Lauren DeLeon

Lauren Kiele DeLeon is an Uruguayan-American director, intimacy director, and theorist. She has worked on and Off-Broadway in production and administration at theatres including The Lark, Roundabout, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Flea, and Keen Company. Lauren came to intimacy direction after multiple years in the theatre alongside working in bystander intervention and trauma and is in training with TIE and IDC (where she is completing her certification). Her theory focuses on decolonizing practices within theatre practice and administration and how intimacy work ties into it. Aside from theatre, she is interested in decolonization of land and native people within the current colonial system and how to give right to and protect land.

Title of Project

Decolonizing Touch: Reimagining Consent through Intimacy Direction & COVID

Description of Project

For the first time in my life, theatre actually stopped. “The show must go on” lost all of its power and artists who had spent year after year fighting for their place in the spotlight were, for the first time, forced to take a break. In studying intimacy direction, I wanted to investigate the affect of care on a colonial art form. I see intimacy direction as a decolonial practice. By inserting care into a historically harmful institution we are able to begin undoing the damage that theatre under the male gaze has caused. However, how can I touch on intimacy in a world in which it no longer existed? With intimacy direction, we choreograph the touch that audiences observe but do not touch — with a pandemic we removed our ability to touch and made us spectators of touch. We spent just under two years watching television shows where people touched while we remained isolated, untouched. We became the audiences who spectate intimacy without partaking.

Project Inspiration

Attempting to study intimacy direction during a pandemic where touch became impossible.

Areas of Academic Interest

Intimacy Direction; Decolonization; Trauma Studies; Touch; Affect