to implement intimacy choreographers, the movement to alter the framing and procedures of immersive 83  Villareal describes this psychological dynamic in terms of a participant’s “affective filter”—the cognitive barrier that arises when a participant encounters themselves outside of their comfort zone so much that they cannot process an experience. Nelson and Villarreal. 84  Sara Lyons, “‘They Don’t Always Know What They’re Going to Do, But They Know How to Do It’: Managing Immersive Theater,” Master’s Thesis, Drexel University (Dec. 2021), https://www.proquest.com/docview/2615171653?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromope nview=true, 51. 85  Lyons, 57–59. 86  “Agency and Consent in Immersive.” 87  Susan Stroupe, comment on Clare Bladden, “Unblurred Lines: The Role of Consent in Immersive Theater,” Howlround, July 8, 2020, https://howlround.com/unblurred-lines. 88  Nelson and Villarreal.

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performance originated in calls from employees and performers engaged in struggle over their working conditions, which producers and directors took up to shift productions’ ethics and aesthetics. In the early days of the #MeToo Hashtag, artists came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct at institutions including Chicago’s Profiles Theatre, Houston’s Alley Theatre, and Massachusetts’s Gloucester Stage Company.89 These allegations resulted in changes in leadership and, in the case of Profiles, a company’s closure. Unseating serial harassers and abusers was perhaps the most visible product of the #MeToo movement, but the longer-term transformation has been a realignment of how productions stage intimacy, including the use of intimacy choreographers. An immersive environment in some ways resembles the environments that participants negotiate in daily life, full of proximities, publics, and intimacies only partially chosen. Participants encounter unchosen proximities on the subway, in line at the grocery store, in the workplace. These proximities may not be emotionally intimate, but they entail shared vulnerability, vulnerability not evenly distributed among political subjects.90 At times, experimental performance can help redistribute these vulnerabilities and acknowledge the pleasure in interdependence. Performance is an opportunity to temporarily lose the self: The “self-shattering” experience that psychoanalyst Leo Bersani says characterizes sexual intimacy.91 Artaud and Lebel are right to acknowledge the pleasure of suspending selfhood in the company of others. However, there must be limits, lest the suspension of offstage social norms lastingly injure self and other. Negotiating the actor-audience contract, participants can rework the social contract to create delineated spaces of interdependence. In this way, participants might discover the forms of shared choreography that give them meaning even within the constraints of social structures. As in Sleep No More, immersive 89  Aimee Levitt and Christopher Piatt, “At Profiles Theatre the drama—and abuse—is real,” The Chicago Reader, June 8, 2016, https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/ profiles-­theatre-theater-abuse-investigation/Content?oid=22415861. Susan Carroll, Wei Huan Chen, and Molly Glentzer, “Actors describe toxic, bullying atmosphere during Alley Productions,” The Houston Chronicle, Jan. 12, 2018, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/ news/houston-texas/houston/ar ticle/Alley-theatre-houston-gregor y-boyd-­­ allegations-12492467.php. Jessica Bennett. “Nine Women Accuse Israel Horovitz, Playwright and Mentor, of Sexual Misconduct,” The New  York Times, Nov. 30, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/theater/israel-horovitz-sexual-misconduct.html. 90  Butler, 20. 91  Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in Is the Rectum a Grave and Other Essays (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010), 25.

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performance can provide audiences with a “night of choices”—and of consequences. The reckoning with sexual violence in immersive performance has not merely happened at the level of individual perpetrators but rather looked to the social structures that guide erotically charged performance. Performances rely on an often-invisible infrastructure that artists navigate and negotiate through labor struggle. As the allegations and shifts in immersive performance since the #MeToo Movement suggests, labor struggle can be its own transformative justice intervention—one that leads to strategies for managing the sense of vulnerability on which immersive performance often thrives.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Keep in Touch

7.1   Intimacy Choreography as Maintenance Work Intimacy choreography is an interplay between repetition and difference. Against the tendency to privatize sexuality as a matter of innate desire, Directing Desire has foregrounded the repeated scripts and embodied practices shaping the circulation of desire in sexual cultures. By focusing on a society’s shared choreographies rather than the individual artist’s sexual identity, intimacy choreography shifts staging techniques beyond the logics of repression and liberation that have often characterized theater’s treatment of sexual intimacy in the United States since the advent of theatrical modernism.1 The intimacy industry crafts a common space in which artists negotiate how they tell stories of erotic desire. In the previous chapters, I have analyzed the interplay of consent and sexual norms in the practices of directors, playwrights, anti-pornography feminists, kink practitioners, and immersive theater-makers, among others. These case studies have highlighted the pitfalls of using individual desire as a guide for staging intimacy. If intimacy choreography is to address sexual violence and cultural stereotyping, it must decouple intimacy for the stage from individual self-expression. When actors consent to participate in an 1  For an account of the significance of sexual repression and liberation in Method Acting and Stanislavski’s System, see Kari Barclay, “Willful Actors: Valuing Resistance in American Actor Training,” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34, no. 1 (2019): 123–141.

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intimate scene, they are not necessarily expressing felt attraction to a scene partner. Even in the presence of attraction, impulses will be insufficient to sustain a scene for the duration of a theatrical run. Rather, intimacy choreography foregrounds physical actions that an actor can reasonably follow in the absence of desire for a scene partner. A framework of simulated sexuality creates space within sex positivity for absences of desire—for trauma, for asexual experiences, for the complex emotions that come with being subject to sexual stereotypes. Despite being iterative, desire is mutable. Like theater, it can differ every night. What are the implications of this instability for theorizing consent? Particularly with the advent of affirmative consent discourse in the twenty-­ first century, consent has taken on an expressive function. Consent must be enthusiastic, vocal, and indicative of underlying desire. “No means no” is no longer sufficient; advocates of affirmative consent encourage an enthusiastic yes. Without a doubt, the development of affirmative consent has helped the law adjudicate a variety of forms of sexual violence previously illegible to the legal system.2 However, outside of a legal context, affirmative consent models can simplify some of the challenges of knowing one’s desires, especially when working on fictional intimacy that may challenge one’s usual self-definition. Part of becoming intimate with others is experiencing sensation that kindles or challenges previous desires. At times, the definitiveness of legal models of consent can stifle this exploration and offer little room for responsive sexualities or absences of attraction. Within a theatrical context, performers can consent to act scenes of intimacy that may have little to do with their attraction to others. An absence of attraction need not imply an inability to consent or experience pleasure. As I conclude, I emphasize that intimacy choreography can reorient our understanding of consent to account for group dynamics. In the employment context of theatrical work, artists are enmeshed in incentive structures, representational histories, and labor struggles that occur at the social level and guide or constrain consent. Consent is one tool among many with which intimacy choreographers construct manageable and repeatable encounters with abjection, the challenging and exciting sensations that can emerge from acting in intimate scenes. 2  Insofar as previous definitions of sexual violence relied on “force,” definitions based on affirmative consent allow courts to understand assault that relied on intoxication, coercion, and incapacitation, especially as they happen in the context of date rape, partner violence, and other contexts involving individuals who know each other.

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This book began by conceptualizing intimacy choreography as abject labor—labor that has been sidelined in theatrical practice and labor that works upon abject moments in performance. As I conclude, I frame this labor on abjection as maintenance work on a society’s intimate life. Intimacy choreography helps maintain the social supports necessary to produce challenging work, care for those involved in the process of staging intimacy, and repair and reproduce audience perceptions of sex and intimacy. To understand the role of maintenance work, I offer a close reading of a depiction of intimacy choreography in the HBO television series High Maintenance, which features an intimacy choreographer character who falls in love with a man on the asexual spectrum. In the episode, the intimacy choreographer uses the tools around her to support actors to tell sexual stories in a demystified way, but she also struggles to have demystified conversations with her love interest when he opens up to her as asexual. Building on this narrative and my own experience as an intimacy choreographer on the asexual spectrum, I offer a vision of asexual intimacies, approaches to staging intimacy not characterized by a quest to know or possess another’s sexual desire. These asexual intimacies focus on choreography and sensation rather than sexual interiority. In keeping with the turn in queer theory to “impersonal intimacies,” my turn to asexual intimacies acknowledges simulation as a component of sexual interactions writ large.3 As there is pleasure in theatrical performance, so there may be pleasure in the repetition of sexual scripts and narratives regardless of one’s attraction to a partner or partners.

7.2  Asexual Intimacies in the Sexual Commons The television series High Maintenance provides one of the first fictional representations of an intimacy choreographer in popular culture. Created between 2012 and 2020 by Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair, High Maintenance follows a variety of characters who sustain the material infrastructure of Brooklyn, New York. These include bus drivers, baristas, construction workers, and a marijuana dealer who tie together these characters in a web of relationships—hence the series’ pun on high maintenance. On another level, however, the series attempts to elevate the maintenance 3  See Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 41 and Candace Vogler, “Sex and Talk,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998), 329.

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work that goes into keeping a city running. The visual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “maintenance art” has highlighted the sanitation workers, caretakers, and cleaners overlooked under neoliberal capitalism, constructing performances such as a garbage truck ballet and a choreographed cleaning of glass cases in a museum.4 In a similar spirit, High Maintenance showcases the workers that keep a city going. Among High Maintenance’s cast of characters is Kym, an intimacy coordinator. The second episode of High Maintenance’s fourth season, “Trick,” follows Kym as she helps actors navigate a simulated sex scene on the TV set of a political drama.5 She offers a cushion to protect the knees of an actor simulating oral sex, discusses the inclusion of nudity and intimacy in actors’ contracts, and choreographs filmic intimacy using depersonalized language. Kym performs quotidian acts of maintenance that enable performers to stage scenes of sexuality safely. As we see Kym helping actors on a television set perform intimacy, the series presents a fictionalized glimpse into the making of High Maintenance. For the show, Intimacy Directors and Coordinators’ Alicia Rodis coordinated intimacy for the series’ fourth season, which includes the episode in which we meet Kym. Self-referentially, Rodis coordinated intimate scenes featuring a fictional intimacy coordinator. The first scene in which Kym coordinates intimacy is strikingly routine. Kym talks the actors through their choreography as they run matter-of-­ factly through their placement on the set, mime removing pieces of clothing, and tilt their heads back and forth as a placeholder for where the characters would kiss. Then we witness the scene a second time, this time being filmed as Kym watches over a monitor. Instead of seeing a visual of the scene, we see Kym’s focus and hear the noises of the simulated sex as the characters perform the action. By contrast to the mechanical choreography from the rehearsal, the acting makes the final product convincing. High Maintenance shows intimacy choreography as a process of repetition, which appears mechanical but ultimately facilitates stronger acting. 4  For Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s own account of her work, see Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition ‘CARE’,” Journal of Contemporary Painting 4, no. 2 (2018): 233–238. For an excellent analysis of Ukeles’s maintenance art, see Shannon Jackson, “High Maintenance: The Sanitation Aesthetics of Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” in Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011): 75–104. 5  High Maintenance, Season 4, Episode 2, “Trick,” directed by Katja Blichfeld (Feb. 2020: New York, HBO), television episode.

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In showing this two-step process, High Maintenance demystifies the process of staging intimacy and depicts it as overlooked and often-­unglamorous work. The San Francisco Bay Area-based intimacy choreographer Maya Herbsman emphasizes that some newcomers interested in intimacy choreography see it as a “calling,” but at the end of the day, intimacy choreography is a job that, like any other, can be repetitive and draining.6 Despite the flurry of headlines and accolades that intimacy choreographers are getting, intimacy choreographer is not always a glamorous position. As the actors in High Maintenance adjust their modesty garments after filming the scene, they talk about what is for lunch—on a hot summer day in Brooklyn, it’s chili. High Maintenance strategically juxtaposes Kym’s desexualized approaches to intimacy coordination with her amorous encounters in her everyday life. On a break from filming, Kym forms a flirtatious connection with an extra, Evan. Over the course of the episode, we learn that Evan is on the asexual spectrum. The premise of an intimacy coordinator and an asexual forming a relationship is amusing in its apparent unlikelihood. After all, Kym spends her days helping actors simulate oral sex on a TV set, while Evan cannot have someone touch his leg without having a panic attack. However, the episode’s playful twist is that the two are more compatible than they initially think. Working with survivors of sexual trauma and preaching a healthy respect for boundaries, Kym has some of the tools to make intimacy accessible to Evan. Stating outright that he is not interested in sex, Evan causes Kym to experience the familiar rituals of hetero-­ romantic courtship in unfamiliar ways. When the two first meet on a lunch break and Kym introduces herself as an intimacy coordinator, Evan says that he did not know that intimacy could be coordinated. “Intimacy must be coordinated,” Kym replies. However, this coordination proves more difficult than she had thought. On their second date, where they sit at a candlelit bar in a busy Brooklyn restaurant, Kym puts a hand on Evan’s thigh and asks how his day was. Evan tenses up, apologizes, and walks out of the bar. Through a window, we see him speed-walk down the block. What to Kym had seemed an innocuous gesture of affection has stirred up difficult emotions in Evan. The consent and boundaries that she emphasizes on a film set prove much more difficult in daily life. Kym is about to text Evan, but he returns, embarrassed. Kym tries to recognize the validity of Evan’s boundaries, 6

 Maya Herbsman, Personal Interview, May 10, 2021.

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“That was a line for you.” Evan replies, “It has been in the past, but—” He trails off. He does not want to make the boundary definitive. Kym lays down a line of her own, “Sex has . . . not been a great part of my life, but if, if you can’t hug me, if you can’t hold me, or, hold my hand, . . . I don’t—”. She does not finish her sentence. Each individual’s self-­ identification—Kym as a person who values physical connection and Evan as someone with qualms about intimate touch—create barriers. Between an asexual and an intimacy coordinator, their intimacy appears rather uncoordinated. While Kym begins with the assumption that “intimacy must be coordinated,” she learns that coordination is not as simple as an alignment of sexual attraction. There can be reasons to take part in intimacy other than sexual attraction—romantic connection, physical closeness, curiosity. Coordination can be a process of finding common ground, even in the absence of attraction. Right when it seems as if they are about to go their separate ways, Evan slips his hand over Kym’s on the countertop of the bar. A ring on his right middle finger captures the light from a nearby candle. Kym and Evan look down at their hands, his on hers. Chatter from the restaurant continues in the background. Evan slides his fingers to her wrist. He takes her fingers. He gently raises her wrist. She looks up at him, trying to catch his eye as he stares down at her inner wrist. He kisses it. His lips produce a smacking sound when they leave her skin. He kisses her wrist again. He looks at her: “Never done that before.” She laughs. He laughs. He playfully brushes her wrist, as if wiping off the kiss. “You okay?” she asks. “Yeah,” he confirms. The camera pans out to other patrons who have missed this whole interaction. This shared moment of intimacy escapes the view of the broader public.7

7.3  Supporting Sensation I highlight this solidarity between intimacy choreography and asexuality because it contains one of the lessons from intimacy choreography that, like the gesture in High Maintenance, might escape the public eye. What unites asexuality and intimacy choreography is a commitment to understand desire differently and to reorient normative approaches to sexuality. When intimacy professionals urge artists to “desexualize the space,” as Theatrical Intimacy Education’s Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard do in 7

 “Trick,” 24:44–28:40.

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their pedagogy, they attempt to remove the assumption that individual sexual attraction is necessary to stage intimacy.8 For example, TIE’s artists stage scenes using choreographic language (“close the distance between your pelvis and that of your scene partner,” “apply muscle-level touch to the chest”) rather than using language that connotes desire (“grope him,” “do it harder”). Acting as if colleagues in theater and film are not sexually attracted to each other facilitates conversations about choreography. If an actor articulates desire or shows arousal, intimacy professionals should not shame the actor (at multiple trainings with TIE and IDI, facilitators have emphasized not stigmatizing performers who have erections during rehearsal).9 Rather, intimacy professionals recognize that attraction and arousal are not required for the work of staging sexuality. I draw a parallel between this desexualized approach and asexuality because they both avoid locating aberrance in an absence of sexual desire. Processes for staging intimacy need not pathologize those who lack sexual desire or build expectations based on hypersexual or desexualized stereotypes. To decenter pathologies applied to individuals, intimacy choreographers shift the focus to collaborative creation. Not every person on the asexual spectrum is as touch-averse as Evan, and many asexuals can derive pleasure from sex. Similarly, desexualizing the space—not insisting on real sexual desire— enables productions to valorize the wishes of artists who do not want to act in simulated sex scenes and to incorporate a greater variety of simulated sex into performance for those who do. Like Kym and Evan’s intimacy in High Maintenance, a simulated sexuality framework finds commonalities between sexuality and asexuality, which are usually framed as opposites. Jean Baudrillard writes, “To simulate is to feign what one hasn’t . . . an absence. . . . Simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’”10 In Directing Desire, I have urged scholars and artists to recognize the 8  Theatrical Intimacy Education uses the phrase, “Desexualize the Space,” to describe the use of technical language (“oral sex” vs “blowjob,” “muscle-level touch” vs “groping”) and non-reliance on personal history. Chelsea Pace, Staging Sex (New York: Routledge, 2020), 10–11. 9  Laura Rikard and Chelsea Pace, “Theatrical Intimacy Education Workshop Weekend.” Workshop. Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.  Feb. 22–23, 2019. Adam Noble, Ashley K.  White, and Samantha Kaufman, “Three-Day Intimacy of the Stage Intensive,” Workshop, Eastfield College, Dallas, TX, Jan. 24–26, 2020. 10  Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, trans. Shiela Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 3.

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absences of attraction that characterize human life regardless of sexual orientation. Participants in intimacy onstage or off can feign attraction, blurring the lines between true and false desire, sexuality and asexuality. Even without identifying as asexual, for example, Kym implies a history of sexual violence that may connect to her experiencing desire non-normatively (she states, “sex has—I’m not going to get into that now—sex has not been a great part of my life”). Not taking desire for granted, asexual intimacies focus instead on sensation. This avenue of investigation builds on queer theoretical turns toward a depersonalized eroticism. In his theory of “impersonal intimacy,” for example, queer theorist Leo Bersani envisions a “wonderful world” in which “no one is interested in penetrating—invading and possessing—anyone else’s desire.”11 Bersani’s world sounds much like that of intimacy directors and asexuals. Similarly, philosopher Candace Vogler calls for an approach of “depersonalizing intimacy,” separating sex from its function as self-expression and conceptualizing sex as a space in which one can lose one’s self as much as find it.12 Since artists choreograph scenes with a variety of colleagues, it is not necessary to take intimacy personally. In a model of erotic repetitions, desire is not an individual possession but a collaborative creation. In other words, eroticism is what people build in common. When scholars and artists decenter innate sexual desire, they can examine the shared work of building sexual choreographies and cultures. The sexual labor that has been excised from theater is important in part because cultural narratives and norms built around sexuality require maintenance; innate desire is not always enough to sustain sexual intimacies. Simulated intimacy in theater  helps produce the stories and vocabulary that audiences can reproduce in their offstage existence. What happens if we examine theatrical intimacy as a matter of maintenance rather than unmediated self-expression? Artistic teams collaborate to create the illusion of spontaneous intimacy within a production process’s prescribed theatrical infrastructure. This infrastructure includes the material working environment of film sets, rehearsal rooms, or performance spaces and the bodies that circulate in it (the cushion that protects an actor’s knees when simulating oral sex, the modesty patch that covers a performer’s genitalia to prevent unwanted contact with another performer, and the contract that stipulates the nudity and simulated sex acts required of a performer). On another  Bersani and Phillips, 41.  Vogler, 329.

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level, however, “infrastructure” includes the sexual choreography drawn from cultural scripts (the movement of one character pulling another’s pelvis onto a desk, the tracing of a character’s hand along the other’s skin, the moans picked up on an actor’s microphone). These two types of infrastructure—institutional architecture and embodied choreographies— come together in erotic performance and form the territory that artists navigate. In Directing Desire, I have urged scholars and artists to acknowledge the erotic infrastructures governing the performance of sexuality throughout theater history. As I have argued, privatized models of sexuality have attempted to naturalize the institutions of intimacy that form a society’s erotic infrastructure, rendering them invisible. Sexuality studies scholarship, by contrast, maps the scaffolding of sexual cultures. Building on Foucault’s understanding of sexuality as field of identity construction, various theorists use the metaphor of material infrastructure. In his analysis of sexuality and technology, performance studies scholar Jon McKenzie describes a “libidinal infrastructure” that shapes the flow of desire between subjects and objects.13 In her work on kink and subject formation, sexuality studies scholar Margot Weiss describes “circuits of desire,” pathways that subjects pursue toward sexual individual emancipation, which build on existing social constructions of race and gender.14 In his examination of eroticism and racialized history, anthropologist Donald Donham argues that fetishes rely on an “infrastructure of mediation, social interaction, and historical context.”15 According to these lines of thought, sexuality is never freestanding or autonomous; it relies on social formations that build people’s sense of their sexual selves. Intimacy directing might attempt to forge this erotic infrastructure into a more equitable “sexual commons,” a space for artists to negotiate a culture’s scripts, institutions, and vocabularies around eroticism. The sexual labor of writers, directors, producers, performers, intimacy professionals, designers, and stage managers shapes the social scripts that circulate in a culture. Every member of a production team who impacts the staging of sex and sexuality performs upon sexual culture, and the task of creating 13  Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), 189. 14  Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and Circuits of Sexuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 7. 15  Donald Donham, The Erotics of History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 85.

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more equitable intimacies cannot fall on intimacy professionals alone. Coordinating intimacies is a shared process. For Evan and Kym, this process causes each of them to shift their boundaries at times and apologize for overstepping boundaries at others. While Evan states that intimate touch on his thigh has been a boundary “in the past,” he suggests that he might become open to physical intimacy with Kym. While Kym is ready to leave Evan because he cannot give her the kind of connection she craves, she rediscovers the unexpected pleasure of a less overtly sexual touch. Judith Butler emphasizes, “If making oneself available to the unknown is part of sexual probing, sexual exploration, then none of us start as fully self-conscious, deliberate, and autonomous individuals when we consent.”16 Consent entails entry into a narrative of self and other whose ending is necessarily uncertain. Subjects learn their boundaries and have opportunities to expand them through experiences of sociality. Etymologically, consent derives from the Latin con (with) and sentire (to feel)—literally “feeling together.”17 Theater as a place for artists and audiences to feel together can provide a more social account of consent than can most positive legal theory. Consent expresses a willingness to feel alongside others, to see what desires might emerge over the course of a narrative. On and off stage, individuals use intimate choreographies to direct their desire collaboratively, opening themselves to the different directions the experiment could take them.

16  Judith Butler, “Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Law,” Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law 21, no. 2 (2012), 21. 17  Jeff Dolven, “Rape, Jokes, Consent,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 18, no. 4 (2017), 274–275.

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Index1

A Abjection, 16–20, 50, 86, 87, 120, 129–133, 136, 138, 140, 143, 170, 176, 177 and labor, 19 Acacia, 80, 80n63, 85, 85n80, 107, 107n47 Amateurism, 100, 101, 110, 113 Anti-pornography feminists, 70, 83, 86, 175 Anzuelo, David, 25, 95, 104, 104n38 Arousal, 181 Asexuality, v, xiii, 11, 176, 177, 179–182 B BDSM, see Kink Benz, Raja, v, 7, 7n27 Birch, Alice, 24, 63, 65–69, 66n18, 66n20, 83, 85, 95

Black acting methods, 49 Blumenthal, Amanda, v, 3, 3n12, 3n14, 8, 9n38, 13, 39, 40, 40n48, 46, 46n66 Bradshaw, Thomas, 1, 25, 89, 95–97, 96n25, 101n33 Burke, Tarana, 8, 8n32, 33 C Consent, 50 affirmative consent, 176 and age, 124 and audiences, 136 consent gym, 19, 20 as contract, 24, 54 as exploration, 24, 54 limits of, 9, 122 and race, 122, 137 and sensation, 184 Contract negotiations, 90

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Barclay, Directing Desire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31222-9

205

206 

INDEX

Contracts, 53 COVID-19 pandemic, vi, 13, 41, 41n55, 42n56, 119, 149 Culture Wars, 12, 83, 84 D Depersonalization, 30, 62, 109, 182 Desexualization, 109, 180, 181 Directing desire, 5 Duenyas, Yehuda, 1–3 Dunn, Kaja, 7, 8n29, 33, 49, 115, 115n1 E Experience economy, 162, 162n60 F Fight choreography, 42, 44 The Fight Master, 36, 36n20, 36n21, 50 H Happenings, 26, 148, 154, 156–159, 170 Harris, Jeremy O., 3, 3n11, 26, 117–119, 123, 125n39, 130n53, 131n60, 132, 136–137, 142 Herbsman, Maya, v, 19, 19n74, 41, 115, 115n2, 179, 179n6 High Maintenance, 177 History of intimacy choreography before #MeToo, 35 controversies around, 34 I Immersive intimacy, 147 Immersive theater, 146 Infrastructure, erotic, 183

Instant chemistry, 29–32, 51, 52, 54, 56, 61 Intermediate bodies, 89, 95, 113 International contexts, 90 Intimacy, 96 Intimacy Coordinators of Color, 3n16, 43, 48, 115, 143, 147 Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, 3n16, 14, 20, 24, 37n23, 41, 50n85, 50n86, 53, 61, 92, 92n12, 115, 116n3, 139, 168, 178 Intimacy Directors International, 6, 7n23, 22n81, 29, 36, 38, 41, 50, 53n90, 91n6, 94n16, 107, 123, 169 Intimacy kit, 90, 106, 107, 107n44 Intimacy Professionals Association, 3n16, 8, 9n38, 13, 13n47, 39, 40n46, 40n49, 46, 47n69, 47n70, 117n8, 117n9 J James, Ann, 19, 19n74, 40, 48n77, 115, 115n2, 143, 143n102, 143n104, 147, 147n6 Johnson, Teniece Divya, 19, 26, 33, 41, 49, 92, 116, 118, 118n12, 138 K Kink, 2, 2n10, 26, 40, 46, 47, 82, 93, 93n14, 117–119, 122–128, 122n28, 123n35, 131, 132, 134, 139–143, 158, 175, 183, 183n14 L Labor, 183 of intimacy choreography, 14, 16 maintenance work, 177, 178 and struggle, 144

 INDEX 

Liveness, 5, 25, 39, 59, 60, 60n5, 85n79, 91–94, 96, 99, 112, 123, 148, 157, 160n50, 161, 162 M Male gaze, 24, 34, 57, 60, 62–65, 67–69, 72–74, 76, 79–81, 84–86 and whiteness, 65, 111 #MeToo, 5–8, 6n22, 8n32, 16, 26, 31–35, 37n24, 38, 38n35, 39n42, 42, 48, 50–52, 56, 66, 92, 116, 119, 123n33, 141, 144, 152, 166–173 as workers’ rights movement, 52 Modesty garments, 90, 106, 107 Movement directing, 35, 36, 42, 44, 46, 51, 56–57 N Noble, Adam, v, xiii, 20n75, 36, 36n21, 50, 56, 61n7, 168n76, 171, 181n9 P Pace, Chelsea, v, xiii, 2, 7, 7n24, 7n25, 14, 15, 27, 38, 38n40, 43n58, 45n61, 46n65, 49n79, 52n88, 61, 61n8, 73, 73n44, 92, 109, 109n54, 143, 143n103, 168, 168n76, 180, 181n8, 181n9 Phallocentrism, 67, 71 Play frames, 140, 142, 147 Pornography, 14, 25, 91, 91n8, 95, 96, 98–104, 107, 110 and intimacy choreography, 92, 93 Presence, 12, 24–26, 59, 61–66, 68, 80, 88, 89, 91, 98–100, 105, 107, 111, 113, 115, 160, 176 Prosthetics, 105, 106, 109

207

R Race and intimacy choreography, 116 Racializing touch, 121, 122 Repetition, 24, 27, 31, 32, 42, 51, 56, 57, 59, 74, 93, 112, 113, 131, 142, 175, 177, 178 Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., 66 Rider, nudity or simulated sex, 53 Rikard, Laura, v, 7n25, 8n29, 14, 27, 38, 38n38, 38n40, 45n61, 46n65, 52n88, 73, 92, 109, 115n1, 168, 168n76, 180, 181n9 Rodis, Alicia, 3n14, 22n81, 36, 37n23, 38–40, 38n35, 50n85, 92, 92n12, 107, 118, 118n12, 123, 138, 178 S SAG-AFTRA, 3, 39, 39n44, 40, 53, 90, 90n3, 108 Sensation, 154, 184 Sex and relationship therapy, 24, 31, 35, 39, 40, 42, 46, 47, 51, 57, 109 Sex positivity, 10, 79 and compulsory sexuality, 79 history and development of, 85 Sexual commons, 16, 21, 23, 27, 88, 90, 183 Sexual misconduct, 6, 172 and Sleep No More, 150, 151 Sexual script analysis, 62, 63, 65, 85 sexual scripts, 14, 24, 62, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 79–81, 141, 142, 152, 158, 177 Sexy, acting, 37n27, 61, 61n8, 62, 64, 65, 72, 76, 81, 85 Sexy taffy, 61, 62 Simulated sexuality, 90, 108, 176, 181

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INDEX

Sina, Tonia, v, xiii, 2, 4, 4n18, 8n29, 20, 20n77, 30, 30n3, 35, 36, 36n19, 36n20, 43–45, 50, 51, 61, 63, 63n11, 76, 92, 94, 115n1, 123, 168, 168n76 Slave Play, 129 Sleep No More, 150 Smith, Sasha, 2, 33, 48, 49, 116, 118 Steinrock, Jessica, v, 14, 14n50 T Tapping in and tapping out, 87, 108, 139 Theatrical Intimacy Education, v, 3n16, 7, 14, 24, 27, 38, 38n36, 38n39, 38n40, 41, 41n53, 43, 44, 46, 46n65, 48, 49n78, 49n79, 52n88, 53, 53n90, 55, 61, 61n8, 73, 109, 115, 116n3, 139, 143, 146, 168, 168n76, 180, 181n8, 181n9 Transformative justice, 26, 145, 167, 168, 170, 173

Trauma, 4, 8, 10, 12, 20, 25, 36, 40, 46–48, 50, 56, 116, 116n4, 117, 120, 121, 128, 129, 136, 138, 139n88, 140, 141, 141n96, 143, 144, 176, 179 as a scene partner, 140 V Villarreal, Amanda Rose, v, 7n25, 14, 14n51, 146, 146n3, 166, 169n78 Violation aesthetic of, 155 W Warden, Claire, v, xiii, 3, 4n18, 10, 10n39, 20n77, 26, 35, 38n34, 39, 39n45, 92, 94n16, 118, 119n13, 123, 138, 168, 168n76, 169 White, Ashley, 61 Y Yehuda Duenyas, 123