Jelly's Last Jam

What does a Sensitivity Specialist do? What’s their role on a production?  

A Sensitivity Specialist focuses on the well-being of the production by making sure the team has all the mental and emotional tools it needs in order to stay healthy throughout the run of a production. If there is content that includes artists designing or portraying characters that might live outside their consent and boundaries, a Sensitivity Specialist opens discussions about how those characters can be crafted with compassion. In my experience working as a Sensitivity Specialist, I have found that supporting the company with de-roleing techniques, closure techniques between actors playing charged material, company agreements, and more are my primary focus when hired onto a production.  

What was your path to becoming a Sensitivity Specialist?   

I have 30 years of directing experience and have directed over 100 productions. When I returned from Shanghai after being abroad directing and producing for 10 years, I was looking for something new to add to my skill set. I landed upon intimacy and immediately got into as many classes as I could. My love for that kind of work launched my new career. After working on Broadway in a show called Pass Over, my curiosity led me to projects that left out the sexual content and focused more on culturally sensitive content around race, gender, mental health, and body autonomy. In 2021, I coined the phrase Sensitivity Specialist while working on Moises Kaufman’s Seven Deadly Sins, a Tectonic Theater Project.  

What is the best part of your job? What is the most challenging? 

The best part of my job is when people tell me that the process of working with an intimacy or sensitivity specialist has really blown their mind. They say they feel empowered to live the character fully because they feel safe and tethered to skills that help them come back to “self” more easily and with little difficulty. That’s most of the time. What is most challenging is when I interact with people who want the wheels of creativity to turn faster than the speed of trust.  

What is always true for a production? What changes from project to project?  

 Well, before the pandemic I would have said one true thing is that “the show must go on.” We know that isn’t true anymore so I guess my second truth would be that there will always be someone willing to listen to a story. Always true? That something will always happen. We may or may not have control over what happens, but something always will.  

Each production has an energy. The equation of that energy is part timing, part leadership, part story, and part team assembled around it. I love walking into new energies on each production I encounter.  

How has your work within the industry evolved since you began? What are some of your hopes for the future of this work?  

I think at the beginning my ideas about sensitivity were colored by a patriarchal system that built the intimacy industry. As I got to know myself and developed my language and style of sensitivity specialization, I began to notice more production companies and GMS were interested in what I had to offer. Now, there isn’t anyone else that has my methods of communication, but in the future I plan on offering training for the field of Sensitivity Specialization. I always say I am in the business of lengthening actors’ careers. I would be overjoyed to have more Sensitivity Specialists following in my footsteps for this necessary work.