For the past few years, Assistant Professor of Theater Kari Barclay has helped cement Oberlin College Theater department guidelines for intimacy work, based on CLEanHouse, the guidelines used in many professional Cleveland theaters.
“Our guidelines were developed very specifically with an educational environment in mind,” Barclay said. “We’re trying to establish consent-forward and trauma-informed practices early in our students’ artistic careers so that they can go out into the industry and influence the work out there.”
As the Music Theater department begins to produce shows with higher intimacy requirements, chiefly their recent production of Spring Awakening, which featured partial nudity and simulated sex, I was curious what academic guidelines the Conservatory is enforcing to ensure students pursuing Music Theater or Opera Theater are safe onstage and trained to deal with intimacy professionally and considerately. I chatted with Assistant Professor of Music Theater Laura Welsh, who intimacy directed Spring Awakening and serves as resident intimacy director at Great Lakes Theater.
“As a program, we do not have specific consent guidelines [for the classroom],” she said. “One of the things that I’m actually working on right now is a student handbook that will go out to our students in August with a lot of information — different facets like academic, rehearsal etiquette, stuff like that. So there will be some consent-forward stuff folded into that handbook for us as a department. I don’t know that there’s one for the overarching Conservatory.”
While there aren’t guidelines for the classroom, all Music Theater productions follow the Intimacy Directors and Coordinators protocols. Conservatory third-year Nic Rhew has become acquainted with them, playing the promiscuous Anatole in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and the sexually forward Hanchen in Spring Awakening. Despite the intense intimacy demands of his most recent role in particular, Rhew felt supported throughout the process.
“It was cool to do intimacy work with a person of the same gender because that is not often seen in musical theater or onstage interactions,” he said. “We made people uncomfortable, and I think that is the goal. … The decision to make the show at the Beck Center [for the Arts] in Lakewood was absolutely intentional because our director wanted to send a message to the people of that area that may have had a differing opinion about what the show was about.”
While the aim might have been to make the audience uncomfortable, keeping the cast comfortable meant subtle adjustments in blocking between casts and conversations about power dynamics between scene partners. Welsh described her process as a bridge between a director’s vision and actors’ boundaries.
“A lot of us have ideas of what is ideal,” Welsh said. “It’s never going to be a perfect world. The amount of times that I’ve had to walk into a room and be like, ‘Great. So this has now happened, or this is happening, and this is not ideal.’ I want to name it so that we can build something together that is structurally sound and consent-forward, and that the art itself doesn’t suffer and no human being in this room suffers.”
While the new Music Theater department is still cementing guidelines for intimacy onstage, the Opera department doesn’t have any systems set in stone. Delaney Fox, OC ’25, took OPTH 203: Introduction to Opera with former Assistant Professor of Opera Theater Chris Mirto, who independently incorporated best practices for intimacy into his classrooms.
“It was a foundational part of that course,” Fox said. “After that, it was nice to know that everyone in the rehearsal room in that [class] and in the future would know and have gone through that training.”
Later, she took OPTH 405: Seminar in Opera with Stephanie Havey, who was similarly intent on preparing students for the professional rehearsal room. In addition to conversations about intimacy, she organized a chat with the Oberlin alumni performing in Oberlin’s 2024 concert production of Omar, some of whom performed acts of racialized violence onstage.
“They all talked about how in the opera world in general, you’re thrown into the rehearsal room, and it’s the first time you’ve ever met this person, and all of a sudden you’re saying a racial slur to them, or all of a sudden you’re kissing on stage,” Fox said.
Fox recalled how Daniel Okulitch, OC ’99, navigated roles that included violences similar to how he would a scene of intimacy, drawing on the same vocabularies and skills.
“In my education, I’ve gotten a strong sense of what it’s like to be in a rehearsal room,” Fox said. “I don’t know what it’s like in the real world — if people actually are advocating for these things — but I felt like it was a conversation happening at Oberlin.”
However, with the frequent turnover of professors in the Opera Theater department, these conversations aren’t guaranteed to all students. Double-degree second-year Ilan Balzac is currently in OPTH 203: Introduction to Opera with Instructor of Opera Theater Andrew Nienaber, a class he enjoys thoroughly. He was assigned a scene from Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, in which his character seduces his scene partner, and the reference video they were given was, in his words, quite raunchy. In blocking rehearsals, the explicit sexual content has been toned down significantly, and there was some talk between the stage partners about what they were comfortable with, but there was also some apprehension going into the process without the support of a department-wide understanding of expectations around onstage intimacy.
“I don’t think any boundaries were crossed, but I do think it left a window for that to happen,” Balzac said. “I do think having more explicit conversations about it would be nice, rather than just saying, ‘This is a weird scene,’ and laughing. Yes, it is true; it is weird, and it requires a certain amount of trust, but I would appreciate a little more of an explicit conversation around what people’s boundaries are.”
Fox worried the open curriculum of the course created less accountability in a moment of rapid turnovers.
“My only concern is that, because the Opera Theater department has seen so much turnover in the past couple of years, and because the 200 and 400 level classes are always taught by different directors, it seems that there is no system in place to ensure that all students have received the same intimacy training, if any,” she said.
While gaps in protocol have frequently been filled by a few faculty members, consistent guidelines around onstage intimacy would improve the safety, productivity, and consistency of the Conservatory education.
