INTIMACY COORDINATION

Co-creating Sensitive Sets

After leaving Higher Education in May 2024, I have more fully returned to industry and am developing my role in consent-based performance as an Intimacy Coordinator (IC). I am currently on the inaugural training course led by Haley Muraleedharan with the National Film and Television School to fully certify (due in December 2024) as an IC for Film and TV.

An IC’s role is to help safeguard an actor and the wider production when there is intimate content. This extends beyond nudity, kissing and simulated sex to include scenes that portray childbirth, or non-sexual forms of touch and hugging. An IC collaborates with the director and the rest of production where necessary so that actors’ safety, needs and boundaries remain paramount while serving the story. An IC applies techniques to break down a scene, choreograph movement, understand bodies and their relationship to the frame or space and utilise appropriate props, prosthetics, and garments.

Having worked in the field of theatre, as a performer, teacher, and mover for almost thirty years, I had a realisation that IC feels like a holistic next step for me, especially given my work has foregrounded body-based practice. I was pulled towards developing my work as an IC because of my work with movement, especially somatic practices, as well as dance improvisation. I very much draw on the idea that you start with the person and where they’re at so that material is not ‘put on’ but rather ‘comes from’ them. Intimacy Coordination takes in my concern with equality, diversity and inclusion as well as my love of choreography (especially working through image and storytelling). It also utilises my experience as a fully certified Feldenkrais Practitioner (a touch-based, non-hierarchical somatic education practice that offers a dialogic scaffold for cultivating curiosity and awareness within an inclusive framework). I see Intimacy Coordination as a welcome and absolutely necessary development across Theatre, Film and TV, and am committed to being a fierce advocate for consent-based practice in the industry while acknowledging the great work that some of the pioneers of this practice have done tirelessly over the past several years to embed the work and pave the way.