Acting on stage or film sometimes involves getting physically intimate with a person with whom you aren’t intimate in real life; sometimes, indeed, they are complete strangers. In most cases, this is just one of the peculiarities of the work, and actors get used to it. But there are also many cases where the practice is abused, or the performers’ feelings are ignored. That’s where Alli St. John comes in.
St. John does credit to her alma mater Arizona State University. A graduate of ASU with an MFA in Theater for Youth and Community, St. John landed a job with the prestigious Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“I oversee our summer camp program,” St. John says. Her experience at ASU and in theaters around the Valley has more than prepared her for this position. The Cleveland native came to pe after undergraduate studies at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio. In her time here “I worked with Childsplay, taught summer camps, went into classrooms,” St. John recalls. “I started acting as a child, so I am a product of Theater for Youth.”
But she also works under another title that is a newer addition to the list of theatrical professions: Intimacy Director. Her work as an “Intimacy Director and Safety Captain” goes back as far as a production of The Crucible at ASU in 2019, and Barefoot in the Park at Mesa Encore Theatre in 2021.
“I’m an actor advocate,” St. John explains. “I’m there to help with any kissing or other simulated activity onstage.” The position is needed, says St. John, because “generally the theater industry has a long history of actor abuse… “Actors feel like they have no autonomy.”
To help counter feelings of this sort, St. John will “lead consent and intimacy workshop[s] for cast members, attend rehearsals to gain insight on character work and blocking, collaborate with directors, choreographers, fight directors and actors to create intimacy choreography, choreograph moments of intimacy, attend preview performances to ensure choreography is safely executed and offer notes.”
Her goal in all this, she says, is to ensure that “if there’s an actor expressing a boundary, that they are heard, and that they are working in a safe environment.” As for her own career goals, St. John says, “Long term, I’d like to direct theater for youth, and continue working as an intimacy director.
“I like my administrative work, but I want to be the rehearsal room.”
MV Moorhead is a regular contributor to Wrangler News and longtime film critic for Phoenix New Times.
