
At Intersection of Race and Intimacy, Drama Professor’s Work Onstage Informs Students Offstage
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Carnegie Mellon University’s Kaja Dunn described the work of an intimacy coordinator in the performing arts as a combination of choreography, dramaturgy and physical intimacy.
Intimacy coordinators work with actors during acts of simulated sexual contact and other forms of intimacy to determine where they are comfortable being touched, but — just as fight choreography is more than just coordinating punches and kicks — there’s much more to it.
“There's part of intimacy coordination that is making sure that people have agency and authority over their bodies while telling a story and keeping a consent-forward environment,” she said. “There's part of it that is thinking about the storytelling, then problem-solving how do we get the scene and make sure that these parts of the script are covered?”
Dunn(opens in new window), associate professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama(opens in new window), has served as intimacy coordinator for the stage including “A Strange Loop” on Broadway, “American Prophet” at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and “Choir Boy” at the Denver Center and ACT Seattle, as well as for the screen with TV shows “Mayors of Kingstown” on Paramount+, “Harlem” on Amazon Prime, and “The Best Man” and “The Final Chapter” on Peacock.
She has pioneered discussions focused on the intersection of race and intimacy, developing workshops and classes for Actors’ Equity Association and Theatrical Intimacy Education.
Considering the convergence of race and intimacy allows for better storytelling, Dunn said. The stories conveyed through the art being performed can then resonate on different levels for the audience, both for people who can relate through their own personal experiences, and those who are seeing them for the first time onstage.
“I am wealthier because I have been invited into other cultural stories, and so let me be authentic and real about my culture and give you a moment that is intimacy between two people,” she said. “In my culture, the act of someone cornrowing a loved one’s hair is an intimate act, or if I'm doing a South Asian play and somebody is touching the feet of an elder, that is specific to that culture.”
Often, when Black intimate stories are told, they also include violence, and that becomes embedded in the prevailing idea of how Black people relate to each other, she said.
“Who tells the story is almost as important as what the story is, because that tells you what legacy we take away from it,” she said.
Collaboration onstage fosters learning
Dunn joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon in 2022.
“I'm at a point in my career where I'm not really interested in explaining why equality and cultural competence are important,” she said. “I want to do the work with people who know that it's important already, and Carnegie Mellon presented a place where they already knew that this was important work.”
Outside of teaching, Dunn has credits as an actor, director and activist in more than 40 productions in five countries.
Her latest directorial effort, the world premiere of “A Room in the Castle” by Lauren Gunderson, is about to come to life onstage with the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company from Jan. 24 to Feb. 9(opens in new window) followed by a co-production with Washington, D.C.’s Folger Theatre performed there from March 4 to April 6(opens in new window).
Based on the women of “Hamlet,” the new play is told from the perspectives of Ophelia and Gertrude, shifting the story’s focus to their emotional journeys.
Working with Gunderson — who was the most-produced playwright in America in 2019-20, according to American Theatre magazine(opens in new window) — has helped Dunn notice how certain people view women and traditional femininity in Shakespeare’s work.
“When you give people the freedom to break outside of that, you start to see different things in the art,” she said. “I learn things as a director, I learn things from my students. The best actors, the ones that I want to hire, are people who are going to tell me something that I didn’t know already. It’s a give and take. It’s a collaboration.”
Gunderson was interested in exploring culturally competent casting, examining what it means to have more people of color in roles from classic texts with a modern lens, Dunn said.
The same day the play opened, Dunn celebrated a film premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, "Ricky(opens in new window)," for which she worked as intimacy coordinator.
Starring Sheryl Lee Ralph and Stephan James and directed by Rashad Frett, “Ricky” follows the new independence of a 30-year-old man navigating the challenging realities of life after serving a jail sentence since he was a teenager.
Inclusivity in theater can be complicated
Dunn’s work in theater, especially as an intimacy coordinator, allows her to have short stints on productions and bring her experiences back to the classroom in a timely manner.
“I'm seeing lots of different processes and lots of different ways of doing things, and that allows me direct access into the issues that we're talking about in the classroom,” she said. “So for me, they're not theoretical.”
Sharing her experiences with her students also helps her learn new perspectives from and alongside her students, Dunn said.
“It feels a lot more like a science class,” she said. “I'm taking a hypothesis and experimenting, and then while I'm doing the experiment — which is why we call it creative research — I come back and I work on it with my students, and then that gives them questions to ask, and it affects their final projects.”
During one of Dunn’s class sessions in the fall, she discussed with her students the policies, resources and best practices related to the LGBTQ community in the theater industry.
“Theater can be a complicated space because in some ways, queerness isn’t new to theater,” she said, but then went on to explain that marginalization, especially for groups at intersections with gender, gender identity and race, happens.
“Saying that somebody is queer and leading a space does not mean that the space is going to be safe or queer-friendly, right? Just like you can have somebody who's Latino leading a space, and it doesn't mean that it's going to be an open, Latino-friendly space,” she said.
She discussed how inclusivity means working on how to engage and communicate with people who think differently, without shutting down the other people in the room when they have good intentions.
“Not everybody has the same experience and sometimes there are even people who belong to the same group that do not use the same vocabulary,” she said. “If we're talking about being inclusive, we have to have room for those conversations.”
During a discussion of best practices in casting, Dunn referred to Robert Ramirez(opens in new window), head of the School of Drama, who encourages the phrasing, “Have you had an investment in this community?” then asked students to share any examples of casting descriptions that spoke directly to them when seeking specific identity characteristics.
“Thinking about how we talk about casting: Is ‘queer’ part of the character description or is it a descriptor? There’s a difference,” she said, adding that casting with such specificity could mean there is a particular need that the character is intentionally meeting, asking “How does this help everybody be seen?”
Classwork reflecting lived experiences boosts student confidence
For Dunn’s class, Anti-Racist and Equitable Practices in Theater, a required course for all first-year CMU School of Drama students, Jakai-Nyasia Norfleet researched theater programs in prisons for her final project.
She and her fellow group members learned that even though about 39% of incarcerated people are Black(opens in new window), some existing prison programs have prohibited productions of works by Black, Pittsburgh-born playwright August Wilson.
“How much more elevated would they feel if they performed something by someone who looked like them or related more with them?” Norfleet said. “Art is a great way of exploring identity, taking the darkness and bringing it to light.”
Ramirez said the course gives the School of Drama a shared vocabulary and foundation to create work together.
“Our students are learning to create work that is centered in consent and cultural competency, which allows them to honor who they are as artists and to make their work in a healthy and sustainable way,” he said.
Dunn was hired as the first full-time, tenure-track faculty for anti-racism and culturally competent practice. It evolved from a 2020 course designed by Nicole Brewer, Anti-Racist Theatre founder and lecturer at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.
“Kaja’s class gave me the confidence to be able to articulate my lived experience or explain how I feel in a way that relates to people from different backgrounds, and how we can advocate for ourselves and others,” Norfleet said.
When Dunn began teaching the course, she said she didn’t want to only be teaching about racism and its effects, but also sharing the work of people of color who are creating art and telling their own stories on stage.
Now, in its third year, she has noticed students’ progress as their analytical skills develop.
“They’re doing critical cultural analysis and they’re starting to ask the questions I would hope they would ask,” she said. “The course is designed so they learn a set of histories and strategies around what it means to be a thoughtful theatermaker and participant in society, as well as what it means to think critically about elements of our culture.”
Using techniques from the course, students can better frame and evaluate works that they are creating and taking part in, both while learning at Carnegie Mellon and later as professionals.
“This is how they’re starting their career at CMU School of Drama,” she said. “Part of it is that this course is foundational to everything you'll do from here on out, and how you're thinking about the work that you're doing.”
Students of all backgrounds benefit from the class, and can use the tools and information to be more vocal allies, Dunn said.
“It's exciting to see white students really process what their role is in this, in the work, in creating equitable practices, in how they can engage with it,” she said.
Making space helps conversations go from difficult to deep
In class, Dunn discussed actors’ dressing rooms and expectations around changing costumes, using an example of a nonbinary actor that advocated for themselves.
“That’s where intimacy professionals become important, because they’re giving people permission to say, ‘Actually, that doesn’t work for me,’” she said. “Then, because there was thought put into that process, it gave other actors the ability to speak up as well,” she said.
Earlier this month, Dunn was honored with an Innovative Teaching Award from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region Two, which recognizes excellence in college and university theater programs in parts of eight states and Washington, D.C. In 2021, she was awarded a Kennedy Center Medallion for her work in addressing racial issues in theater education.
Making space to hold, learn from and incorporate what some might consider difficult conversations allow for future conversations to go even deeper, she said.
“There’s an active deconstruction of anything that deals with equity, with diversity, with not just inclusion but empowerment,” she said, adding that for some, marginalized populations demanding empowerment is scary, but that makes doing so that much more significant.
“It becomes even more critical that we are present, that we are loud, that we’re not self-censoring and that we’re really clear with the students about what we’re teaching and why it’s important.”
At Carnegie Mellon, Dunn’s background and teaching are helping the entire theater community propel the industry forward, Ramirez said.
“Kaja's expertise, not only as an educator, but also as a professional working in the industry right now, is an incredible asset to our students and faculty,” he said. “By committing to and investing in this kind of work and training, the School of Drama is reinforcing its position as a leader in shaping the future of theatrical practice.”