The writer-interviewer Parvathi Ramanathan was introduced to Cathy Walsh soon after arriving in Berlin, and over the years has seen her in the many roles she participates in the Berlin dance scene – as a performer and a performance-maker for various audiences, as a production technician and coordinator, as a light technician, as a facilitator of workshops and now in her foray into intimacy coordination. As someone decidedly navigating the city’s freelance scene by offering her diverse skills and knowledge, Cathy’s path illustrates the ways that Berlin inspires its artists to work innovatively and collaboratively. In the current moment of budget cuts for the arts, it also illustrates the demands it places on the very same bodies.
Parvathi: The performances you have made in the last years seem to have an element of interaction designed into it as a means of connection with the audience, whether it is a large audience of adults or children, or a single audience member. What is your intention and drive for making performances?
Cathy: One of my main interests in performance is the interactivity – whether direct or subtle – with the live aspect of people being in a room together and transformation of the space. Even if the audience doesn’t need to respond at all, I always like to have the sense that it's something that I couldn't do without the audience there. We generate something together in the present moment, and it will be a different the next time with a different group, and different even with the same group on a different day. Coming from theatre, I have had the experience of performing characters with fixed lines of text, but I prefer when I can create something that has an element of myself, or that I can interact with the audience with my own personality. In turn, the audience is also in a similar state of being themselves but also being in an altered state of a performance space. Here, there's the potential for intimacy and magic and play. I'm always interested in bringing an element of playfulness, whether it's easy going or challenging, gentle or confronting. I want to be in a place where we somehow feel like we're sharing the space or contributing to the responsibility of making the thing.
I'm interested in how I can create a different performance environment – what is it to invite people to a workshop that turns into a performance, or a performance that turns into a workshop. I like to work with consent, but I also like to work with surprise. And I'm always wrestling with ways of taking risks, but also not making someone feel alienated too quickly, because then that's not enjoyable for them and then it's not enjoyable for me either. I have a big question mark around what is it to be comfortable? I do want to ask for consent and I do want people to feel comfortable, but I don't think that discomfort is a bad thing either. So I do want to encourage people to kind of go close to their boundaries or to accept to do things that they wouldn't normally do. I would love to see how much I could be a host and invite people in without giving the rules. Like in the games piece there's a ball flying through the air. Someone's going to have to hit it if you don't want to get in the face.
Parvathi: When you invite a participant on to the stage, or for a walk in the park with you or for the possibility of spooning with you, one never knows what's going to happen. How do you approach this unknown in the role of the host?
Cathy: It's true that you don't really know exactly what's going to happen, but it's also true that I have a very clear boundary to what I imagine can happen and have made space for it. If we're in a performance context, a performance festival, in a theatre, most people are aware of the conventions and tend to be polite, behave “correctly”. Sometimes, there may be people who don't know what's happening, maybe there is a conflict, and I'm also interested in that. I wouldn't mind if that happened more. After working for years with different kinds of proposals, I get increasingly curious about dissonance.
I think the more I practice it the more I see where the real interaction is happening, where I can gauge a sense of someone stepping back or reluctantly accepting my proposal.
Parvathi: Now that you're working with children more, do you encounter this unknown and dissonance?
Cathy: Yes, it's definitely different with children because they don't have the same conventions of good behaviour. That kind of interaction with them being loud, talking and laughing is lovely, actually, it's uncontaminated. Then the challenge and work is in somehow finding ways of pulling back their attention.
Parvathi: Would you like to share a little about the performance work that you're making next?
Cathy: The piece that I am working on next is inspired by the film Dirty Dancing. Somehow it has a reputation of being a kind of fluffy romantic dance movie, which is true on one layer, but it's also a feminist masterpiece – It addresses class distinctions and relations, there's illegal abortion, there's sexual activity, the female gaze and there's just so much in this film! The writer Eleanor Bergstein managed to kind of get all of this dense difficult material into something that packaged in a way that seems like it's just fun. And so I want to make a piece that does the same thing, that uses the popularity of Dirty Dancing to invite people to a fun event where we can actually deal with a lot of the difficult subject matter of the current world and also of the film. My wish is to use pop culture as a tool for generating empathy and collaborating with the other, at a time when political factions of left and right are moving further and further away from each other.
Parvathi: That's an exciting proposal! I want to touch upon your work as a production person – not just are you performing in your own and other makers’ works, you are also a theatre and lighting technician. What kind of insights does this give you about performance making?
Cathy: The production work that I do is almost always as a lighting technician. Then I do some heavy lifting, literally building up set or taking it down or moving stuff. That has kind of expanded a little bit to stage or production management. Working as a stage manager gives an oversight of the complexity of any project. I wish there was an endless supply of money to pay producers loads of money because they always do six jobs. I think it's the most difficult work in the world – it’s like a marathon. But I'm always happy to lift heavy things. I feel like somehow the socialism aspect of performance is unloading the van or building and un-building the set. Somehow these moments are such a perfect metaphor for “I cannot carry this table on my own. But when we do things together, they happen.”
As a lighting technician too I have had limited training. But I love to come into a space where there's not a lot of time and be fast with all of the potential options, improvising with the available lights in this kind of lo-fi way, trying to figure what we can do with them in the space of an hour. This I really enjoy. And I'm much more there to facilitate somebody's interest and curiosity and desire or a version of it.
Parvathi: In your work with lighting and performance making, it seems like you are engaged in ways to find a meeting place for different bodies and their impulses. And it takes me to think about the Intimacy Coordination work that you're doing now that needs to bring together the artistic intentions of various roles in a creative process. What has taken you in this direction of training as an Intimacy Coordinator (IC)? Is this a segue from your ongoing practice?
Cathy: Absolutely, yeah. It's interesting that that you highlight the role of the Intimacy Coordination being something that's in between, in the same way that I'm talking about lighting. It's really something where I'm trying to find out from the director what they're looking for from the performers, what the performers are comfortable with and then come with also my own ideas about how best that can function, and help facilitate the language and the choreography of the scene too. Since the lights, space and the camera also come into consideration, with all these facets we try to find out how best that can work.
But yes, it's completely coming from my background and all of the things that I've spent the last 20 years doing. I studied theatre and so I have an understanding of the performance acting side of that, the choreography that I've been doing since 2007. And then when I moved to Berlin in 2011 discovered this world of adult play and that people were really committed to this way of living their lives with conscious sexuality, breath work and BDSM and kink. Being an Intimacy Coordinator is all of those things together, but also the aspect of being a crew member to facilitate the work happening with an artistic focus. Along with that I'm concerned with how that performers are experiencing their job, that the performers are in their body that they're having a great time and they can be proud of the work that they're doing, and not feel ashamed or embarrassed or triggered by it.
Ultimately it's an exploration of how bodies can tell stories in really beautiful ways. So I really feel, it's like a braid of all of the things that I've ever done. The day that I read my first article about it, I was like, that's it, that's what I’m meant to be doing!
Parvathi: If you could take this knowledge of IC into Berlin's dance scene how do you envision it? What direction can it take for our awareness and the way we exchange with each other?
Cathy: The way I perceive the contemporary dance world in Berlin, people are very comfortable with each other's bodies. To the extent that - it's a bit like whether you like it or not this is the status quo. And so I think it can be really challenging for people who don't necessarily want to be naked or on top of each other’s bodies all the time. Just because you happen to work in contemporary dance doesn't necessarily mean that you have that comfort level. And there's always people coming from different cultures and countries newly into this dance scene. It's probably brought certain people in and pushed other people away because of certain practices, which is also natural. So I think there's a lot of potential that Intimacy Coordination brings for making new considerations on how we want to work and play together. Is there a place in your body you don't want to be touched? What cultural concerns are there around touching people's hair? What's the word we're going to use for just a time out?
It's very important that people understand that it's not about taking away possibilities, but that if my yeses and noes are very clear, then you can also play, you can go further, you can take more risks. For example, someone could actually be fine with biting and to really go for it, but might hate their eyebrows being touched because it makes them freak out.
Rather than coming into a project and laying out fixed rules, as an Intimacy Coordinator for the Berlin dance scene, I would begin by doing workshops together with participants to find out what is it that's interesting to them and what is it that they need.
Parvathi: Okay, what this clarifies for me that Intimacy Coordination is not just about putting restrictions, but actually liberating each person participating in that physical co-presence to go further or not, to whatever agreed measure, just with a lot of more awareness and respect. With that they can also take much more liberty with themselves and with their own boundaries.
Cathy: Exactly. When we can just address things directly with intimacy coordination, we have an invitation to try something interesting without feeling judged. Everybody's nervous about doing it wrong or doing it badly. But if we just address our concerns or anxieties, what you're looking forward to and what you're not looking forward to, then it gives us the space to be silly and be fine with that. Or talking about it afterwards to say let's do this again or let's never do it again, that's fine. But that we can both practice being silly, practice being wrong and embrace that – not just as a way of getting better, but as a way to enjoy.
Veröffentlicht im Februar 2026. Text von Parvathi Ramanathan.