“Inside the fight, it’s like paint by numbers… and there’s something about Tonia’s building a vocabulary that [Tonia Sina’s] endeavoring to make the intimacy the same. So that in the throes of onstage passion, things never wander. Nobody ever gets lost along the way, and therefore everybody is safe.”
— Director Jillian Keiley
“We want to treat intimacy just like choreography of any other style. It’s not something to be ashamed of, just because it’s about intimacy.”
— Tonia Sina
What’s different is the intent of these exercises. Sina builds on them so that what took minutes to establish a bond between paired performers can be re-established in seconds. At every stage there’s group discussion about what people are and aren’t comfortable with.
“Most of all I emphasize communication within the cast, from director to actor and with the stage manager,” Sina says. “There should never be a rehearsal without a stage manager or coach or other third party present. Without one, without someone supervising, its no longer the work of acting.”
- The Ins and Outs of Onstage Intimacy, Now Toronto,
Steve Fisher
I looked at our protocols, and there were no real protocols, so I said, “Let’s create [some].” Tonia Sina, who created something called intimacy choreography, wrote her thesis on it in 2004. I reached out to her and we met up in an apartment in Brooklyn and I told her all about what I was doing. She said, “I think we should start a company,” and so me, her and Siobhan Richardson started Intimacy Directors International in 2015.
— Alicia Rodis, Variety
“Stage Sex is nothing like real sex. It’s fake. It has to be taught, and it has to be choreographed separately.”
— Tonia Sina, Huffington Post
“What we’re hoping to do is change the industry so we can prevent sexual harassment from happening in the first place. And if we can change the industry standard, we think that could happen.”