HowlRound: I recently received a commission to create a piece of theatre for Spalding University, a small private college in Louisville, Kentucky, which is where I got my BFA in Creative Writing. My instructions were beautifully open to interpretation. I was to create a work that reflected their new curriculum theme: "Crossing Borders." Like many universities, Spalding is diving head first into interdisciplinary studies, and the curriculum theme will help professors choose reading material and activities, as students learn to use a variety of disciplines to interact with our complicated world.
4 comments:
This is an important article for CMU to be aware of particularly because we are in the midst of an ongoing school-wide discussion about sexual assault, and yet we often do not consider the implications of rape culture in our own work. There are so often times when actors will mention to each other how things that their teachers have said or critiqued them with made them uncomfortable in their work, albeit offhanded comments, or in-scene suggestions. We see this gap primarily in generational differences, because the world that we are growing up in is vastly different in terms of its definitions and awareness of issues of rape culture than the world that the majority of our teachers grew up in. The more that this conversation happens, the more we need to hold school-wide discussions and speak up when we recognize something. Recently, we had an issue like this in one of our classes, and I won't go into specifics, but not one of us spoke up when the teacher said something that offended all of us, and instead we all sent emails afterward addressing the issue. Being impassioned about the issues, or knowledgeable about the issues is purposeless if we are not standing for them in our daily lives. I take this article as a good reminder of that.
This article mentions something that I think is very important. Not only does the work we do have an effect on the audience, but something that may often be forgotten is the effect on the creators involved in making a sensitive work of this nature. Especially centered around consent, sexual assault, and rape culture, it is important to be aware of the work that is taking place both onstage and off. Like Jack says in his comment, it is a reminder that when something is brought up in work it is also something that we deal with personally. Each of us is responsible for recognizing the potential that our words contain for hurt, and controlling that. This applies not only to ourselves but also to others in a collaboration. Making sure that everyone is operating on the same tracks is key to having a successful conversation about these issues, and to creating something that will initiate conversation in our audiences.
Being an actor is a strange parallel to being a person being taken advantage of: you are at the mercy of your director, producer, etc. rendering you in many situations, powerless. You are a tool for the art, rather than an active participant. You are being used for your talents, for your name, for your face. By opening up this dialogue and treating the process of creating art as intimately as a sexual encounter, this puts power back in the performers hands. I think this is a really interesting and wonderful take on the process of art. The art world has a responsibility to treat artists with respect.
This article touches on important topics, themes, and issues in theater (and in real life). But what does it have to do with being in a fly-over state? Don’t these issues exist all over the country? We’ve all heard phrases like “implied consent” and “verbal consent” and “no means no” as it pertains to our everyday lives. What hasn’t been discussed so much is how these apply to theater. Not being an actor, I’ve never been put in this situation and quite frankly, I don’t want to be put into this situation. I have, however, worked on shows with various aspects of nudity and/or love scenes. While helping on the national tour of HAIR, the production didn’t require anyone who didn’t want to go onstage naked to do so. The stage managers discussed, in brief, who was or wasn’t going to appear onstage naked in each performance as it related to the production. As a guest, I was asked to leave the backstage area for the entirety of the scene wherein the nudity occurs. In college, I was the master carpenter for a show that required a diaphragm as a prop. These two situations are on different levels of consent, but that doesn’t mean that they should be treated differently. Consent matters and we all need to be more respectful of it.
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