The Sum of All the Floors - Cleo Notcutt

Cleo Notcutt has spent a lifetime reading rooms. Now she's doing it in service of something larger than herself.

The first thing Cleo Notcutt does when she walks into a room is read it. Not the lights, not the monitor, not the schedule. The people. It happens in the first few seconds, before she has put down her bag, and it is not something she decides to do.

"I can see it within the first few seconds of someone's movement or vibe," she says. "I can know immediately."

She is describing how she was once handed a batch of casting tapes with ten minutes to decide which dancers to recommend — the client was flying out, there was no time for callbacks, and the choreographer they trusted most was her. She went through the footage and made her choices with a speed that surprised even her. But when she talks about it, the surprise fades. It is simply what she has always been able to do — and it turns out to be exactly what her newest role requires.

Notcutt, a Cape Town-based choreographer, dancer, production coordinator, and newly trained intimacy coordinator with Safe Sets, has spent her entire career in the business of bodies. She knows how they move when they are comfortable and how they move when they are not. She knows the particular stiffness of a non-dancer who has been told to look natural, and the particular ease of someone who has not yet learned to fear the camera. She knows what potential looks like before it has been realised, and what reluctance looks like before the person feeling it has named it.

These are not skills she learned in a classroom, though she has been in many. They are skills that accumulated across decades — in studios and schools, on commercial sets and in township community halls, in production offices with contracts spread across her desk and on floors where she has tried to bring disparate people into the same rhythm. Now, speaking to me from her screen with her jacket already on because she has a meeting at Artscape in fifty minutes, she is beginning to understand how all of it was preparation for a role she has only recently given a name.

Growing up moving

Notcutt has been dancing since she was three. This is not unusual in the world of professional dance — most serious practitioners have a similar origin story, as though the body made its decision before the mind caught up — but what she did with that beginning is less common.

"When I was a teenager," she says, "I was always teaching the kids in the class. Always choreographing."

The impulse was pedagogical as much as artistic. Movement, for Notcutt, was never only about performance. It was about transmission — how you got something from your body into someone else's, how you made a person who didn't think of themselves as a dancer feel like one for long enough to get through a commercial shoot or a school production. When she left South Africa to study in New York, it was because she wanted to learn from the originators — the OGs, she calls them — of the hip-hop styles she had grown up loving. She came back with that knowledge and built her career: her own company, events, teaching, choreography across commercial and long-form productions.

The range of that teaching career matters. She has worked with children in under-resourced schools. She has worked with students in elite academies training to become professional dancers. She has worked with models and actors on commercial sets who were cast because of something — a quality, a look, a smile — that had nothing to do with their ability to move. In each of those spaces, she developed a different kind of intelligence.

"The director may be coming at four and this must look great by four," she says, describing the particular pressure of the commercial floor. "But I know they're really nervous, and this person is not a dancer but they got the right look because they can smile like this. Now they're a dancer. Now I have to make them look good — because my job is to make them look good."

That sentence — my job is to make them look good — captures something essential about how she works. The goal is not the choreographer's vision, exactly. It is the performer in front of her, and how they can be made to feel capable of meeting that vision. The distinction sounds small. It isn't.

The production years

Alongside the creative work, Notcutt built a parallel career on the administrative and logistical side of the film industry. She became a cast coordinator and then a production coordinator — the person who goes through riders, liaises with agents, manages schedules, ensures the paperwork is in order before anyone says action.

In this role, she began to see intimacy coordination from the other side of the desk. She was the person in production setting up the conversations with agents about sensitive content, tracking what the contracts said versus what the shoot day would require, watching how the discussions unfolded when budgets were tight and directors were pressured and everyone was trying to get to the end of the day.

"You see that side all the time," she says. "So you understand it."

She also began to work alongside Kate Lush and Èmil Haarhoff on set — watching, up close, how an intimacy coordinator actually functions in a room with actors. Most people who come to intimacy coordination arrive with experience of performing, or of directing, or of psychology. Notcutt arrived with experience of all three sides of the camera: creative, logistical, and administrative. The combination is unusual. She knew what the director wanted, why the producer was worried about the budget, and what the performer needed to feel safe enough to deliver.

She is candid about the tension. The admin side of production — the riders, the schedules, the endless coordination — was never where her heart was. "My creative itch is just dying inside," she says, with a laugh that suggests she has made her peace with it. But that fluency has quietly made her a more effective advocate. She understands the language of production, which means she knows how to make the case for an intimacy coordinator's presence on a shoot day in terms that will actually land.

"I said, I understand you maybe don't have budget," she recalls of one such conversation, where she had been booked as choreographer for rehearsal but not for the shoot day itself. "But I'm going to be here, because they cannot go behind the monitor and watch and see whether something looks okay. It's not their responsibility to do that. I will stay."

She stayed. On a fraction of what she should have been paid. It is a choreographer's story, not yet an intimacy coordinator's — but she tells it in this context deliberately. The instinct is the same: when the people in the room need someone to hold the space, you hold it.

What the body already knows

When I ask Notcutt about her IC training — she completed Safe Sets' course alongside a cohort that included coordinators from a range of backgrounds — she describes a particular kind of confirmation, followed by a particular kind of disruption.

The confirmation was her movement background. When trainers talked about reading body language, she kept finding herself not just understanding the instruction but relating it to something she had already been doing for years without the language to describe it. The ability to sense, from across a rehearsal room, that someone was performing comfort rather than feeling it. The ability to see, in the way a person's weight shifts or their breath shallows, that they are about to hit a limit before they know it themselves.

"Whenever Kate would mention that we have to be in tune, that we have to always remember we're watching body language all the way through," Notcutt says, "I remember just going off in my head, relating it immediately to what I already did."

For Notcutt, this reading happens at a pre-verbal level, quickly and without calculation. When she auditioned dancers from that batch of tapes — ten minutes, fifty decisions — she was not applying a checklist. She was receiving information through the eyes and processing it through a vocabulary of movement that is now, after decades, simply part of how she thinks. That same reception, she believes, operates in intimacy work: from the first greeting, she is already noting posture, breath, eye contact, the quality of a person's stillness.

"Is this person going to go on this journey willingly?" she asks, describing what she is reading in those first moments. "Or do I need to give this person more time? Have they done this many times and can I let them settle into it, or do I need to actively bring them along?"

The assumption of yes

But the most significant thing her movement background has brought to intimacy coordination is a newly critical eye on the world she came from.

Dancers, Notcutt explains, operate under an assumption of yes. Because the body is the tool, because physical proximity is the material of the art form, because the culture of the studio trains practitioners to be accommodating and resilient and uncomplaining — the question of whether any given physical interaction is actually welcome often goes unasked. Not out of malice, but out of habit.

"Just because they're dancers," she says, "we assume they're automatically going to be comfortable holding each other, being in a lift, whatever the position requires." She describes the specifics: the partner work of tango and salsa, the attire designed for line and rotation, the holds and lifts in which bodies are placed in proximity that would be, in any other context, intimate. "The assumption is yes. The assumption is always yes, because you're a dancer."

She connects this immediately to the parallel assumption that existed on film and television sets before intimacy coordination became standard: because you're an actor. The industry, in both cases, had decided that the training itself constituted consent — that professionals in these fields had signed up for whatever the work required, and that discomfort was something to be managed internally rather than raised.

"Dancers don't know that it's needed," she says, of consent conversation. "And I don't know how yet, or when, but I think it needs to be part of training — in the beginning stages, a real conversation."

She is now having those conversations. Working on a high school production with her sister directing, she choreographed a scene in which a young male performer needed to make a romantic advance on a young female performer. She separated the two actors and worked with them individually before bringing them together, going through a proper process of communication and consent rather than the usual assumption that they would simply manage.

"They were mind-blown," she says. "These are things that will make them rethink everything they're doing."

They were teenagers. They had crushes on people in the rehearsal room. That is precisely why it mattered.

Tasting the edges of the map

Here, Notcutt pauses in a way she has not paused before. She is measuring something.

There is a tendency, in profiles of people who are good at their work, to smooth over the places where that work has cost them something — where they have found themselves uncertain, or underprepared, or brought up against the limits of their own experience.

"The world of the various dynamics that comes with individuals different sexualities," she says slowly, "and the levels in which people interact with each other in a sexual way — I found that difficult in training."

She is not talking about professional discomfort, the ordinary awkwardness of learning new territory. She is talking about recognising, for the first time, that her understanding of intimacy had been shaped by assumptions she hadn't examined. That something had been capped in her — a horizon drawn by her own history, by what she had been exposed to and what she had not, by ideas about what was appropriate and what was raunchy and what raunchy meant.

"I'm not conservative at all," she says carefully. "It's more — what have I experienced? And whatever I'm thinking about it is affecting how I approach it in practice. I had to challenge that."

She describes it, with characteristic precision, as a fault cap: a ceiling she hadn't realised she was pressing against. She noticed it in her own dancing too — a tendency to pull back from anything that registered as sexual, not because she disapproved of it in others but because something in her training had suggested that restraint was the more respectable choice.

It is, she says, an ongoing process rather than a resolved one. The role asks practitioners to move between the full range of human intimacy without allowing their own histories to quietly shape what the story requires or what the performers need. Somewhere in our conversation we find ourselves circling a distinction that is easier to feel than to articulate: the difference between something that is not to your taste and something you have a genuine moral objection to. Between those two things — between I wouldn't choose this and this should not exist — there is a great deal of space, and learning to inhabit it without defaulting to either pole is, it seems, part of the work.

Notcutt is navigating it. She is journaling about it, reading about it, sitting with the discomfort rather than retreating to what she already knows. She is, in other words, doing the same thing she asks of the performers she works with: staying in the room, even when the room is unfamiliar.

"I know I tick a lot of boxes," she says. "But there's another side to many things we're encountering in this work. I have to explore more."

Where she wants the role to go

The meeting at Artscape is approaching. We are running over. She does not seem to notice.

She is talking about the future of intimacy coordination in the South African industry — about what she has observed from her dual vantage point as someone who has worked both in the crew and in the role itself. The gap in understanding, she says, is not between actors and ICs. It is between ICs and crew.

"The crew often sees you as HR," she says. "Or as this mysterious person who arrives and disappears." She finds this costly — not for herself, but for the actors. Because the protections that intimacy coordination offers are only as strong as the culture that surrounds them. If crew members are sceptical, or indifferent, or simply uninformed, the atmosphere of safety is fragile.

"I think actors feel more protected when crew really have a stronger understanding and respect for it," she says. "Then it becomes a group effort to make the space feel good and safe, rather than one person holding it."

She raises the question of scope, too: the tendency for productions to think of intimacy coordination as relevant only to explicitly sexual content, when the work is just as necessary in scenes of violence, emotional intensity, or sustained vulnerability. She knows this from her own experience on commercial floors — the scene that doesn't look sensitive until you are inside it.

And she raises, with some feeling, the question of budget.

"There are little lines when it comes to budgets that are changing our industry," she says. "Changing the way we can do our work." The story of the shoot day she stayed for, on a fraction of her fee, is not a story of heroism. It is a story of a system that hasn't yet decided to take the role seriously enough to fund it.

The longer sum

What strikes me most, by the end of our conversation, is how little of what Notcutt brings to this work is accidental. The specificity of her experience — the breadth of the students she has taught, the range of the productions she has coordinated, the years spent watching the industry from inside its most administrative corners — adds up, in retrospect, to an unusually complete picture of what a set actually is.

Not the creative vision. Not the business of it. All of it. The director's brief and the actor's fear and the crew's lunch break and the rider that says one thing and the producer who says another. She has been in all of those rooms.

"This combination," she says, gesturing at everything we have been discussing — the dance, the production, the coordination, the consent — "the creative plus that plus that — it equals this role."

She does not say it with triumph. She says it with the quiet satisfaction of a calculation that has finally resolved.

Notcutt zips her jacket, picks up her bag, and heads off-screen toward Artscape. There are people waiting for her in another room. She will read it when she walks in the door.

She always does.

Cleo Notcutt is an intimacy coordinator with Safe Sets Ltd, as well as a working choreographer and production coordinator based in Cape Town. Safe Sets is South Africa's leading intimacy coordination organisation, founded by Sara Blecher and Kate Lush.

Interviewed May 2026 by Maude Sandham.