To get ready for rehearsal as an intimacy choreographer — or even just to talk about the work, in an interview or at a conference — Maya Herbsman has a ritual.
“I just have a certain set of songs I listen to,” she says. “I have a ring I put on. I have a shade of lipstick I wear. I’ll roll down my spine, roll back up, shake out my hips a little bit. Then I feel like I’m ready.”
Her work, staging intimate scenes in plays, “could include a simulated sex scene, a kiss, a hug between family members, nudity, a first touch between ‘Romeo and Juliet’ … whatever feels vulnerable and intimate.” In her current project, Cutting Ball Theater’s “The Bald Soprano,” running Wednesday, June 5, through June 16 at the Exit on Taylor, she’s staging a sexually intimate, yet ridiculous, encounter between a maid (Radhika Rao) and a fire captain (Doug Nolan).
Herbsman makes those scenes “specific, technical, repeatable and highly choreographed.” She compares her job to fight choreography, in its use of standardized practices to keep actors and everyone else in the rehearsal room safe — physically, emotionally and psychologically.
That can entail holding a lot of other artists’ trauma, hence the rituals. She needs a way to step into the work and then step back out of it, so she can go back home and watch “Friends” reruns, so she can sleep at night.
Intimacy choreography, or intimacy direction, is a new discrete profession but a function as old as theater itself. Herbsman, 23, is to her knowledge the only trained practitioner of it in Northern California. She’s an apprentice with Intimacy Directors International, which was founded by Tonia Sina, Alicia Rodis and Siobhan Richardson in 2016.
That novelty can make Herbsman’s work a tough sell. “People ask me this a lot: ‘Why do we need it? Why is it important? Hasn’t the industry existed for years before this?’ ” she says. “The answer is yeah, it has. And with the #MeToo movement and with the Time’s Up movement, we’re seeing all the damage that’s been caused with the way that the industry’s been run so far.”
Herbsman, a Bay Area native, was first trained as a director. In college at Wesleyan, she worked with organizations dedicated to promoting awareness about sexual consent, and her directing friends would ask her to consult on their projects when they were staging intimate scenes. She thinks they asked “ultimately because I was comfortable with it, which is a lot more than many people can say. … I make good eye contact. I’m someone who has worked really hard at making safe spaces, and that started for me as a teenager, in activism work.” She’s referencing earlier feminist and multicultural causes, leading the Gay Straight Alliance at her high school, the Urban School of San Francisco. She also credits her Jewish summer camp, Camp Tawonga in Yosemite, for instilling in her the value of body positivity, in creating safe spaces for its campers to be vulnerable.
For Rao, “The Bald Soprano” marks the first time she’s worked in depth with an intimacy choreographer; it’s also her first sex scene in her career. “I have this narrative sometimes that I’m not necessarily physically the most interesting actor onstage.”
She’s not a trained dancer, and she can feel self-conscious about her body in scenes that rely more on movement than on dialogue. But Herbsman worked by “reinforcing what (Nolan) and I are inherently good at doing.”
Herbsman first spent a long time talking to the pair about their boundaries and comfort levels, pledging to work with them, not against them. She provided a structure so that the scene’s staging “is not up to me and how I, my body moves in an intimate situation.” Still, that safe space meant Rao felt comfortable supplying ideas. She surprised herself by how much she contributed. “My narrative about myself changed.”
Most actors seem grateful to have an intimacy choreographer on site, Herbsman says. “But I find when I work with actors over the age of 40, it sort of takes on this whole new meaning, because they realize all that they’ve been putting up with for their whole career. In that moment they realize the things that they didn’t know how to say no to, they didn’t know they could say no to, they didn’t know they were allowed.”
One of the exercises Herbsman leads early in rehearsal processes is all about saying “no,” deprograming how actors are always taught to say, “yes, and” — or else. “Because again, if I don’t say ‘yes,’ there’s 50 women outside the door who will say ‘yes’ instead. So intimacy directors are trying to popularize this idea of, instead of ‘yes, and,’ ‘no, but.’ So it’s saying, ‘No, we’re not going to do this, but we’ll keep playing this other way.’ So we’re still going to keep going. I’m not shutting the play down. I’m not saying we have to stop rehearsal. I’m just saying, ‘instead of touching me on my neck, can you touch me on my shoulder?’ ”
In that exercise, women and trans performers often have profound reactions. “Their whole body stiffens up. They start to sort of, whatever their nervous habit is, whether it’s playing with their hair, tapping their fingers. Sometimes people cry. People have a really wide range of reactions the first time that I challenge them to say no. … It’s like you’re watching all of this ingrained hetero-patriarchy and societal expectations and this industry and the world — you’re watching all that they’ve lived with their whole life all of a sudden start to bubble up in one 10-minute theater exercise.”
When Herbsman leaves that world at the end of a rehearsal, she has another ritual to shake it all off. She dances and sings, as big and loud as she can in her car, out on the street, wherever. Then she’s ready to go home.
“The Bald Soprano”: Written by Eugène Ionesco. Translated and directed by Rob Melrose. Wednesday, June 5, to June 16. $30-$40. Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., S.F. 415-525-1205. https://cuttingball.com
