Similar to dance choreographers or fight choreographers, an intimacy coordinator choreographs and oversees scenes featuring intimacy, nudity, and simulated sex between performers. As a coordinator, they also facilitate the conversations between directors, performers, wardrobe departments, and production. Additionally, they serve as advocates for the performers or other team members, helping to find solutions to any issues that may arise. They’re there to amplify the actors’ voices and concerns, facilitate the establishment of consent, and find the pathway to guarantee the project is respectful of any and all boundaries set by performers while still maintaining the vision of the production.
Before the role of the intimacy coordinator was established, these scenes were typically crafted by either a choreographer or a director. And while there are undoubtedly empathetic, caring, and considerate people who have controlled these scenes in the past, there have been plenty who were in no way qualified to handle such sensitive scenes. (For more on that, see the “Last Tango in Paris” controversy.) But there have also been people trying to hold consent in a process in some form until now. Notably, the Wachowskis hired sex educator Susie Bright when they were making “Bound” and had her serve as a “technical consultant” and choreographer for the intimate scenes. (I previously interviewed Gina Gershon about this experience on the /Film Daily podcast.)
“What comes under my purview is any kind of nudity or hyper exposure, and by hyper exposure I mean uncovering an area of a body that that person would normally keep covered if they were at a beach or a pool for example,” Claire Warden tells me. “Because it’s not always just breast, buttocks, and genitals — for someone it might be cultural or religious reasons — but also any kind of simulated sex or sexually motivated touching, any kind of what I call intense physical or intense intimate physical contact.”
This goes far beyond sexuality. It could also include scenes like medical exams, being a corpse on the slab during an autopsy, the act of helping someone bathe, or even just special effects being set off near an intimate region. “I think intimacy is a very broad term, for me, it is a deep body and soul-centered connection — that it’s the inside human reaching out to the inside human,” Warden says.
For Amy Waller, she describes intimacy in a broad sense as “closeness, vulnerability, exposure, connection […] sharing a part of yourself, whether that be mind, body, spirit, or even a space that is private and only shared with those you choose to share it with to feel a sense of closeness.”