Over the course of its 186-year history performers at Liceu theatre in Barcelona have faced fires and anarchist bombs.
Now the opera house has hired an expert to police other dangers: sexual harassment and the cast’s participation in overly passionate scenes.
The Liceu has employed an “intimacy director”, the first time a Spanish theatre has done so, to ensure that opera singers performing in its upcoming production of an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra feel comfortable embracing one another.
“The figure [of the intimacy director] is increasingly taking centre stage in the film sector, but it is still rare in the opera sector, which makes the Liceu one of the few European lyrical theatres to host a production with this role,” the theatre said.
Ita O’Brien, a British intimacy director who has advised HBO and Netflix productions on intimate scenes and taught at some of the UK’s leading drama schools, will protect performers during the production.
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She said operas had always revolved around dramatic stories and that, historically, performers would arrive in a city just a few days before an opening night, and were not expected to discuss intimate scenes. “Without that process of agreement and consent sought, people were left feeling awkward, harassed, absolutely abused,” she told the news agency Reuters.
At rehearsals, she invites performers to “connect with a hug” then discuss where they are happy to be touched or feel uncomfortable. “We are inviting the performer to really tell us [their] boundaries and that’s a big shift in the industry,” she said. “Your yes is your yes, your no is your no, and a maybe is a no.”
In a recent rehearsal, O’Brien ensured that the mezzo-soprano Adriana Bignagni Lesca, who plays Cleopatra’s servant Charmian, was comfortable kissing another woman on the lips, and supervised scenes in which the performer playing Antony embraces Cleopatra.
Conducted by John Adams, an American composer, and staged jointly by the San Francisco Opera and New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Liceu will stage six performances of Antony and Cleopatra from October 28.
O’Brien has pioneered the role of intimacy co-ordinator. She became the first with the role at the Royal Opera House, London, in a Katie Mitchell production of Handel’s Theodora in 2022.
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A year earlier, after receiving a Bafta for best actress in I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel dedicated her award to O’Brien, saying: “Thank you for your existence in our industry, for making the space safe, for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries so that we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power without being exploited or abused in the process.”
Graça Ramos, a spokeswoman for Madrid’s Teatro Real said that the Spanish capital’s opera house had no plans to emulate the Liceu. “We don’t have plans to do that but if a production company comes with one we would of course accept it,” she said. “It’s a production from the United States, [so] normally they have this sort of thing over there.”
An unsolicited kiss planted on the lips of Jennifer Hermoso, the World Cup-winning footballer, by Luis Rubiales, when he was the Spanish soccer federation chief, in August led to national soul-searching in the country over sexism and a movement entitled Se Acabó (It’s Over).
In January the opera star Placido Domingo faced new accusations of sexual harassment from a fellow Spanish singer in a television programme, three years after such claims prompted an apology and curtailed his career. He has denied any wrongdoing.
