Cardboard and a Glue Gun: How Kate Lush Figured Out What Intimacy Coordination Actually Is

There is a French word that keeps surfacing in conversation with Kate Lush. Bricolage. In its most literal sense it describes a DIY shop, a hardware store, the place you go when you need to assemble something from whatever is at hand. As a concept — borrowed from anthropology, beloved in theater — it describes the art of making meaning from the accumulated materials of a life. A glue gun and gum strip. A yoga mat folded under a sheet. Mime books borrowed from a drama teacher who didn't know how to teach mime. Skin tone foam inserts taped to actors' knees to stop carpet burn.

When I suggest to Kate, near the end of our conversation, that she is an expert because of the bricolage of things, she laughs and says: yes, that's exactly it. It is, characteristically, the most credit she will take.

We are speaking over a video call. Kate is in London, where she has lived for two years after a significant stretch in South Africa — years that coincided with the birth, growth, and gradual professionalisation of intimacy coordination as a discipline across the African continent. She is, as she admits, one of the busiest people I know, and has agreed to this interview partly through social pressure.

She has been doing "this specific job" — intimacy coordination — since around 2018 or 2019, though she frames the timeline loosely, as people do when a career has grown so organically that the start date is hard to pin. She has been a physical storyteller considerably longer. Since she was three, she danced. At thirteen or fourteen, she sat a performance exam in mime because she had seen something in it that called to her — her drama teacher lent her books he didn't quite know how to teach from, and she still has them. At fourteen or fifteen, she saw Théâtre de Complicité, Trestle, and the French and international physical theater companies doing their most vital work in the nineties, and something locked into place. "Communication with the body," she says. "That's my nuts and bolts."

This matters because, as Kate tells it, intimacy coordination did not represent a departure from physical theater. It was physical theater, approached from a particular angle. "Intimacy coordination is physical storytelling in a very niche way," she says. "The tiniest of touches, the glance of a finger on skin, the closing of space — or the journey of the closing of space, starting with the eyes across a room. That's still physical storytelling." The role, as she practices it, is less about policing what bodies do and more about authoring what bodies can mean.

The intimacy coordination landscape Kate entered in South Africa was not yet a landscape at all. It was more like unmapped terrain. The first generation of ICs — the people who invented and codified the role — were mostly working in the United Kingdom and the United States. What Kate and her colleagues Sara Blecher and Èmil Haarhoff built in South Africa was something adjacent but distinct: shaped by the same principles, forged under entirely different pressures.

The difference was pace. South African television production moves fast. Budgets are smaller, schedules are tighter, and the luxury of a half-hour blocking rehearsal with a director is exactly that — a luxury. "You'll go on to a TV show and the blocking is the blocking," Kate says. "It's technical flow and then you shoot it. We're going to do the master, then a tick-tock, and then we're moving on — even for an intimate scene."

What this demanded was a kind of radical pragmatism, a shedding of rigidity in favour of shorthand. The golden standards imported from the UK — the insistence on complete choreography beat by beat, the formal consent processes that presupposed generous pre-production windows — had to be renegotiated against reality. "The most important thing," Kate concludes, "is the boundary practice, the consent. That's the absolute. The fully fixed choreography has gone."

She learned this, in part, from watching Èmil Haarhoff work the Johannesburg circuit while she was doing longer-form international projects in Cape Town. "He really developed the skill of getting the call the night before to be on set the following morning," she says. "I really learned from that." It is a characteristic admission — direct, generous, entirely free of the professional defensiveness that might lead someone to minimize what they received from a colleague.

This willingness to say I learned this from that person animates Kate's understanding of knowledge as something that passes between generations rather than residing in any single practitioner. The newer ICs she has trained — people like Loren Loubser, Tina Redman, Carla Classen, Lea Vivier — have, in turn, taught her things. Loren brought a sex-positive openness and a "yes, and" creative energy forged in ensemble theater; on one of Loren's first really tough jobs, it was Kate who had their back in a way that, as Loren has said, kept them from quitting. Tina brought the particular attentiveness of someone still learning how to hold a room, still checking every instinct against the training they return to mentally when uncertain. Carla arrived already carrying years of experience as an actor who had lived, at firsthand, the absence of what an IC provides — and who credits Kate with one of her most clarifying pieces of professional advice: that what marginalises you is often your greatest strength.

Kate does not volunteer any of this. These are things her colleagues say about her, in other rooms, in other interviews. She is more interested in talking about what she still doesn't know.

What strikes her, looking back, is that the rigidity of the early training she received was perhaps less about necessity than about an anxiety to legitimate. "The golden standards," she says, with a slight dryness, "of what you must and mustn't do." Standards are useful; they signal professionalism; they protect people. But applied without sensitivity to context, they can also become a performance of rigor that serves institutions more than individuals. South Africa stripped some of that scaffolding away, not because rigor didn't matter, but because the work demanded you find out what rigor actually was.

There is another shift Kate names, quieter but perhaps more consequential: the move from thinking about intimacy coordination as creative facilitation toward thinking about it as risk mitigation. The turning point came through a partnership with Netflix — specifically, a conversation with Netflix's Head of Production Safety Alison Hodgetts.

"They were able to deconstruct the entire role of the intimacy coordinator purely according to risk assessment," Kate says. "Without knowing anything about intimacy coordination — just thinking about intimacy in terms of risk — they were able to take the whole job apart. I thought: well, that is what an intimacy coordinator is."

The revelation was both practical and philosophical. Practical, because it gave the role a professional language that could command respect in production meetings, justify line items on budgets, produce documents that departments understood. Philosophical, because it reframed the work not as a soft supplement to the real business of filmmaking — not as a courtesy extended to anxious performers — but as a structural necessity. The IC does not make sets nicer. The IC mitigates risk. These are not the same claim.

The risk assessment framing also quietly explodes the misconception that the job is principally about emotional literacy or sexual fluency — the idea that someone who is good at talking about intimacy would naturally be good at coordinating it. "The ability to talk about my personal sexual life or yours is not the job," Kate says, with unusual directness. "The job is: what's the story we're trying to tell between these two people? Where do their bodies fit together choreographically? How do I mitigate the risk?" She describes arriving on a recent exterior set and going immediately to the person responsible for the outdoor sprinkler rig — are they heated? — and then pushing the bush the actors were supposed to fall against to gauge its stability. It wasn't stable. They had a conversation with the director. They found another approach. "That is not glamorous," she says. "That is the IC job."

This matters, too, when you consider how often ICs are brought in too late, or not at all. "Everyone knows ICs exist now," Kate says, with a particular edge. "There's no excuse to write content with sexual violence and not, the moment that script comes out, go: we need to book an IC. It's so short-sighted, in terms of both finance and the well-being of your people."

But legislation alone does not a culture make. And Kate, seven years into a role she loves, has arrived somewhere harder: the recognition that being an IC can be genuinely damaging to the IC.

She describes it carefully, without self-pity. The intimacy coordinator is, by design, the most regulated person on set — the person whose job it is to hold other people's vulnerability, to scan rooms at a hundred meters and feel in their gut when something is off, to find themselves unconsciously matching the shallow breath of an actor who is not coping. This is demanding work. What makes it corrosive is what can happen around it.

"I think the IC role can be very, very damaging to the IC," she says. She describes the particular dynamic that allows a director — someone who would never shout at the AD or the DP they need every day — to scream at the IC who is there only for the day, already holding the room together, who will then re-regulate and support the actors as if nothing has happened. "You get side-arsed apologies or justifications: 'Oh, he's just really stressed right now.' But not actually calling that behavior out."

"It's taken me seven years to realize that," she adds. "And I'm really facing it right now."

There is something important in that sentence — in the seven years, in the right now. The intimacy coordination community Kate helped build is predominantly made up of people who came to the work because they cared, who derived their authority from attunement rather than hierarchy, who were inclined, perhaps, to absorb harm before naming it. That inclination is also a vulnerability. The same permeability that makes a good IC good — the capacity to feel the room, to pick up a stranger's distress at a hundred meters — is also what makes the accumulation of unacknowledged damage so easy to miss.

"I don't think there's anybody else on set who genuinely wants to be there to take care of people," she says, "but who can be so brutally untaken care of by the environment itself."

Touch is always real. This is one of Kate's core convictions, the thing that distinguishes the work she does from a technical exercise in choreography. "You can't fake touch," she says. "Touch, nerve ending to nerve ending, skin to skin — that is absolutely the most real thing any two people can do." It is why intimacy coordination is not, as it is sometimes misunderstood to be, about making actors less emotionally present. It is about creating the conditions under which they can be more so.

"I love the micro gestures," she says. "The tiny touch, the strand of hair." Across rooms she notices the proprietary touches between people who are no longer together — one hand on a lower back that no longer belongs there. She reads this not as a professional tic but as a continuation of something she has always done. Has the job made her this way, she wonders, or was she always this way, and is this why she ended up doing the job? "Probably a little bit of both," she concludes.

The theoretical framework she returns to is Le Coq's elemental binary: push or pull. Two energies. Everything that happens between bodies can be understood as a variation on these — the lean toward, the withdrawal, the hold that does not know it should have let go. It sounds simple because it is. The elegance of a practical philosophy is that it survives contact with the complicated world.

Kate is not much interested in the glamour of the role. "I just love working," she says, when asked what draws her to it. "I love being part of a crew, part of a creative team." She describes, with something close to affection, the chaos of a recent low-budget queer production — shot in a tiny flat, bodies and equipment crammed into the same few square meters, an AD stuck in the doorway, no radios, a lamp falling and someone climbing across the bed to right it. "It felt like we were all working together, all trying to make it, all doing the best we can." That environment — improvised, collaborative, a little precarious — is one she gravitates toward.

There is a way of thinking about Kate Lush's career as a series of in-between states — between physical theater and film, between London and Cape Town, between performer and coordinator, between the generation that built the discipline and the one now practicing it. But this framing, though neat, slightly misses the point. She is not a figure defined by threshold-crossing. She is someone who has understood, with unusual clarity, that thresholds are not interruptions to the work. They are where the work lives.

"The kiss is dead once we're in it," she says, speaking about the choreography of screen intimacy. "The kiss is alive in the space just before, or the space between, the breath in the middle of it. That's where it's interesting."

It could also be a description of everything else she has spent thirty years thinking about. The interesting thing is rarely the arrival. It is the closing of the space. The journey toward the thing.

We say goodbye, and I think: she has been doing this for a long time — reading rooms, making things work with whatever is at hand, rebuilding from the materials available. She will have figured out the next thing long before anyone else notices it needs figuring out.

Interviewed in 2026 by Maude Sandham. Kate Lush is a co-founder of Safe Sets Ltd. and a senior intimacy coordinator now based in London. She has trained intimacy coordinators across South Africa, Europe, and the African continent.