About Élan
We don’t know what happens during birth anymore.
Before the last 100 years or so, birth happened inside our homes. Now that it’s become a medical event outside of the home, we’ve lost connection to it as a normal, human experience, so it’s not surprising that there’s an absence of realistic representation of what birth is as a human experience, not a medical procedure.
I’m a Broadway producer turned doula who now uses my unique background in birth and the arts as an intimacy director specializing in consultations for film, television, and theatre directors on birth and pregnancy scenes.
This is an opportunity to rewrite the story of birth on a cultural level.
My goal is to bring more realistic representations not only of what birth is but of what it could and should be and disrupt the idea that it’s purely a medical event in which women are screaming, out of control, beating on their husbands, or in a medical emergency in which they need to be saved. In disrupting that narrative, we have the opportunity to create a new one.
There are so many incredible human stories to tell around equity and the ways that birth is a site for racism, sexism, xenophobia. Birth is a place where these things are played out in a very specific way, and these stories haven’t been told. If you can get into the heart and guts of a birth experience, you get into a core place of a human being in a raw moment of truth when all senses are heightened.
I’d love to help you mine your performance, script, or story for these raw moments of truth, for the place where the human experienced is stripped bare.