Intimacy Coordinator ITA O’BRIEN on Normal People, Sex Education & Creating Safe Spaces

Feminism, Women’s Stories: The Creative Process: Empowering Stories, Inspiring Women, Gender Equality, Women's Rights & Empowerment

How can intimate scenes be brought to the screen in ways that respect the emotional well-being and privacy of the artists themselves? How do we make sure that we can create a story about abuse without anyone being abused in the process?

Ita O’Brien is the UK’s leading Intimacy Coordinator, founder of Intimacy on Set (and author of the Intimacy On Set Guidelines). Her company, set up in 2018 provides services to TV, film, and theatre when dealing with intimacy, and is a SAG-Aftra accredited training provider of Intimacy Practitioners. Intimacy on Set has supported numerous high-profile film and TV productions including Normal People & Conversations With Friends (BBC3/Hulu), Sex Education 1&2 (Netflix), I May Destroy You (BBC/HBO), It’s A Sin (Channel 4), (Neal Street Prods / Searchlight Pictures).

"It's been a very organic journey and one that still surprises me and I feel I'm so grateful for the journey that life has taken me on and subsequently the creation of this work. I was a dancer and then a musical theatre performer, professionally trained as an actor, and then did the MA in Movement Studies at Central and worked as a movement teacher and a movement director. During that time, I was exploring my own theatre work, and put on my own play called April's Fool, and then was looking at taking that work further and exploring the dynamic of the perpetrator and the victim."

"Menopause. How do we deal with that? Of course, while menopause might seem that it only affects the person who's going through it, it affects everybody in a family. It affects your partner. It affects your children. They need to know what's going on in the body. If you haven't had conversations about the menopause, it's full on. And then intimacy and into our older years, it is right and proper that we stay intimate and loving, and then the question of how we possibly might grow into our older years in our sexuality, I would want to lift the lid off all of that for us to create that content out in the world."

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