In the past year, Ita O’Brien’s job has become part of a global conversation. An “intimacy coordinator” for stage and screen, based in the UK, her role is to coach production companies through the protocols of touch and contact between actors in explicit scenes.

And in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations and the broader MeToo movement, that role has a newfound urgency.

“The thought’s been that ‘people don’t need to be taught how to do sex’,” she says. “[Alternatively] some directors are embarrassed about dealing with intimacy on the set – they leave the detail up to the actors, and actors are left vulnerable.”

The resentment expressed by the lead actors of Blue is the Warmest Colour for the interminable filming of that movie’s extended sex scenes springs to mind. But the example that O’Brien and I discuss is that of Maria Schneider, some of whose experiences on the set of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris were not consensual.

Intimacy director Ita O’Brien, who is in Australia in November to lead a series of workshops. Photograph: Nicholas Dawkes Photography

In a 2013 interview, Bertolucci described that an infamous sequence, in which Marlon Brando’s character anally rapes Schneider’s, was largely improvised. “Even though what he was doing wasn’t real, she cried real tears. They didn’t choreograph it,” says O’Brien. She quotes Bertolucci who said, “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress.”

It was a professional and personal humiliation from which Schneider – only 19 when the movie was filmed – never recovered. “There’s no sense of the understanding of the damage done to that person,” O’Brien says.

Rare is the production that doesn’t recruit a specialist coordinator to choreograph fight scenes, or dance sequences – and in 2018, it’s unsurprising that O’Brien’s intimacy workshops are proving popular. Currently touring Australia, where the Geoffrey Rush defamation trial has dominated headlines in the past week, she was originally scheduled to present only in Sydney and Auckland – but Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide were added by demand.

An intimacy director or coordinator encourages the navigation of a scene, through the negotiation of an actor’s boundaries of physical touch. It’s nuanced choreography, but it also facilitates a conversation between the production and the actors that affirms trust in what’s taking place.

But what does that actually look like in practice? O’Brien describes one powerful technique as the “practice of saying ‘no’”. In this, the actor physicalises a refusal emanating from their belly, heart or head. O’Brien has observed patterns from her practitioners: “A belly ‘no’ is an emotional ‘no’, and there’s an aspect to it of a wailing, or grief. A heart ‘no’ is a love ‘no’, being able to say ‘no’ from love. A ‘no’ from your head is the intellectual ‘no’ – a clear ‘no’, from considering all the aspects of something, mentally.”

The value of the exercise is not just a detail of physical expression, she says: it’s an ends in itself. “Practicing saying ‘no’ is powerful, and bringing it into the work is empowering. Many people have real difficulty in being able to say ‘no’ for themselves, even when a ‘no’ is needed.”

O’Brien was brought to this line of work by the instinct for safety and protection in her own creative practice. She trained as a professional dancer and, 10 years in, retrained as an actor. Within less than a decade she had expanded her practise again, as a director and deviser, and was creating a work about the dynamics of abuse. “I was very aware of creating a rehearsal space that would keep my actors safe,” she says. Given the delicate nature of the subject matter, she recognised the risk of a careless process which could expose her performers to emotional distress or psychological injury.

Ita O’Brien leading one of her workshops. Photograph: Sven Arnstein

But this was 2014, when the global conversation around consent and rehearsal room exploitation was not what it is now. In the absence of existing guidelines, O’Brien worked with her performers to develop their own. She began researching processes that had been developed elsewhere, and cites Vanessa Ewan from the Central School of Speech and Drama, who had been writing about using the choreography of on-set fight-coordination as a safety framework for stage intimacy.

Listening to O’Brien describe her protocols, you can’t help but recognise their value to a broader social conversation about safety and trust. In the first place, participants pause “for the director and the actors to get to know the physical shape of the scene, by asking, ‘Is it OK for me to touch you here? Is it OK for me to touch you there?’,” she explains. “For someone to feel comfortable and to walk away feeling happy, you need agreement and consent. You need open dialogue and transparency.”

Your ‘no’ is a gift. It means that your director and your fellows can trust a ‘yes’ Ita O’Brien

O’Brien’s advice applies beyond the rehearsal room, too: “Your ‘yes’ is your ‘yes’, and your ‘no’ is your ‘no’, and your ‘maybe’ is your ‘no’. Your ‘no’ is a gift. It means that your director and your fellows can trust a ‘yes’,” she says. “You need to be clear about what people’s boundaries are, what people are comfortable with.”

Performers have told O’Brien “horror stories” of being “so scared of doing the intimate work that they would get pissed before they get on stage – and make themselves more unsafe by doing so”. The solution, she says, is not censorship but professional risk aversion. “It’s important that that intimate content is part of our storytelling – [storytelling] should reflect what’s going on in the world, and the world is one that includes abusive behaviour. We’re dealing with this subject matter unlike any other industry. It’s about taking care of possible vulnerabilities so everyone can work in a professional way.

“Getting these guidelines known across this industry leads to safe practice and safe work, but it doesn’t preclude producing exciting and vibrant intimacy,” she says. “It allows you to get on with the job of acting well, because you know you’re safe.”