 Hi, I am Diana Wyon, a producer at Directors Lab West. Before we begin, it is Memorial Day here in the U.S., so let's take a moment to remember the military personnel who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. Thank you. For those of you who are new to our lab, DLW is a 20-year-old, all-volunteer-run organization that every May provides an eight-day intensive full of workshops, panels, masterclasses, and more for emerging and mid-career theater directors and choreographers from all over the world. But this year, because of coronavirus pandemic, we are adopting how we do what we do by creating this Directors Lab West Connects, and we've been overwhelmed by your response and thoughtful questions. So, welcome to day three of our eight-day conversation series, crafted for and by theater directors and choreographers, live streamed by our wonderful partners at HowlRound to their website and to our Directors Lab West Facebook page. Those joining us on Facebook, please use the chat to tell us who you are and where you're logging on from and post any questions you might have for our speakers. I also want to thank Aviva, Aviva Levy, our ASL interpreter for today. Thank you so much for being here with us. And now, it is my pleasure to welcome our speakers Ann James and Carly D. Wegstein. They'll turn on their videos, and as I do, I want to share that as an emerging activist and early career artist, Ann had the opportunity to advocate for women in warring countries by serving as executive aid to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Betty Williams. She has since become an internationally certified educator and stage director by learning her craft as an associate director at Steppenwall, Hartford Stage, the Alley, and the Goodman, marking now her 30th year as a professional. She is now compelled to make both stages and film sets safer places for people of color. To that end she is pursuing America's first doctoral degree in intimacy direction for people of color and launching intimacy coordinators and directors of color this summer. Now Carly D. Wegstein is a theater director, sex educator, intimacy director and community facilitator. She founded and directs the Illyrian Players, a feminist ensemble for theater artists in Los Angeles. And she works as an intimacy director for theater companies and universities in the Los Angeles area and beyond. Carly creates at the intersection of theater, community, healing, sexuality, art is activism, and her work champions communication and consent as an essential part of the creative process. You can find their full bios and all of our speakers bios at directorslabwest.com. Now Ann and Carly are going to be in conversation for about 30 minutes and then I'm going to return with some questions called from the Facebook chat. But before I go, for those newer to this kind of work. I want to share with you that intimacy choreography and direction is the craft of delivering moments of staged intimacy or sexual violence with the same respect, specificity and professionalism that we treat moments of all other movement based storytelling. Intimacy choreographers endeavor to respect the boundaries, integrity and needs of the actors involved, so that they can do their best work enthusiastically. And we also want to acknowledge that while intimacy direction and intimacy choreography is a new and emerging toolkit and practice in our rehearsal rooms. The practice of protecting actors from the harms of unbalanced power in relation to their craft has been present in the theater for much much longer. So with that, shall we dive in? Sounds great. Hi Carly. Hi Ann. Hello. All right, now that I shared all of that, let's kick this off and I'm going to ask you both to share with us how the pandemic has impacted you and has impacted your practice. That's really good. Carly, you want to take it or you want me to take it? Take it away. First of all, hi everyone, thank you so much and thank you to HowlRound and thank you to Directors Live West. This has been an honor to create this communication channel and I thank you so much for supporting this. I wear the blue lipstick in solidarity with our essential workers out there, so that's why my lips are blue. Also, it's a fabulous color. Yeah, so the pandemic has impacted me in different ways. I will say, you know, right when we got the Safer at Home call here in California, I'm here in Los Angeles, which is the ancient land of the Tong Vu people. And we just kind of stopped everything. I was on my way. I had plane reservations to go to an EDII conference with TIE, which is the Theater Intimacy Educators. And I was going on speaking engagements. I had Canada, you know, to look forward to and everything just stopped. That was the first initial shock of what was actually happening to our world. Then I got angry. I started writing plays. I decided I was going to write a play today, you know, the super efficient. I'm going to just crank out productivity and just be productive. Now I'm in a phase where I have produced some plays. I am not angry anymore, and I am breathing deeply. I am breathing deeply in this moment and taking time to go deeper with research and knowledge that I have and that I want to learn and that I want to share. So I feel very humble and very open to opportunity, and I'm willing to listen to what the business of intimacy is saying it needs. And I'm willing to share that information as I get it. So I guess I'm in a very humble place now, a very vulnerable place, but I feel strong. I feel strong about the practice and I feel that it's only going to grow larger. And I'm very inspired by that. And one of the people who inspires me is Carly. So Carly, how's it going with you in this pandemic? Oh my gosh, and you inspire me so much. Yeah, it's I had a similar thing where I had a lot of kind of balls in the air of workshops and shows that I was intimacy directing for, especially a lot of university theater programs in the area, which had been really incredible. And then, yeah, everything kind of just stopped. But I've been really trying to take this time as we heard in yesterday's discussion that phrase from Jessica Hannah invest in the pause which I love so much. It's so good. But just to to let this force slow down via kind of time to reconnect to like asking and checking in why do I do theater. What do I want to do with that. When we get back into these spaces together, what stories will be really important to tell and also in these like cyber spaces right now. And I think this whole thing really is reaffirming my desire just to like move away from the commercialism capitalism competition competition kind of sides of theater in industry that can be really exhausting. And to just double down investing in community healing and processing and growing. And that's what theater is really meant to be I think a tool for. I think all of this is just inspiring me some it's waves, it's waves. This whole thing, you know, but what the overall it's inspiring me to be more resilient and creative and I really believe that our theater communities can can rise to meet the challenges and just about intimacy I think we're going to have to be so much more mindful and considerate of actors needs and boundaries because they're going to hugely change when we are are able to get back into physical spaces together. And I'm really dedicated right now to making information about consent practices that directors can use in their rooms more accessible so we can still do some learning and growing and setting with seeds for for when we can be together again. But in the meantime, I think we can really trust in our collective creativity and that we can find less naturalistic but maybe even more powerful ways to physically tell stories of intimacy on our little box screens and then when we get back into spaces together. Hopefully in the not too distant future but That's awesome. That's awesome. So, how did you get into intimacy work with what's your what's your or what's your superhero origin. I love that. I'm spider man. Into the spider verse is actually my intimacy soundtrack to like pump up whenever I do this work. But my original backgrounds I trained as an actor for for many years and I as a director as well I feel like I'm an actor's director like that's really a background for me because I often felt disempowered as an actor in was upset by how workers rooms were run. I saw a lot of peers and friends, because like all my favorite people are actors. I'm mistreated and even turned off from theater. And then just before I graduated I moved to directing from acting and everything kind of clicked. So I have really big feelings about mindfully running rehearsal rooms and how a director's job really includes taking care of your actors and respecting their integrity and boundaries to get and that's what gets the best work for everyone that's what makes theater sustainable. And so I kind of was on this simultaneous parallel journey of learning to be a director and learning to be a sex educator and started kind of putting some of those back and forth into each other. And that was the gems and nuggets that I learned from, from each. I've been, especially with the valerian players. My ensemble, I have been directing material that's focused on sexuality for the last 10 years or so. And I really love using theater as a tool to question how our communities can collectively heal from our cultural wounds around sex. And so I started doing videos before we can move forward in theaters and incredible tool for that. And then I found out that intimacy direction through IDI, who's that now now IDC is something that exists and I went to my first workshop with Tonya and I learned amazing things and it crystallized some language and framework for this new role in theater spaces. And until then I did various trainings of intimacy and kind of supplemental things. I draw a lot from my sex educator background and also just from the way that I direct and operate as a director. And then I just kind of ran with it and over the last year and a half, especially or so I've been really dedicated to making this work more accessible in like smaller LA theaters. And yeah, I recently started working in a lot of university theater programs and I just really want to give students, especially acting students tools and language and safety that I didn't necessarily have. But I think there's so many ways to get into this field and there's not one like you need to check all these boxes. How, how did you come to this work. Well, it surreptitiously, I guess, you know, I'm, I was in school in the 80s, you know, the late 80s. Actually, I landed in university right at the height of the AIDS HIV AIDS crisis. Actually, our little tiny theater department of 50 drama majors, which is now over 300 drama majors a year are coming out. We lost 14 of our friends over an 18 month period. And so, you know, I remember sewing clothes and just weeping into the seams of, you know, just sadness and building sets and painting sets and remembering the people who had just fallen the week before. And so my interest and intimacy started back then. I come from a time and I know some of you older drama people out there, theater people out there know that, you know, some of my professors were sleeping with the students and, you know, that was just kind of Derigure at that time. And I found it absolutely appalling. Yeah, the whole idea of casting couch was absolutely appalling to me. And so I developed this system called circles of intimacy that I developed while I was working with actors that I would cast for directing experiences that I was I was having while a junior and senior in college. So the circles of intimacy really dealt with casting members in our department who were HIV positive, and the fear of touching them. The understanding that it was okay to be touched, certainly influenced my, my experience as a director. And so I've carried that with me all these years, 30 years this year in the business. But what was so interesting and Tonya, there's this big heart for you if you're out there. And what was so cool about running into and I literally ran into IDI on my research, looking for something to connect as I moved here to LA is that it gives a language and it gives a moment to rest in the fact that actors are the foundation of our craft, and that if we can't care for them, and we can't protect them, then our house is broken. And building the foundation of protecting actors, and making sure that the power is dynamic in the rehearsal room, and quite frankly, here in Hollywood on sets is vital to the success and the health of the industry. So I'm moving forward with the understanding that while this foundation is has been created we're kind of in the second wave of the intimacy industry, and I would like to personally, you know, my personal quest as a superhero in this field is to bring more people of color into the leadership of the field and not only in intimacy direction, which for those of you who don't know is more geared toward theater, then also intimacy coordination, which is more geared toward film and television. So I really want to open those doors of inclusivity and diversity in the field of intimacy direction, but I couldn't be happier and much respected those who have created a great foundation for for what is going to lead us into the future. Absolutely that's that's so beautifully said and that brings up something else I'd really love to ask you about how do we ensure that the community of intimacy directors is as diverse as our community of humans and like, does this involve making training access more available does involve making more awareness of this role. What could better accessibility in this field look like and how can we make sure we we ship as we move in the second wave of this field off of the beautiful foundation. How do we make sure that diversity and inclusion are real practices and not just a buzzword. That is a lot of questions. Let's unpack it. Let's unpack it. I've taken some notes. You know, a lot of organizations be pre pandemic. We're suffering from this idea that white male patriarchal society was the benchmark for the advancement of the performing arts. I'll just let that rest there for a moment. Artistic directors are statistically white and male film directors writers white and male so they kind of have a control over what we see as audience members and that is only a natural thing it's not a good thing it's not a bad thing it's just the way it is. Moving into what we can be and how we can reflect society in the world of intimacy direction is to have people of color in a place of leadership in those rehearsal rooms and on set and I'll tell you why because I really actually feel that if you have someone in the foundation of a production something like an intimacy director who holds a space for people in the room at their most vulnerable and I'm talking about the actors. I'm actually also talking about the directors and helping to support their work because that's what we're doing. We're not there to be the sex police. We're not there to be, you know, don't use profanity. Don't do this. We're not there to do that. The job is to hold space for the actors so that their natural voice can be heard about their boundaries and consent. So if we allow a person of color to come into the room and almost specifically care for the people in who are acting and sharing their craft. I venture to say this might be a little radical but hello I'm wearing blue lipstick. It might elevate the emotional intelligence of our craft. And I say that in a very organic way and a very holistic way that if we can give leadership to people of color in this way and in intimacy direction and coordination that there might be more understanding more compassion more acceptance. From the foundation of that production. So it is my desire to bring that to the forefront in the mind and I'm not saying let's change everything immediately. I'm saying we need to take this time in in this global pandemic to think about what we want to put forward in the world. What we want to create in the world and how we want to mirror society. Black people and people of color just don't exist in the world. We have an artistic point of view. We have thousands of years of culture to share but because we've been colonized all over the world our stories have been suppressed. And I feel like it's time now that the Earth has put us on time out. Literally. Literally Gaia has said that maybe when we come back that we will be more fruitful and more understanding about the power dynamics of art. And hopefully that will encourage more people of color in positions like intimacy direction and intimacy work in general to help raise the to help elevate our society in a very foundational way. Wow. Amazing. Yes. Amen. We got our fingers crossed. I believe I believe I love this idea of using pods to plant the seeds and what we want to see in the future. How we want to keep growing together. Yeah. Our theater community is a reflection of the larger global community too. Let's talk about that. OK. So when you're in the rehearsal room you've got lots of experience with being in the rehearsal room. Let's talk a little bit about the power dynamics and privilege in the rehearsal room. This idea of leading how do you lead. What do you think of when you help our helping directors and choreographers. Great. Great question. I can speak from experience like through intimacy direction and also from direction leading a room. And I think one of the most important things is just this foundation of directors need this awareness of the power that they have in the room. And that actors are conditioned and trained in a lot of ways to please the director at the expense of their personal boundaries and integrity sometimes. And that just that we there's this like stigma around actors saying no or pushing back and it makes you difficult or a diva. And I think as a director part of acknowledging the power that you have in a room or an intimacy director. It's really powerful to kind of actively undo that and practice naming at the beginning based on like the culture you want to create in your rehearsal room. Name the actors are not going to be punished by asking for what they need to do their best work and rather wanting to encourage that and say you can speak up and you're not going to be you know fired or punished or have a reputation as a difficult actor. Just because you asked for what you need to do your best work like actors as you said are the most vulnerable folks in the room their work lives in their bodies like that's incredibly vulnerable and so I think it's really important to to take care of them and give them permission to communicate their needs and a practice that I love and have done since the beginning of my experience as a director and offer to directors as an intimacy director because I think intimacy directors as you said are we're not the sex police. We're here to empower the directors and the actors to have better communication to really tell the story they want to tell, and to create a culture of consent in their rehearsal room. And one of my favorite tools for that is just taking the time to make group agreements, like with your actors at the top. What does this group telling this story in this context need to make sure that everyone can expect safety dignity and belonging when they come into the rehearsal room, let's take it. Yes, let's invest in a conversation and let people activate their voices. And I always suggest putting ask for what you need as one of those agreements so I think that's that's a really powerful way that that directors can start to advocate for actors and in a different way and acknowledge their power. I also think that it's really essential just to for for directors intimacy directors artists of all kinds to engage in reading and reflecting on the privileges that you personally as personally has as a human in this world around race gender ability size and more. And just to be aware of how that plays into the power you have as a director when or an intimacy director when you're telling actors what to do with their bodies, because we don't make theater in a vacuum. And I think it's essential to acknowledge that like, for instance, staging intimacy could be a lot more charged and vulnerable for an actor who's the only woman in the room. And so that's a great opportunity if you're a male director and you're directing that scene to consciously mindfully say I'm going to bring in a woman intimacy director. That's a great opportunity in that situation. And also, yeah. No, just building on that, you know, I think, you know, there's no reason why we should censor writers playwrights screenwriters there's no reason we should censor their stories and as stories come to the surface that are going to get greenlit are going to produce that have stories of intrinsic trauma to people of color to women to our trans community. I feel that it might serve intimacy direction and the craft to incorporate more of our family, the intersectionality of our family into the space. It's just going to be a natural progression to be fair. The more that the classes start to become available, I think, and even if creating, I would, I love the idea of creating affinity space for the initial training of different people in our intersection worlds. But then also there's this also this looking out into the community and saying, this is us. And this is how we share our intimate moments and this is how we tell the story of our cultural sexuality. I think that that's, that's going to be really important moving forward. And I think it will give power to the people who we want to share the story to our larger audience. That's amazing. I think just, yeah, making these tools available for for more folks and having folks feel empowered to to be like, even if I'm not an expert, I have a few I'm going to add a few things in my tool belt so that I can be more mindful of our culture and privilege and consent in the spaces that that I run. I would love to talk about, since we are in this like really intense time, and, you know, a lot of us as theater artists are drawn to very charged or challenging work. And how do we navigate spaces, and how do we balance where artists in intimacy directors specifically aren't therapists, but we're still exploring and opening up our emotions, especially in everything that will be very charged around touch in the aftermath of this pandemic and physical distancing. That's a great question. You know, I think, as we wake up out of this pandemic, and now I just read an article this morning, you know, theaters are being very reticent about opening up in the summer they're not opening summer. Now they're thinking fall, it's not going to happen, they're pushing it back to the spring shows have been canceled, you know, because we're really trying to create space for healing and for understanding, especially coming from our leadership, the information is so confusing. And so I think we just need to all take a breath and realize that we may be in this format, these boxes, we may be in these boxes for a while. I think we have to be very sensitive to people's personal clocks, we have to be sensitive to actors clocks and I say that because when we get back into rehearsal space and we are sharing spaces we were going to have to think about protecting ourselves and protecting our co actors, our crews, our designers, anybody in that space, I feel that we're going to have to have safety measures, and I know that equity is working on this day around the clock I know that SAG after is working on this, trying to improve the guidelines that they've put forth already. I think that it's going to be a very interesting time as we open back up things like masks and PPE and testing temperature taking all of those things are going to have to come into effect in order for us to do our craft. I don't like saying the new normal. I think it's a progression, I think it's an evolution. I really do believe that people who didn't necessarily have access to the arts are going to create and find interesting spaces to do theater. I think that, you know, I'm a big, big student of Grotowski's work in the poor theater, and Peter Brooks work with the conference of the birds and how, you know, this troop of marauding performers will come and lay out a blanket and perform for a small village and I mean I really, really believe in that and I believe that theater has been kind of kidnapped by financial crazy town. It's so expensive to do a show now. And now even no matter how much you throw money at this pandemic, it will still cause harm. And so I think those big institutions and those big engines and those big theaters. I just hope that if you're a director out there, I know we have 96% of you out there are directors and producers out there. I just want you to, yes, we love you, we love you and we know you want to get started again. And please hope that you can breathe with us and reach across the table to artists who are dying to do something for you and find a way to do it in a protective, healthy, sanitized way. Don't need to rush back into something just because of a financial decay. I think we just need to let that happen and focus on the health of our spaces, focus on the health of our audiences that come and see us and think about innovative ways to deliver theater because theater will never die. Absolutely, theater has survived many plagues and and I think this is it. You know, at a really tragic and horrific cost also but that we can also see there's an incredible opportunity to tear some things that weren't working to the ground and come back to this core of what you were saying, what do we really need what is the essential to tell this story. What are the essential stories, how are we using them to connect and feel with communities, we don't need these huge budget, expensive productions to do that. And I think there's will be some power in in grassroots theater, when we can be in physical spaces but in the meantime, I think we can still be creative in these boxes and that we can even, I think, as we talked about before on the phone there, there could be some amazing opportunities to get creative in staging intimacy in zoom theater in this possible stages and like, go with that, go with that. Okay, in this box, how do we, how do we share intimate moments when often the actors aren't even in the same room and that we're on this virtual landscape that is now zoom and hopefully something better soon. Well, I think this can all be applied both to the zoom boxes and then when we go back out is that like, let's lean into the magic of our medium, which is theater, which doesn't have to be naturalism. There's, we can be so creative, and we can tell stories in these like non literal ways that can sometimes be more powerful, like, in just in the zoom box like there's the distance to the camera. Like that's, that's often could be a very comedic kiss if that's the story you're telling. There's like leaning off of this. Yeah, but but just using reaching spatial relationship breath muscle tension design design can be incredible with light and sound I think is going to be a big part of that. Even in the, the before times one of my favorite sex scenes I've ever staged didn't have literal simulated sex there was just kissing and touching of arms and hands, and there can be something just as powerful sometimes more powerful by having a creative theatrical interpretation of an intimate moment. Yeah, I mean I did building on that depending on how long we're in these boxes. You know, some people are in the school of, don't make theater stop doing it in these boxes. It's not theater. And I understand and appreciate and respect that 100%. I think people are rushing to these boxes to just keep content going and to remain present to say I was the first to and, you know, we did a play and, which is great and I understand that and I believe that that is a fervor that I think we're maybe pulling back from I don't know maybe it's getting stronger. But I think we can create a choreography we can devise a vocabulary for intimacy in zoom. That's an interesting thing to me. You know, are we going to have a moment where a kiss is is demonstrated by a certain specific type of choreography. You know, is it going to are we going to have a vocabulary and a vernacular for the things that we do normally when we're in rehearsal, but through a zoom lens, literally see what I did there. I think that it would be really fun and interesting to investigate a new vocabulary or at least an interim vocabulary for what we're doing to display intimacy on these screens. I think it might be interesting for directors to investigate that interesting for designers and for actors to investigate kind of how we're going to create language around performing theater in in these boxes. Yeah, that's, that's amazing and I think some of our discoveries in that can be taken back to our physical spaces even out. One more thought I've been having about intimacy in some of the practices of intimacy direction in zoom theater. I think one I think we need to still be mindful of consent and asking when we're asking actors to tell sexualized stories and still not assume just because they're not touching anyone else that consent is automatic. And because especially even with privacy when something's on the internet, you have less control over it so I think we have to be mindful of that. And then I really one of my favorite practices from the field of intimacy direction, which is something I've engaged in as a director for for many years. Before that is the practices of IDI IDC calls it closure TIE calls it de rolling. Yeah, kind of re grounding away from back to yourself as a person and releasing of the character after after charged work. And I think that's so important for when directors through zoom open something vulnerable up and actors that we close it at the end that we book book market and making sure to lead this practice of re grounding into self after zoom is if we go deep into charge work, especially because we need to ritualize the separation because actors are performing in their homes in their rooms. We really need to not encourage actors to bring the trauma of their characters into their personal bodies and into their home spaces. And this is just a period that's a really intense strain on mental health in general. So let's let's use this practice to de stigmatize mental health and talk about it and encourage actors to take care of that. I could not agree more that is very well said, you know, there's this, you know, being in our own homes and, and, you know, not being able to tap out physically with our co actors. How far, how far should intimacy go. As far as theater is concerned. I mean, I mean, if we're in these boxes and people want to push the intimate world of their characters. How do we differentiate between intimacy and say pornography. Where is that line where we're in our rooms and we, we have an audience. How are we going to as intimacy facilitators going to draw the line in this time of the pandemic about what is intimacy and the theatrical use of intimacy and what is flipping over into pornography. Right. That's it. Amazing question. I see, I see Diana is back. Hi. Oh, no, no, no, no, it's a really, really good question. And maybe it also, there's been an amazing conversation happening in the chat and I've got some great questions here so feel free to continue that because I feel like I'm going to grab this one. Go for it. Laura Carlin asks, when a mistake has been made by a performer in the creation process. How do you help them learn or grow and simultaneously make amends. Do you draw from restorative justice practices. Great question. Do you want to start, Dan? Yeah, I mean, I think it's like, oops. Oh, I'm sorry. Right. Are we here? Are we here? I think you have to acknowledge that something has not gone quite right. And acknowledge it with that person and then apologize. I think the process of not shaming and not ignoring or glazing over it like, oh, get over it. You'll be fine. I think we'll be on that in the rehearsal room and in the rehearsal process. I think we live in a canceled culture. Unfortunately, or at least we did. Hopefully we won't in the future. But we live in a very blasé kind of a culture of, oh, you know, just grow up. But I think when we're working in a vulnerable space that we have to acknowledge that a mistake has been made. And then we have to apologize for that. Maybe Carly, you can build on that. Yeah, that's, that's really beautifully said and just so, so resonant with how I'm, I'm feeling about that. I think there absolutely has to be acknowledgement. I definitely use the practice and often include it in group agreement at the top of ouch, ouch, I'm sorry, move forward, um, which is, uh, something I originally learned from a gender justice LA training, but just a chance for someone to say, ow, that, that hurt me, oops, and I'm sorry, acknowledge that you made a mistake and apologize, like, don't say, oh but I didn't mean to because intent is not the same as actual impact. And so I think having space for, we're humans, we mess up, we try things and we mess up, especially as we learn and grow. And it can be messy. But I think part of accountability is acknowledging it. And then learning from it is not repeating that behavior. I think that's what becomes important. And, you know, different, different ouches, that sounds kind of reductive, but they require different levels of accountability and interference or not. But I think a way to, for things that are, they're smaller, I think that just acknowledging that this was a mistake and apologizing and then not repeating it can go so far. And I love what you said about cancel culture. I am very not into cancel culture. I think it's violent and I don't think it helps us overall. One of the best things I've ever heard about this is on one of my favorite podcasts. It's called How to Survive the End of the World with two sisters who are sci-fi writers and social justice activists, Adrienne Marie Brown and Autumn Megan Brown. But they talked about the violence of cancel culture and how there's, that doesn't lead room for us to grow and heal. If we take somebody who messes up and just put them away forever, they're done, we don't get better as a whole. And they have no chance to grow or heal. And the person who's been harmed in that community doesn't have that chance. So I think, you know, accountability is essential, but I don't think we need to full on cancel people every time that they make a mistake in their humanity. This could be a whole other. All of these could be a whole other. Let me throw in another question from the audience out there. A couple of people kind of asked this in different iterations across Facebook and in our registration questions. But do you feel that in a production, the roles of director and intimacy director should be separate? Or is it okay to combine? Why? I could start. As a stage director, as a trained stage director, you know, with hundreds of shows under my belt, I feel as though, yes, you can have the beauty of having an intimacy director in the room. And I encourage if the budget allows and the timeframe allows that you should 100% have an intimacy director in the room. However, if you can take, and these are directors, I know you're out there. Hi, I'm one of your clan. If you can look at the study of consent and boundaries. And actually, there's a book called Staging Sex. I really recommend it. It's by Chelsea Pace and Laura Ricard of TIE. And they really give you a practical knowledge if you can't have an intimacy director in the room with you at all times, how to navigate intimacy in a healthy way for with your actors forward. And I highly recommend that you snap that up and take a look at it because it gives you practical ideas and practical theory about putting intimacy work into a scope that has consent and boundary work incorporated into it. It's a beautiful book and a beautiful study. So if you can have an intimacy director, absolutely do make sure they're vetted. But if you cannot, then I highly recommend you do the deep work that it takes to actually understand what intimacy, consent and boundaries in your rehearsal room actually mean. Yeah, so that's kind of my thing about that. Amazing. That makes me think of a few other things. One, yes, that book is a really amazing resource for directors. And I believe that these basic tools and practices, they're great for just all directors to have. It's another thing to put in your tool belt. It doesn't make you an intimacy director, but I think it's just like, oh, I have a director who has a few basic skills around like fight choreography. That's another thing for your tool belt. I think there's something very analogous to it. I think it really is situational when you should bring in an intimacy director. I mean, yes, if you can afford it and if you feel you need one, and if you have done a real reflection and say, I don't have the tools to handle this, then it's really important to bring someone in. I think there's a lot of specifics. It depends on the context of the story, the actors, the context of the production. Is it a university, is it a what? And so just to ask yourself, oh, do I feel confident with my knowledge in staging this specific kind of scene? And if you're like, I'm not totally sure whether it's about that actual sexual practice or whether it just feels intimidating, whether it's about wanting somebody to come in and give you some specific choreography tools, though some directors feel really solid about choreography, but they might want support with negotiation and consent in actors' needs. Those are kind of two different skills that an intimacy director can bring. Also, like if you're looking at, you know, we're not therapists, but it behooves intimacy directors to have training in mental health first aid. So if you can see one of your actors distributing or displaying kind of disassociative behavior, you'll know how to talk that person back in. Not saying that you should do that without training, but there's something you should do to look at how the work and how the art is physically resonating within the actor in that moment. So those are things that intimacy directors are trained to do and certified to do, but yes, you can notice those things and you can in that moment recognize that maybe you need to pause, take a pause for a moment and allow that actor to redistribute that energy a little bit. That's amazing. And there's also some situations where like if you're working with two actors who have kind of personal history or conflict, that's a great time to bring in an intimacy director. If you're working with a company or a group that has like a history of consent violations or has had some issues, that's a great time to bring someone in. Just if you feel over your head with the specific, you're like, well, I can totally stage like a confident with a make out scene, but I don't feel confident staging this like BDSM kinky sex scene. You know, everybody kind of is a director, it's a it's a powerful thing to look in and be like, okay, what, what self reflection, what do I feel confident about? And what do I want support with an intimacy directors aren't going to take your job away or police you. They're there to collaborate, I really believe and help you realize your vision while keeping your acting safe. That's so you two have been such a wealth of knowledge. And I'm excited to take so many of the things that I'm hearing into my own practice. And we've got so many more questions and we have, I mean, we talked in our pre pre conversation about, I mean, I send you all the questions that I'm not able to get to right now. And you two are game to share some knowledge. And I think they have some plans about how they might be sharing that knowledge. But we'll definitely throw stuff onto the Facebook page that becomes available and check our website because we'll add additional resources. I know and you've got some specific resources that you're going to share with our audience today. And Carly as well. So because of time, I wish we could go on for so much longer. How's that even possible? I don't know. I don't know. But in closing, would you briefly, we're asking everybody this, would you briefly share something that you have learned or discovered during this quarantine period that you plan to incorporate into your practice as an artist? There's so much. What I'm learning when I think it's an unfolding process. It's like a flower that is blooming. Is that no one wants to hurt another person intentionally? And that in this time of sensitivity and pandemic, I really feel that artists are going to lead the way in healing. And this is a time where writers are writing. I can feel them writing. I feel them writing plays. I feel them writing screenplays. I feel that there will be a historic, you know, a historic collection of what is happening now. And I personally want to be ready to absorb those things, learn from those things. And then as an artist, I have nothing that stops me from wanting to share those things with the planet. And for me in this pandemic, I have to be resolute and understand that this is going to go day by day. And that there are no true answers except what we know, what we learn 10 years from now, five years from now, two years from now. We can't be in the knowing and in the experiencing at the same time. So I'm learning to breathe with that. I'm learning to talk to colleagues that have the same flow of energy that I do, directors, producers, actors, interested people, allies, all of our intersectional love bunnies out there. I just want us all to breathe together and learn how to treat one another better during this time out. That's so beautiful. I think for me one of the biggest things is in this pause just slowing down and just this reconnection with life is short and beautiful and precious and the world is a wild place. And what do we want to do with our time? Just what brings us fulfillment, what's in line with our integrity? What gifts can we share with others? And how can we use art? And I believe that so many of us are drawn to theater. I certainly am because it's such a communal creative craft in the communities that are around theater making. And so I think in this time it's a brilliant chance to say, what do I really want to do? What's important to me? And the importance of reaching out and connecting and the balance of taking time by ourselves because that is kind of inevitable, but also not forgetting, and sometimes it can feel exhausting and overwhelming in this time, but not forgetting to reach out and connect and not necessarily with the goal of productivity in mind, but just in hearing and inspiring each other and dreaming and scheming for the future, the uncertain future, but that we can can be in together and look forward to. Thank you. Thank you so much. So thank you to our fantastic speakers. And I want to thank again our partners at HowlRound and Travis on our tech, amazing. Aviva Levy, handling the ASL interpretation. Thank you so much, or you might be over here, you might be here, you might be, I don't know where you are for everyone else, but I just want to say thank you for being here and all the good work that you're doing. We'd also like to acknowledge our longstanding partners at the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the Pasadena Playhouse in Boston Court, Pasadena, and we really look forward to reuniting with them next year when hopefully we'll be together again in person. This conversation and all the conversations are going to be archived and available with closed captions on both HowlRound.com and DirectorsLabWest.com, so you can head there for that and to see any of the conversations you might have missed. And with that, I guess I'll say I hope you'll join us again tomorrow for a conversation between Laurel Lawson and myself as we discuss disability and equity as creative forces. So thank you so much for being here with us today. We hope this conversation sparks many, many more, and with that, be well. Thank you.