A Petition to Do Your Thing - Èmil Haarhoff Intimacy Coordinator

Èmil Haarhoff fell into intimacy coordination by mistake. Seven years later, he's ready to make more room for everything else he's always been.

There is a story Èmil Haarhoff tells about himself that he clearly enjoys. He is ten years old. He crosses the street to where the girls who do ballet live, knocks on their door, and asks — with complete seriousness — if they would please come over and let him choreograph them as backup dancers for his Eisteddfod singing number. They come. He choreographs. This is, he suggests, simply who he has always been: someone for whom the moving of bodies in space felt less like a choice than a given.

He is sitting across from me now, warm and precise and occasionally very funny, and there is still something of that ten-year-old about him — the certainty that the thing he wants to do is reasonable and worth doing, and that the people around him will eventually agree. Except now the thing he wants to do is considerably more complex. He is a director, a choreographer, a performer, a PhD-level researcher, a member of Safe Sets, and one of the people who, alongside Sara Blecher and Kate Lush, built intimacy coordination into a South African industry standard. He is also, he says with quiet deliberateness, in the middle of shedding.

On bodies, movement, and a childhood spent holding vulnerable people:

Haarhoff studied an M.Tech in musical theatre, but he was always more interested in movement than pure technique — in what bodies could say rather than what they could execute. "My natural inclination was towards movement of bodies in space rather than just technique," he says. "Storytelling through movement, with technique as the basis when needed." He was good at the technical work. It just wasn't, at heart, what he was reaching for.

Alongside the performing and the directing and the choreographing, there was something else. His mother worked at a trauma centre, and by the time he was fourteen, Haarhoff was working there too — connecting with people who had experienced abuse, self-injury, cult trauma, family violence. The logic was that a teenager with sufficient emotional intelligence might reach people that adults simply couldn't. He did this for nearly six years.

He doesn't position this as the origin story of his intimacy coordination career. He is careful about that. "I was never really necessarily an advocate for set safety," he says. "I was more interested in creating interesting work, creating with bodies." The safeguarding, when it came, was a byproduct of that interest — a "foundation to the creative cause", he calls it, rather than the point. But it is hard to hear about fourteen-year-old Haarhoff sitting with survivors and not see something being laid down.

On falling into intimacy coordination by mistake:

He did not go looking for intimacy coordination. As a performer, he had almost no inhibitions — he describes a director asking him to drop his trousers and do a cartwheel in the middle of a road as an uncomplicated "yes" — and the question that nagged at him was not about his own comfort but about its absence in others. Why was he so uninhibited? Why did other actors find certain content unreachable? He wrote his PhD on exactly this: trying to understand embodied discomfort, to find processes that could help performers engage with material they would otherwise shut down around.

The research took him to a course in intimacy coordination in Connecticut, USA. He didn't even know the role existed. "The research took me there," he says simply. What he found was a methodology that spoke directly to everything he'd been studying — and then some. "I really did learn that intimacy coordination is an entire process and protocol on its own." The concept that crystallised for him was what he calls no surprises: the idea that anxiety is dismantled through understanding, that discomfort can be navigated when you know exactly what is coming, when the body is no longer bracing for the unknown.

He came back, met Sarah Blecher and Kate Lush and joined Safe Sets early 2020.

On building an industry set by set:

What followed was, by his own account, slightly ridiculous. South Africa had never seen an intimacy coordinator on a set. Directors didn't know where to place them. First ADs didn't know how to handle them. Crew looked at them with a mixture of suspicion and confusion. And yet the work needed doing — there were actors on sets without anyone to advocate for them, and the three of them were the only people in South Africa trained to do it.

"At that point, you cannot call someone for help, because there's no one to call," he says. "That's you. You have to do it." There were periods where they were covering three or four sets a day each. The longest stretch Haarhoff went without sleep was four days — moving from night shoots to day shoots and back again, because there was simply no one else.

They made a decision in that period that he now looks back on with something between pride and a certain rueful clarity: they would show up even when production wasn't ready, even when the protocol pipeline had problems, even when conditions weren't ideal or when the money didn't make sense. The calculus was simple. An IC in a flawed system was safer than no IC at all. "We were just trying to catch-all and build this industry," he says. Together, they did. From a country where the term intimacy coordinator drew blank stares, South Africa now has an industry standard, a growing roster of trained ICs, and a training programme approaching its tenth cohort. "I'm very proud of the fact that we could build up to a place where there is almost not a set in this country that doesn't have an IC" and, he says proudly, "we solidified how IC's integrate into the crew and production process in South Africa in a way that raises the bar on the global IC positioning".

On queerness as a superpower:

Haarhoff grew up in the Dutch Reformed Church, the son of a Christian preacher and a missionary mom, in a community where being queer was not something you did openly. He then studied on an art campus — comparatively liberated, full of queer people — but where the actual training pushed a heteronormative performance ideal. Versatility was the goal: you should be able to play anything. He became very good at it, and is very thankful for the versatility. And then he stepped into a South African industry that, particularly in the Afrikaans-language space, expected its artists to keep their queerness behind closed doors.

"That's kind of a theme that has been running throughout my entire life," he says, "whether that's a personal life or my professional life." He has only recently — in the last three or four years — made the conscious decision to stop moderating it. And what he's found, on set, is that the thing he was once asked to conceal has become his clearest professional asset.

He makes the joke with evident pleasure: "I'm too short to be intimidating to straight men and I'm too gay to be intimidating to most women." But underneath the wit is something real. In a role that requires people to be vulnerable in front of a near-stranger, the ability to walk into a room and make almost anyone feel unthreatened is not a small thing. "My queerness has become kind of my superpower on set," he says. "It is the thing that helps me connect to a vast variety of people." Being unapologetically yourself, he has found, gives other people permission to do the same.

He is aware that a certain kind of queerness has always been tolerated in the industry — the flamboyant sidekick, the comic relief. "People want you to be a eunuch clown that they can laugh at and enjoy. But the moment that clown has desires and needs and something that's too real or too complicated — that's unacceptable." He has chosen, in recent years, to be unacceptable in exactly that way.

On the next generation and the only advice that matters:

Safe Sets has now trained nearly ten cohorts of intimacy coordinators and is approaching their cohort of young performer support specialists. Haarhoff co-wrote and co-developed the training programmes, and he speaks about it with a quiet, unguarded pride. He is also candid that they no longer train the way they did in the beginning — because the role itself has changed so dramatically that the old training would be inadequate now.

This is, for him, the central question: how do you stay ahead of what the industry actually needs? The protocols that were essential after the #MeToo movement — strict, prescriptive, deliberately limiting — were right for their moment. They created a framework where none had existed. But the moment has shifted. "It sometimes feels like we are forcing actors to work in the way that the intimacy coordinator has been set up to work," he says, "whereas I think we're moving into a space where the intimacy coordinator should adapt to actor process." The cookie-cutter, he suggests, needs to evolve.

He talks about improvisation — once banned entirely from intimate scenes, because improvisation was part of what had enabled harm. Now, with years of protocol and trust built into the infrastructure, he and his colleagues have developed ways to create what he calls a safety container: a set of agreed boundaries within which, for the first time, genuine spontaneity can live. "That didn't exist," he says. "And it couldn't exist, because we had to restrict improvisation first. Now we have to allow it to expand and grow."

When asked what he most wants to pass on to the next generation — to emerging ICs, to queer ICs figuring out how to do this work authentically — his answer is disarmingly simple. "Just focus on the human in front of you." People ask him constantly how to handle trans individuals, deaf individuals, people with disabilities, people of different races and sexualities and backgrounds. His answer is always the same: "Just sit and be with whoever the human is in front of you. All of those people are so complex. There's no one answer towards how to treat anyone." He pauses. "Kindness and presence. Be present with the human in front of you, be kind towards them, and just treat them as human."

On shedding, and what comes next:

About two years ago, having run himself to the point of a burnout that he describes with the careful understatement of someone who has since recovered from it, Haarhoff made a decision. What the three of them had built together was real. There were other people now who could help hold it. It was time to reclaim something.

"I need to coordinate less and I want to create more," he says. "I need to choreograph more, I need to direct more. I need to perform more." He describes the current moment as a shedding — things that no longer serve him falling away, making space for whatever is arriving next. He says this with a particular kind of bravado that he immediately acknowledges might be partially performative: "I say with a lot of bravado and fake hope." But the hope itself seems genuine.

At the end of last year he wrote a piece called A Petition to Dionysus — a work, he explains, that is almost a blood sacrifice to Dionysus, the god of theatre and wine. A petition, addressed directly to that mythical god, asking why he gives artists talent and desire and hope and then withholds the opportunity to use them. A school in Pretoria is performing the piece this year as a first workshop run. "That piece is very much me going: I'm petitioning you to do your thing, man. Give us the stuff."

He laughs. And then he says it again, more quietly, like a man who has helped build something extraordinary alongside people he trusts — and is now, finally, making room to be surprised by what comes next.

Èmil Haarhoff is a Cape Town-based intimacy coordinator, director, choreographer, and performer. He is a senior IC for Safe Sets Ltd., and co-developer of the Safe Sets Intimacy Coordinator and Young Performer Support Specialist Training Programmes. He holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Pretoria (bridging embodied discomfort through facilitating bodyminded performer processes), an M.Tech in Musical Theatre from the Tshwane University of Technology (skill-based vs child-centred dramatic arts training for learners between grade 10-12) and a CMA at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (folding Laban into the intimacy coordinator's approach).

Interviewed in August 2026 by Maude Sandham