Crafting Intimacy: a Decolonial and De-Westernizing Mission

In Bridgett M. Davis’s groundbreaking film Naked Acts (1998), a Black actress has a dilemma about shooting a nude scene. Davis, seeking black feminist ways to coordinate sex on-screen, looked to provocative visual artist Renee Cox. In many of her early pieces, Cox relies on nude self-portraits placed in significant historical moments or cultural movements to exemplify self-love, reject Eurocentric beauty standards, and challenge Western stereotypes about Black women’s body and sexuality. For Black women filmmakers to counter damaging sexual stereotypes about Black women in film, some had to turn to other visual arts fields and craft unique filmmaking methods—simultaneously creating new empowering images and developing less Hollywood-like approaches to cultures of consent and coordination of nudity and simulated sex on-screen. Today, intimacy choreographer and theater professor Kaja Dunn also offers valuable insights for those interested in both cultures of consent and collaboration in theater and film production across Black and Brown diasporas. The new era of intimacy coordination offers reform for Hollywood and its history of sexual harassment, coercion, and violence; but this reform is not without its critics, and rightly so.

“How do we negotiate touch with students who came of age with the internet, with a completely different access to pornography, to online dating? How do you take what we’re doing with intimacy choreography but also look at the dimension of differential racial embodiment? How do I have to think about consent differently when I’m working with Black and Latinx and Asian bodies on stage in relation to these white bodies on stage?”

—Kaja Dunn, “Intimacy Choreography and Cultural Change”

As a Black sexuality studies scholar who also researches and writes about Black film, I am interested in what this new era means for experimental, avant-garde, independent, and guerilla theater production and filmmaking. These artistic forms are often tied to concepts of liberation and revolution, some with the intentions of decolonizing sexuality (challenging the compulsory deployment of sex as power and violence) and de-Westernizing film and theater (challenging the dominance of a Eurocentric approach in form, aesthetics, and technique), or do both in front of and behind the camera. Historically, contracts and terms of consent and coercion have carried little to no weight in voluntary and involuntary labor markets and economies rooted in racial capitalism, settler sexuality, and sexual colonialism. The performance of sex (simulated or real) is an art form impacted by centuries of sexual colonialism and eroticphobia; in turn, moral panics about sexuality impacted the representation of and approaches to physical intimacy on-stage and on-screen. Consequently, an entire alternative industry—pornography—developed to capitalize from and revolutionize the publicness of sexuality, and early on it sustained many of the tenets of sexual colonialism. This rehearsed history is why the coordination of intimacy must grapple with a more complicated mission, one that exceeds the US and UK’s current movement to promote intimacy professionals. Though they don’t receive as much attention, Black women have been intervening in the contemporary moment and highlighting many of the blind spots of those dictating the current modes of coordination and possible reform. Due in large part to their background in alternative theater and film traditions, they bring plural awareness and Black aesthetics that interrogate Western performances of sexuality, embodiment, and nudity. They deploy novel erotics to address bodily autonomy, and in doing so interrupt ongoing conversations about boundaries and consent that only account for one facet of identity.

The contemporary professionalization and organization of intimacy professionals, including movement specialists, choreographers, actors, and stunt coordinators, developed the field with much less fanfare and institutional power than the earlier iteration. Mainstream press coverage (New York Times, Washington Post, Vogue, HuffPost) highlights the intimacy coordinators with the most recognizable names, Ita O’Brien and Claire Warden. O’Brien’s SAG-AFTRA-accredited company, established in 2018, helped establish “Intimacy on Set Guidelines,” which include best practices and can generally be read as an accountability and compliance checklist. Intimacy work has been defined as a #MeToo or #TimesUp phenomenon and a job of advocating for consent-forward spaces. Outside of these understandings derived from #MeToo in 2015 or #TimesUp in 2017, other origins are less noted but as important.

Tonia Sina, a fight director, is credited with the term “intimacy choreography” after using her firsthand fight experience to theorize the concept in her 2006 MFA thesis. Another movement leader, Adam Noble, is credited with developing the “extreme stage physicality” approaches that also figure into early intimacy labor. Two major US organizations have contributed to the growth of the industry: Theatrical Intimacy Education and Intimacy Directors International. In 2016, Sina, along with Alicia Rodis and Siohban Richardson, founded Intimacy Directors International to help actors navigate the standard power dynamics between themselves and directors or producers that can complicate consent throughout performances of sexuality and nudity. They developed the five pillars of intimacy: context, communication, consent, choreography, and closure. The organization disbanded in 2020, but the five pillars remain in most training and workshops today. In 2017, choreographer Chelsea Pace and movement specialist Laura Rikard launched the Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE) consulting group. TIE promotes a pedagogy that stresses ethical practices with an end goal of eliminating the need for intimacy coordinators. In addition to these professional organizations, stellar scholarship has been produced that surpasses the superficial perspective of mainstream media. Theater and performance journals such as Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Symposium, and Journal of the Society of American Fight Directors have published notable essays and special issues for several years. Most recently The Journal of Consent-Based Performance was established by Laura Rikard, Chelsea Pace, and Amanda R. Villarreal. Such work has led to transformative conversations about the whiteness of the intimacy coordination arena and the need for variety in approach. Formalized intimacy direction, coordination, and choreography originate from universalist approaches to reducing bodily or emotional harm when performing physical violence.

In “Sex and Violence: Practical Approaches for Dealing with Extreme Stage Physicality,” Noble claims, “In either situation [intimacy or violence], we find that when words are no longer sufficient to express the depth of a character’s emotions, the body steps in to fill the void.” While both might be forms of nonverbal communication, the parallel being made about sex and violence is troubling. Noble is not the only one to make such parallels. Sina also acknowledges, “So I decided to take stage combat exercises and techniques and modify them—I turned duels into sex scenes and mass battles into orgies.” Much of the initial discourse, from characterizing intimacy coordination as akin to stunt coordination to reduction of sex as extreme stage physicality, reproduces this logic. Equating sexual acts with acts of physical violence obscures the emotional, cultural, and spiritual factors of sexuality and performances of intimacy and limits the possible approaches that could address harm and vulnerability. Might there be other perspectives of body and eroticism that incorporate cultures of collaboration that are not limited by a sex-positive/sex-negative binary of the West’s preoccupation with shame, sin, violence, coercion, or trauma? For instance, comparisons of intimacy work with dance choreography, specifically invoking what Audre Lorde might note as its uses of the erotic, are far less common.

Given the origin of #MeToo in Black feminist thought from activist Tarana Burke, the link between the coordination of intimacy and broader Black feminist thought about the erotic, sexual autonomy, sexual expression, or sexual violence should be more visible. Be it theater or film, publicized genealogies about intimacy laborers are being construed as originating in either white Western academic spaces or Hollywood and mainstream television spaces, but other industries and cultures have been doing this work, even if it was not recognized as a culture of consent. Tonia Sina once said, “I’m sure that people have choreographed sex before I was born . . . but they weren’t doing it with consent in mind.” However, as Davis’s Naked Acts makes clear, intimacy was being choreographed before our contemporary era by directors or acting coaches, based on their own developed methods. The idea that consent in such coordination was never a concern for any directors in all of film history is arguable. The reality is that consent, along with other pillars, have histories and genealogies that Sina might never have learned from her performance background and training. None of this is to negate the work that Sina has done to establish good practices, such as co-founding Intimacy Directors International or developing an eight-step protocol for kissing. Yet, independent, guerilla, and pornographic sets have been removed from how coordination of intimacy might be developed on set.

In “Introduction: Consent-Based Staging in the Wreckage of History,” Joy Brooke Fairfield writes that prior to fight directors, the “consent practices formalized by intimacy choreographers for the process of staging simulated sex are efforts that have been historically led by survivors of sexual violence, sex workers, porn performers, sexuality activists, and members of kink communities.” Fairfield provides a glimpse as to why one might have a critical perspective about all the praise being heaped onto this “new” category of labor. From Annie Sprinkle to Sinnamon Love, sex workers as sexuality scholars and vice versa have been interrogating what constitutes sexual labor across various industries for decades. In “Sex Scenes, Television, and Disavowed Sex Work,” scholar Jane Ward turns to theories about sexual labor to outline the unacknowledged blurred boundaries of Hollywood actors being paid to simulate sex acts on-screen. She notes, “one of the core demands of feminist sex workers is that sex work be decriminalized and, relatedly, that it be recognized as work.” Ideally, this current wave of consciousness around intimacy coordination could be a great win for actors and feminist sex workers since decriminalization could lessen vulnerability. However, the remarkably quick turn to professionalize and establish institutions and accreditation certificates forewarns that no such decriminalization or de-stigmatization can or will occur and underscores that new hierarchies might be par for the course. In their recent book, Directing Desire: Intimacy Choreography and Consent in the Twenty-First Century, Kari Barclay explains:

“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.”

Ignoring this genealogy constructs new hierarchies about sex work and maintains the false boundary that allowed predatory behavior to flourish in mainstream film, television, and theater industries. In doing so, radical conversations and methods about class, labor, race, and cultural contexts also fall by the wayside.

Attention to decolonial and de-Westernizing genealogies in theater and film highlights the precariousness of intimacy labor rooted in monolithic foundations of gender, race, and class. I speak now of a crafting intimacy, of non-Western methods and approaches rooted more in ritual and community than in the race of the intimacy coordinators. Fortunately, Kaja Dunn, Ann James, Teniece Divya Johnson, and Sasha Smith are Black women intimacy coordinators and directors committed to de-Westernizing and decolonizing. They have been advocating for more expansive thinking in training and professionalization with a clear understanding of how cultural comprehension might shape the five pillars and provide future developments for the field. Dunn explains: “I had been thinking a lot about pedagogy techniques, specifically with theatre students of color. So much of it had been damaging. I was looking at the work of Barbara Ann Teer and others, but also looking outside of theatre for answers, because theatre can sometimes hide behind its assumed liberalness.” Dunn notes her training in fight choreography, but she also acknowledges she had to look toward other genealogies to shape her teaching and work. Teer’s founding of the National Black Theatre allowed her to devise methods and structures for performance derived from Yoruba cosmology and Nigerian performance traditions. Likewise, Ann James discusses her recent move to develop and advocate for an Afrocentric Intimacy Pedagogy based in ubuntu and the Nommo philosophy created by Paul Carter Harrison. Dunn and James’s attention to the genius of Teer and Harrison acknowledges them as theater practitioners and teachers who trained students in non-Western philosophies, many of whom would go on to Broadway, film, and television. Both worked with actors of all races and knew their methods might be seen as unorthodox for those not of African descent. Teer is notable for her theories and pedagogies of actors as liberators, five cycles of evolution, and art as action that flows from the heart, while Harrison’s work centered on Dogon ritual and African retentions. In each case, their methods derived from an origin of love, community, and liberation in spite of tremendous violence in Black life. Much of their work to transform traditional theater space hinged on collaborative processes in artmaking. Teer employed concepts such as self-affirmation, cooperation, education, spirituality, and liberation. Despite being classified as Black Arts Movement practices, not feminist or discursively recorded as intimacy coordination, their methods and approaches addressed bodily autonomy, vulnerability, consent, and safety. Yet, outside of Black spaces, they are less known and appreciated. Dunn, James, and others are rightly bringing these traditions to the forefront of the rapidly evolving intimacy coordination industry.

In recording and constructing the parameters of intimacy coordination labor and practices, the inclination to overlook the history of several theater innovators, feminist directors, feminist pornographers—along with the actors and crews who worked with them—ignores the precedent set by the distinctiveness of their craft. Bridgett M. Davis describes making her feature film Naked Acts:
I felt empowered to portray a film-within-a-film for my feature . . . because I knew that Losing Ground included a film-within-a-film. I felt empowered to tell the story of a community of Black artists and actors because I knew another Black woman filmmaker had done just that. And I felt empowered to explore a Black woman’s inner life and sexuality on the screen because I knew [Kathleen] Collins had already ventured to do so.

A similar analogy might be made when thinking about all the important directing of intimacy and sex done by Black women directors such as Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Cheryl Dunye, Dee Rees, Michelle Parkerson, Angela Robinson, or Shine Louise Houston—especially when examining the filmmakers who influenced them as well as the visual artists, choreographers, and storytellers. Studying their craft showcases their concerns about collaboration and vulnerability in their depictions of nudity, sexuality, and eroticism in various and complex ways for themselves, their actors, and their audiences. Their craft attends to intersecting issues of race, sexuality, class, and consent. It’s important to bring up these previous iterations that managed to do all these things while having minimal privilege in filmmaking studio systems—important in terms of historical representation and who was theorizing cultures of consent in their artistic practice. Furthermore, any person of color, especially queer and trans artists, seeking to make films outside the studio system or across the diasporas should remain lovingly critical of the very people that created the conditions and structures for such harm. Artists cannot naively rely on these mainstream entities to do something they have not consistently done in any other existing category of filmmaking production: equally value the culture and ethics embedded in other communities’ ideologies and philosophies about aesthetics, embodiment, performance, and visual practices. As Raja Benz expresses to Ann James, “We need to start imagining what more localized and community-centered approaches to intimacy work could look like.” Anything else might be reform, but it would not be crafting a decolonial practice.