The Fine Art of Intimacy on Stage
Carly DW Bones on Respecting and Protecting Actors
By Matthew Beymer
Intimacy Coordinator Carly DW Bones (photo courtesy of the subject)
This article is part of the Stage Raw/Unusual Suspects Youth Journalism Fellowship
Carly DW Bones (they/she) is a Los Angeles-based intimacy coordinator, director, and community organizer in theatre and film. Founder of the feminist theatre company The Illyrian Players, they have worked regularly as an intimacy coordinator and director with professional theaters and college theatre programs for the past decade. We first met two years ago when they provided intimacy direction for the play Happy Birthday Mars Rover, a production I understudied for.
Bones recently spoke with Stage Raw via Zoom, after co-facilitating a teach-in titled “Artists in Response.” The event was sponsored by This is a Front, a new organization that uses theatre to bring awareness to contemporary sociopolitical issues on national and global scales. At “Artists in Response,” Bones provided tools for creatives to work through post-election emotions, including what is termed “community agreements” –– a series of pacts co-created by artists in real time, with Bones as the facilitator.
Stage Raw: How did your journey with intimacy coordination begin?
Bones: It was a long time coming. I studied acting at UCLA and I started directing towards the end of that. That’s my deepest resonance as an artist. I directed a lot of shows. I’m really drawn to shows with charged material around gender and sexuality. I also trained and worked as a sex educator, and starting to unconsciously weave some of those things together. Then around 2018, this new field of intimacy, direction, coordination, choreography, came into my awareness, and it was something that really felt like the intersection of both of my areas of experience, expertise, and passion. And so I started pursuing some supplemental training and specific training to that work, and then just started working in that area and putting myself out there.
SR: As you mentioned, intimacy coordination is a synthesis of your theatrical background and your interest in sex education. How much would you say you draw from each field?
Bones: I think it’s a little more from the theater side. I don’t know if it’s 50/50, maybe like 60/40 –– 60% working in the medium of theatre, working with actors on charged material, and just having the experience of telling stories with bodies in space and communication with actors around that kind of storytelling. And then [I] really supplemented it with sex education. I worked for 5+ years at The Pleasure Chest in West Hollywood, and they have a really robust sex ed program offered to staff who are interested. Just being in that environment gave me so much experience around gender, diversity, and inclusion, and language, and queering sex ed, which totally fed back into choreographing intimacy.
SR: How would you describe your day-to-day freelance work?
Bones: The day-to-day is always a little different, which is the one thing that I love about freelance, although the instability is sometimes challenging.
There’s a lot of prep that goes into the work, especially for film. Being on a film set is just like being in tech week –– it’s like you’re in tech the whole time. There’s not a lot of room for discussion and collaboration, so I really frontload all those conversations. I talk to directors, I read scripts. I love making charts, especially because I work on a lot of shows and sometimes films at once.
When I read a script, I make a Google Sheet to track all the moments, and that really helps me, especially if I’m jumping between a lot of stories –– just reading the script through the intimacy lens, ideally talking to the director, making myself available to talk to actors, and then prepping to do the work. I’ll always do an intro workshop session for the whole cast and the main creative team who’s going to be in the room, giving folks some shared concepts and frameworks about starting the discussion –– how do we want to hold consent while telling this story with this group of people in this moment in time?
SR: How did you first get involved with “Artists in Response,” and how would you characterize the community you were able to foster through this experience?
Bones: Recently, I was reached out [to] by This is a Front Theatre, a wonderful new organization. I did intimacy for their Fringe show this summer, Mikvah Girls. I love that show so much — it was a really exquisite production, and I was so thrilled to get to work on it. They’re also really committed to weaving arts and activism together. They reached out and asked about hosting an artist post-election response conversation. I got to facilitate with two other incredible colleagues that I absolutely adore, and they did a lot more of the education part. I held the beginning of the community agreements [part of the program] and starting to process feelings, because I really think that’s the first step before action: feeling things and taking time with that. We had a small but really lovely turnout. I think everyone who showed up really needed that space just to be able to be vulnerable, to come in with everyone’s different experiences, to learn, to consider. Hopefully, this is the first of many. We talked about doing another one in January or February.
SR: Many intimacy coordinators voted recently to unionize under SAG-AFTRA. How would you describe the state of current labor protections for intimacy coordinators?
Bones: Since this is a much newer position, the folks who do this work really want to be respected and compensated just like anybody else in the field. There is a lot more that goes into the job than just being on set. Especially on film, there’s so much prep. There’s a lot of energetic and emotional labor. It’s a very multi-dimensional work, and I think the people who do this work really put in a lot to care for artists that they’re working with, especially actors. We just want to have our time, our artistic talents, our contributions, be held and respected and compensated, just like anybody else.
I’m optimistic that [the unionizing] will bring more legitimacy. “Fine word, legitimate,” to quote King Lear. That’s a whole other conversation, because who decides what’s legitimate can be steeped in gatekeeping. I hope that this unionizing doesn’t create more gatekeeping or barriers and exclusiveness for who can do the work, because I really think there’s a balance. It’s a really delicate position, and there’s a lot of harm that could be caused if somebody is trying to do this outside of the scope of their abilities. I also think that sometimes there can be an overprotectiveness and inaccessibility that creates less diversity in the fields than would truly be beneficial.
SR: In terms of intimacy education, are there any specific resources you recommend that are more accessible to the general public?
Bones: TIE, Theatrical Intimacy Education, has some really good intro workshops. They offer sliding scales, they offer some on Zoom. That’s often a place where I direct people to start and get a taste and get the basics. For folks who are more experienced, I think there’s a big gap between theory and practice in this field. A lot of people have a lot of training, and then there’s not a lot of bridges to actually doing the work.
My favorite more advanced training: Chelsea Pace recently started Open Intimacy Creatives. There’s some fantastic classes, online cohorts. Ann James, who started Intimacy Coordinators of Color. She and I, years ago in 2020, started a podcast that we did for a year called Intimacy Choreography in Conversation, [which] has us having open conversations that were inspired by a lot of questions we got when we had a conversation through Directors Lab West online in 2020. We stepped away from it for a few years. I think we’re gonna try to bring the podcast back in the new year, which is really exciting.
I also have on my website, thespomancer.com, a free worksheet that I put together a number of years ago and update every couple years, which is an Actor Boundaries Reflection. It’s inspired by the style of a yes, no, maybe list, which is often a tool that sex educators use to help people figure out things like: what am I interested in, and where do my desires and interests overlap with my partner, and what are my clear boundaries?
SR: Do you have any advice for someone who wants to be an intimacy coordinator, director, or actor?
Bones: When I was trained as an actor, there was really a culture of “Don’t be ‘difficult,’’ and “You’re not going to get work if you don’t say yes to things.” I think that’s not true. I think it’s really healthy to have boundaries. I would just encourage any artist or human to reflect on what things don’t align with your personal values and integrity, and allow yourself to say no to those things. I think that strengthens you as an artist and a person. You may miss out on some opportunities, but are those really the opportunities you want to do? Especially when you’re a younger artist and just getting into the industry, I think it’s really easy to be taken advantage of in that way, so you don’t have to drink that Kool Aid.
The other thing I consider a toxic message that I have rewritten for myself, is: “You are a ‘successful’ actor [only] if that is your main job that’s paying all the bills. You’re always booking, you’re always auditioning.” The hustle culture of that is so exhausting and depleting. So I would say instead that being a multi-hyphenate increases the richness of your artistry and your human life. Most artists that I know do multiple things and those cross-pollinate each other. Being a sex educator helped me be an intimacy director. Being a director helped me be a community facilitator. All of those are different areas of wisdom that can inform and flesh out the others.
I would encourage you, especially young artists, to really reflect on what ideas of success have been imposed upon you from the industry. Do you actually agree with them or not? To live in alignment, creating within your own values and integrity is a really fulfilling thing that I think leads to a personal, healthy life and will help your career.
You can learn more about Carly DW Bones’ current and past work through their website: https://thespomancer.com/.
