The University of Idaho Argonaut

Associate professor of performance Kelly Quinnett presented Tuesday's Interdisciplinary Colloquium, "The Art of Stage Kissing" where participants were shown intimacy exercises and discussed the difficulties of kissing on stage. Photo Illustration by Jake Barber/Argonaut

Standing silently in a circle of staff and students, a hand gently brushes the back of senior Jessica Rice — she walks steadily across the open space to a man she’s never met before and gazes into his eyes.
Giggling, she takes both of his hands in hers as they move together toward the floor. Their eyes never leave each other’s as he moves his hands over her arms and shoulders — her eyes close as his fingers explore her face and hair.

For the next 12 minutes they are partners and silently imagine there is no one else in the world.
“No, I’ve never met him before, actually I think I’ve only seen him once before this,” Rice said at Tuesday’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium on “The Art of Stage Kissing” offered by Kelly Quinnett, associate professor of performance. “It’s strange at first getting so close to someone when you don’t even know their name, but after a while, you feel yourself getting closer to them.”
Abandoning the traditional colloquium style of PowerPoint presentations and podiums, Quinnett’s presentation featured monologues, staged scenes and an exercise in intimacy.

“I know for all of you this isn’t something you’re use to,” Quinnett said. “But, theater, like any art, is about doing and feeling.”
Quinnett described stage kissing as usually the culmination of an emotion expressed on stage and a way familiarity is expressed between characters.
More than 40 people sat on the floor after the exercise and expressed what they drew from the experience.
Comments ranged from realizing how universal loss is to a reminder there’s a lot of superficial stuff to cut through.

“We’re all kind of partners in this crazy mixed-up world,” Quinnett said. “It’s our job as actors to know who these characters are and what they need, and we can tie that into things we see and feel every day.”
Scott Doughty, an MFA director in theater and film, said he has been involved in theater for the past 27 years. He said the key to doing a kissing scene is the same as doing anything as an actor, staying true to the character.  

“Let’s say I’m performing Romeo and Juliet,” he said. “It’s not Scott who desires her, it’s Romeo. But, I’ve desired someone before, so I try to use those emotions.”
Doughty was 17 years old when he had to perform his first stage kiss in a high school play, he said.

“I barely knew my co-star, and it was so uncomfortable at first,” he said. “You don’t want to force it, though. Eventually you grow an awareness with each other, and at that point it can all come together.”
Channeling those emotions consistently can be emotionally draining, Quinnett said. But she said she would rather be in the practice of feeling too much than in the habit of cutting herself off emotionally.

“It’s so easy to suppress feelings of vulnerability with an eye roll or some other gesture,” she said. “Numbness can be more dangerous in my opinion than the emotions we feel all the time.”
The key is remembering you’re a character and not letting the real world bleed into the imaginary one, Doughty said.
He remembered one show he saw at a private university in Seattle where the two characters in a contemporary version of a Shakespeare play could not make that distinction.

“These two people just started making out with each other, and it was clear it had nothing to do with Shakespeare,” he said. “It was so uncomfortable and awkward to watch.”
After years of experience, Quinnett said she doesn’t have that level of difficulty anymore separating herself from her character. Although immersion is key, she said, the ties and duties of her own life make it “unrealistic to become lost in a character.”
“I have three kids, I can’t just go in the kitchen one day and be Blanche Dubois,” she said.