Staging intimacy: Theatre alumna leads the way in new field

By Sarah McCarty

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When staging fight scenes for live theatre productions, you hire a fight coordinator. When a film calls for a big dance number, you need a choreographer. When your show depends on stunts, you get a student coordinator. And when your production has a sex scene, you can hire an intimacy coordinator.

“People have been coordinating intimacy for as long as people have been making films,” said Chelsea Pace, who graduated with an MFA in theatre performance from the School of Film, Dance and Theatre. “The trick is that it wasn’t any one person’s responsibility. Folks from the producers to the wardrobe supervisors to the producers to the actors themselves took on staging the intimacy – with various degrees of success. The role of coordinator is new, but the work isn’t.

Pace is a leader in this new professional field that continues to grow, especially in the #MeToo era. She works as an intimacy choreographer, coordinator and educator, and she is the co-founder and head faculty of Theatrical Intimacy Education. She has been developing ethical, efficient and effective systems for staging intimacy for more than 10 years and has shared her work with thousands of theatre and film artists around the world.

“As people have become more aware of power dynamics and consent on set, the need for special focus, and this position, have come into focus,” she said.

In 2020, The New York Times featured Pace in a story exploring how intimacy coordinators help actors and Routledge Publishing released Pace’s book “Staging Sex: Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Theatrical Intimacy.”

Question: You are an intimacy choreographer, coordinator and educator. How are those distinct from each other?

Answer: Intimacy choreography is for live performance, coordination is for film, and education is for everyone. When I am in the room as an intimacy choreographer, I’m collaborating with the actors and the director to tell the story of the moment. Intimacy coordination includes choreography, but also involves a lot more logistics management. There are often a lot more pre-production meetings for film to make sure that the director, actors, wardrobe folks, etc are on the same page so that shoot day goes smoothly. As an educator, I teach workshops for theatre and film practitioners around the world. The goal of those workshops is to make everyone in the industry better at being consent-based practitioners. 

 

Q: When did you know this was what you wanted to do?

A: I started intimacy work in my early 20s. I was working primarily as an actor and realized that there was an opportunity to discover, and later develop, best practices for staging intimacy, nudity and sexual violence. 

 

Q: Who’s a professor at ASU who greatly influenced you, and how?

A: Although I never had them for a class formally, conversations with Jason Davids Scott had a huge impact on my work. Lots of long chats about intersections between our research interests helped build my confidence to write about my work.

 

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your book—what it’s about and who it’s for?

A: “Staging Sex: Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Theatrical Intimacy” is a practical, step-by-step handbook for staging intimacy, nudity and sexual violence for the theatre. It’s for anyone who works in theatre or film and is hoping to expand their toolkit, develop consent-based practices, or make their creative process a lot less weird.

 

Photos courtesy of Chelsea Pace.
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