July 3 through August 17, 2024
EMMA FEATURE: Intimacy Direction and Regency Era Etiquette
An Interview with Intimacy and Fight Director Christopher Elst
ALEXA PRAXL: How do you go about researching the social and intimacy rules of the Regency era? Are there specific resources out there? Is it a bunch of Google searches? Are there specific people who know a lot about this?
CHRISTOPHER ELST: In eras before television or film, people were not particularly inclined to record the intricacies of their etiquette; indeed, part of the reason the rules were so specific was so those in the know could immediately identify those who were not brought up in social classes with different etiquette. The minor changes and nuances would develop somewhat naturally to exclude people who were not constantly “in fashion,” almost to a game-like degree. Tripping someone up on a minor concern of etiquette was definitely getting the upper hand. Not needing — in fact, eschewing — daily employment, the rich were bored much of the time, and would sometimes spend their leisure time in conversational competition.
Because of this, resources are slim. I started with google searches to be sure. There are a few pamphlets and articles here and there, but they would change rapidly and each year would have new additions and changes. Most sources specific to this era are academic investigations based on novels of the period, primarily Jane Austen, aptly enough. No doubt the Austen Society, who may be in attendance, have more information. For our purposes, a hodge-podge of collected information from peer-reviewed journals, pamphlets and articles, theatrical movement specialists, and internet enthusiasts has served us best.
PRAXL: How does your research and how do these rules play into choreographing intimacy onstage?
ELST: We’ve created a class-based stage etiquette that hopefully translates into a peek into a very different way of relating to each other. In modern times, one might not consider a minor breach of etiquette as anything to worry about, but even a handshake in the Georgian / Regency era (and who offered their hand first) would contain several levels of meaning. As social animals, we as humans pick up on these subtleties pretty quickly. Director Maggie Kettering has crafted the interactions so that right when audiences are starting to settle into that understanding, one character or another will make a gesture of intimacy that, while relatively tame, may even elicit a gasp from those spectators who witness it.
This has been a lovely learning experience as an Intimacy Director to get granular with touch and non-touch intimacy. Obviously, IDs have to consider these things carefully, but examining the rules of an entirely different time period brings into sharp contrast those things that we take for granted today. When we talk to actors about this awareness, even in a show with a less controlled etiquette, they often express surprise as to how much incidental contact or breaches in social space we all take for granted.
PRAXL: What all is included within the scope of intimacy? With regards to an intimacy director and also the Regency era. How is intimacy defined?
ELST: Intimacy for the stage is essentially any strong connection between characters that has mostly positive intent or effect. But Intimacy Direction, in my opinion, is much more about advocacy, boundary work, conflict resolution, and mitigating the coercive elements that naturally occur when performing. Performers are often asked to do things that other people would absolutely shy away from, if not be deeply offended. Kissing a stranger within a few days or weeks of meeting them for the enjoyment of an audience… there are very few jobs that would not only require that, but sort of spring it on a person at a moment’s notice. So, the value of having someone there to look after actors’ emotional well-being and help actors create a sustainable and repeatable practice that produces convincing portrayals of emotional connection cannot be overstated.
A story I love to share is the time when I was asked to Intimacy Direct a production of The Diary of Anne Frank. I specialize in staging intimacy, particularly non-touch kissing for minors, and was brought in to help the underage actors playing Peter and Anne to share those characters’ first kiss. After helping the cast develop a shared nomenclature and protocol surrounding intimate touch, we staged the kiss. After a time, I was asked to return to help develop a clearer and more convincing intimacy between the actors playing Anne and Anne’s father and mother, a familial intimacy expressed with strokes of Anne’s hair and face, embraces to comfort her, etc. Actors will often err on the side of politeness toward the other actor which can subtly undermine their performances of this sort of familiarity. Furthermore, after I had helped them navigate those moments, another actor who was playing a Nazi soldier asked if I could create a protocol for him and the younger actors so that he could fully embody the cruelty of the soldier without retaining his emotional repulsion he felt in re-enacting the horrors of that story.
“Intimacy” has become a loaded term in the theatre, and the resistance to this work can be understandable and difficult to overcome in people that already have their own methods, but most performers and productions I have worked in have found it invaluable, once they understand the aim of Intimacy Direction as not counter to, but rather generative of, the immense emotional power to be gained from performance. Once actors feel that their lives and mental health are properly separated from the sometimes heart-rending work they strive for, they feel free to expand into greater performances.
PRAXL: Just for fun: What was the most obscure or your favorite rule that you found in your research?
ELST: A few stood out to me. Perhapsas a holdover from chivalric times, women were given reverence, but not real respect. Things like hand-kissing and handshakes, essentially any show of intimacy, were always at the discretion of the woman in the interaction, opposite of almost everything else in the period. In fact, if you had not been introduced properly (which is a much more formal process than today), you were meant to ignore each other entirely until someone made the introduction. Even if you were introduced during a dance, you were considered “not formally introduced,” and would need to go back to ignoring each other entirely until such an introduction were made.
Anyone elderly was given the same respect as whoever the highest class person would be, out of respect for their years and wisdom. In our youth-focused culture, this is definitely a large contrast.
PRAXL: Anything else you’re interested in sharing or would like the audience to know about you, your work, this work in particular, etc.
ELST: Answered above at length.
BUT
FROM Corfield PJ. Fleeting gestures and changing styles of greeting: researching daily life in British towns in the long eighteenth century. Urban History. 2022;49(3):555-567. doi:10.1017/S0963926821000274
Unsurprisingly, the wryly observant Jane Austen emerges as an outstanding witness to usages and variations in styles of greeting. Her characters are generally life-like, if sometimes presented with a pleasing touch of satire; and they are unfailingly rooted in plausible societies. Given that Austen’s novels are describing an era of change, they are therefore filled with instances of both the traditional custom of bowing/curtseying and the new-style use of the handshake. That latter observation sometimes causes surprise. People object – sometimes quite vehemently – that Austen’s characters do not shake hands. But, in certain circumstances, they do.
Dramatic body language cannot be bettered in the Austen canon than the encounter, in a crowded London salon, between Marianne Dashwood, who represents ‘sensibility’, and the cad, John Willoughby, who has unilaterally dropped their friendship. They have not met for some time; and have had no shared communications. When they unexpectedly find themselves face to face, Marianne Dashwood declares ‘in a voice of the greatest emotion. “Good God! Willoughby, what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?”’ In response, Willoughby is at first awkward and then cold. He touches Marianne Dashwood’s hand briefly, drops it and turns away. Rejecting someone’s proffered handshake is an outright snub; and in Sense and Sensibility, Austen accurately pinpoints Willoughby’s callous evasion.
For historians, this fictional encounter shows that the egalitarian custom of shaking hands between a young man and young woman, both unmarried, was an accepted part of the cultural repertoire by this date. (This comment refers to the handshake between friends, which was becoming increasingly common in the long eighteenth century – not to touching or clasping hands between courting or dancing couples, which has a much older history). Marianne Dashwood was depicted as impulsive and lacking the socially useful capacity to hide her true feelings. Yet her request to Willoughby was not considered unthinkable. There was no general recoil in consternation by the surrounding company. Moreover, plenty of other characters in other Austen novels also shake hands. Thus in Emma, the relative social outsider, Harriet Smith, was ‘delighted with the affability with which Miss Woodhouse had treated her all the evening, and actually shaken hands with her at last!’.
So a shared manual pledge between two people – not necessarily absolute social equals but meeting on terms of equality – was by this date a normalized pledge of social acceptance. The alleged ‘invisibility’ of the handshake in Austen’s novels – for those who claim not to see it – is thus a case of readers skipping over details which they are not expecting to find. That syndrome is quite common. Many researchers will have had the experience of suddenly spotting significant information in sources which they have consulted many times, without previously having identified anything of note. Hence, a further methodological rule for historians, who are searching for fragmentary references to fleeting gestures, is to keep eyes wide open for every little detail, including unexpected ones; and to reread sources several times.
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