A Conversation About Intimacy Coordination and Ballroom
As part of our Dance for Pride programming this year, we held the first ever workshop between ballroom dancers and intimacy coordinators, the latter a position becoming increasingly popular on film sets and live theatrical productions – someone who advocates for the boundaries and rights of performers during scenes of intimacy.
Per the mission statement of Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (IDC), the organization we worked with this year, they hope “to equip every institution and individual artist in the entertainment industry with the resources and education needed to create a culture of consent in which intimate stories can be told with safety and artistry.”
Most often, intimacy coordinators help navigate sex scenes in film and television, but this level of intimacy is a topic that has become increasingly taboo to discuss between ballroom dancers – perhaps because it is not as romantic to discuss such things, because we all hope that the connection we have with our partner is a beautiful, ephemeral, unspeakable thing. This is a dangerous attitude to have, and a dangerous culture to foster.
This year, our founder and editor-in-chief Carly Mattox hosted the workshop at Emmanuel Pierre-Antoine Dance Studio, with a group of community leaders within the New York City post-collegiate amateur community in attendance. Included amongst them was Crystal Song, a PhD candidate in performance studies at the University of California Berkeley, Outreach Chair for Big Apple Dancesport Challenge, co-founder of Dance for Pride, and frequent WTF contributor.
Here, the two discuss their thoughts on the workshop and its implications for the larger partner dance community.
I want to know, first of all, what your expectations were.
Crystal: I think I wasn't really expecting anything super concrete to come out of it. I did figure that it would be a small group, not because it wasn't well organized or important, but because it was the kind of thing that would probably require people to rub two brain cells together and think about like, “oh, why would ballroom need something like that?” You know, obviously, we do. So I figured that the exact people who showed up would show up, people who have been dedicated to the community in a very unofficial capacity, not because of titles or compensation, just because we show up to everything.
Carly: All of the emotional toil without any of the financial incentive.
Crystal: So I also figured it'd be a pretty comfortable environment for us to be open about things, which is nice. Because if it were a bigger group…
Carly: …it would have felt different.
Crystal: But I felt like, for me, as someone who's in a performance studies program at a school like Berkeley, the vocabulary of intimacy direction was something that I was familiar with, but I figured that almost no one else in the room would actually have said those words, even if they were on board with the ideas. So I was kind of interested to see how these worlds would come together. Like, even if people in ballroom know to care about stuff like agency and intimacy and consent, they don't really use those words.
Carly: Yeah, definitely. And I think my general feeling on the conversation was, this is very much a 101 class. And just because of the people who showed up, it seemed like everyone was on the same page. But there was — I don't know if you felt this, something of a disconnect between intimacy coordinators and what they understand about ballroom dance, how certain rules are different.
Crystal: I think that it's very revealing, it’s pretty obvious how little most people who work in the arts know about ballroom, or any sort of partner dancing. And I think the main thing I thought about after is that like, the kinds of issues present in the community are not issues that can be addressed through a list of guidelines or a waiver or rules for a particular event, even if we had control…
Carly: We’re not studio owners, so we can't actually do that.
Crystal: But even if we could, that wouldn't solve those problems. And like, that's not unique to ballroom, the fact that enacting particular practices won't magically transform the industry. So that's never what I would have expected. But I do think that like, as someone who studies partner dancing and takes it really seriously, it can be kind of annoying to see people in the arts put so little thought into it, that they're like, oh, the stuff that I know about theater or filmmaking should be applicable. And like someone had to, like, raise their hand very politely and be like, well, we touch each other, like 1000 different times over the course of like one practice.
“That’s not unique to ballroom, the fact that enacting particular practices won’t magically transform the industry.”
Carly: It's just different.
Crystal: It made me think a lot, just because of the dissertation chapter that I've been working on, the day-in day-out of a long term partnership is so different from how you negotiate consent and intimacy on a film set, or a theatrical production, who are probably getting paid in some way and accountable to each other in some way. Like, it is just really different. So not something I would have expected anyone who wasn't in this industry to know automatically. But I think that ballroom is just marginal enough that people don't think they need to know more about it.
Carly: I feel like it’s multiple problems, with different layers. It's the problem of people in the arts who don't really take ballroom seriously as its own art form for various reasons. But also because it's closer to like a...an immersive theater performance that you're living every single day of your life. It's the physical sensation of it. I remember talking to my friend, who's an intimacy coordinator, and they were like, there's a lot of rules for actors going into and out of their character. And that's how they separate themselves from whoever they're playing, and that’s how they can go home to their partner at the end of the day. And I wanted to talk about, like, how you can do that, like physically? And if that's even possible in ballroom dance.
Crystal: Yeah.
I guess my question is, what do you think was especially applicable to your own practice?
Crystal: I do think it was helpful when we actually did the physical exercises at the end, where we had to practice saying, “Yes, and,” and then, “No, but,” or something like that.
Carly: Oh, I loved that.
Crystal: We really broke down each point of contact for every kind of connection. When I first started dancing, when I would go to socials, it’s always like, oh, more experienced people do full body contact. So if I want to become more experienced I need to do that too. And at a certain point, I was kind of just like, okay, I'm not going to do full body contact, unless I know this person well. And if not, I'm just gonna hold myself here. When we initiate touch a thousand times at every practice, we start to take for granted what all the pieces of that connection are. So I think it's helpful to sort of break it down again, and be like, okay, we can connect this way, but not this way for me today, for this reason, or for no reason. And I think it's always more helpful even just on like a technical level, when you're trying to run a diagnosis of why something is or isn't working, or why something is uncomfortable, just to break down what piece of the connection is off? And to be able to communicate that, and have the other person hear that and not get offended.
Carly: There was an extended conversation we had, workshopping ways to create a community within our own community. Like, why can't we keep our own members safe? Because no one is on the same page in terms of who is allowed to be in the community. It seems like community guidelines can't be enforced, because there's no centralized body.
“When we initiate touch a thousand times at every practice, we start to take for granted what all the pieces of that connection are.”
Crystal: I think it'd be more enforceable with a collegiate team. I think that with, I guess what you can loosely call the post-collegiate community, that part of the amateur community in New York, it's very non-bureaucratized, which I think ultimately is a good thing. But we don't have a list of members, we don’t pay dues, there are no requirements for participation, which also means there's nothing to hold people accountable to. We're so enmeshed in the bigger industry, and there's such terrible people in it.
Carly: I mean, to a certain extent, there is some power. Even when we don't have these community guidelines, we have like the power of the collective, which sometimes is underestimated.
Crystal: I think that's true. I think that there is a very slow, quiet crawl through which some people have enough wherewithal to recognize like, okay, I'm not really wanted here. I don't know how they understand that, like, I don't know what that looks like, in their head. I don't really care that much. And it's just such a like, it's, it's an extremely understated kind of canceling, I guess. I personally don't think it's strong enough. I think people are too polite. Because they don't really conceptualize the things that these men have done as an offense, it’s just like, Oh, that's kind of weird. People don't really like it, but I think if they were really like, oh, that's abuse, or that's assault, then we would act differently. And we wouldn't be so worried about being polite. People just find it too uncomfortable. Because they feel like, Oh, we're gonna be overstepping. Like, oh, I don't really know what's going on. And so like, I don't want to potentially make a big deal out of it.
Carly: Such pussy shit to the fullest. I'm sorry.
Crystal: It’s very annoying. I understand it, because I've happened to hear a lot of very explicit stories about particular people, and not everyone has, and a lot of people don't believe anything until they're faced with too much evidence.
Carly: I mean, this is something that's sad but true, people just don't care. They're like, this person was my friend, and I'm going to ignore this evidence because that is easier for me emotionally. Like, when actors are canceled, people say, this is going to make my own experience of watching his movies that much more difficult. Which is just a very selfish way to approach it. And I think that extends to like, when pro-Russia dancers come to teach in New York. And people acknowledge those politics, and are still like, I'm gonna take lessons from them anyway, though. It's like, okay, what are we doing here?
Crystal: Yeah. I don't know if this, like, is still relevant, but I find cancel culture very terrifying. I don't know, I think we have like, created a beast we cannot control. I think maybe some people just genuinely want blood and like, that's fine too. But I feel in a lot of cases, it would be better if we could take the time as a community to create the structures for sustained conversation, like if we talked about this more than, like, once a calendar year. I don't know, I think it's hard to say what the end version of these practices should look like, because we haven't even really begun to have a real, sustained conversation about this.