Performing #MeToo

Description

A tweet by American actor and activist Alyssa Milano, sent on October 15, 2017, opened the floodgates to an outpouring of testimony and witnessing across the Twitterverse that reverberated throughout social media. Facebook status lines quickly began to read “Me too,” and #MeToo was trending. That tweet re-launched the ‘me too’ movement, which was started in 2006 by Tarana Burke.

Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away does not attempt to deliver a comprehensive examination of how #MeToo is performed. What it does aim at presenting is a set of perspectives on the events identified as representative of the movement through a lens or lenses that are multinational, as well as work and analysis from a variety of time periods, written in a diversity of styles. By providing this means of engaging with examples of the many interpretations of and responses to the #MeToo movement, and by identifying these responses (and those of audiences) as provocations, of examples of how not to look away, the collected chapters are intended to invite reflection, discussion and, hopefully, incite action.

It gives writers from diverse cultural and environmental contexts an opportunity to speak about this cultural moment in their own voices. There is a wide geographical range and variety of forms of performance addressed in this timely new book. The international group of contributors are based in the UK, USA, Australia, South Africa, Scotland, Canada, India, Italy and South Korea.

The topics addressed by writers include socially engaged practice; celebrity feminism, archive and repertoire; rape/war; misogynistic speech; stage management and intimacy facilitation; key institutions’ responses; spatial practices as well as temporal ones; academic call-outs; caste/class; political contexts; adaptation of classic texts; activist events; bouffon (a clown technique) and audience response

Forms of performance practice include applied theatre, performance protest, verbatim, solo performance, institutional practice, staging of plays, street responses, academic, adaptation of classic text, play reading events and the musical.

Although there is much to read in the media and alternative media on the #MeToo movement, this is the first attempt to analyse the movement from and in such diverse contexts.

Bringing together twelve writers to speak about works they have either performed, witnessed or studied gives the reader a nuanced way of looking at the movement and its impact. It is also an incredible archive of this moment in time that points to its importance. 

Suitable for use in several graduate and undergraduate courses, including performance studies, feminist studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, environmental or liberal studies and social history.

Essential reading for theatre workers, academics, students, and anyone with an interest in feminism, contemporary theatre or human rights. For artists considering projects that include the themes of #MeToo, and for producers and directors of such projects looking for good practices around how to create environments of safety in their organizations, as well as those who wish to organize communities of artists.

For anyone interested in learning more about how to support the movement, or an interest in the specific social narratives told in each individual chapter. For women, feminists and anyone with an interest in the issues.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Judith Rudakoff

1. “Vital Acts of Transfer”: #MeToo and the Performance of Embodied Knowledge

Shana MacDonald

2. Bite the Bullet: The Practice of Protest as a Coping Mechanism

Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga

3. Resisting Theatre: The Political in the Performative

Effie Samara

4. Supporting Brave Spaces for Theatre-Makers Post-#MeToo: A Chicago-Based Study on Rehearsing and Performing Intimacy in Theatre

Susan Fenty Studham

5. We Get It: Calling Out Sexism and Harassment in Australia’s Live Performance Industry

Sarah Thomasson

6. Toward the Origin of Performing #MeToo: Franca Rame’s The Rape as an Example of Personal and Political Theatre/Therapy

Laura Peja and Fausto Colombo

7. The Royal Court in the Wake of #MeToo

Catriona Fallow and Sarah Jane Mullan

8. Dissident Solidarities: Power, Pedagogy, Care

Swati Arora

9. Conversations with Noura: Iraqi American Women and a Response to A Doll’s House

Mary P. Caulfield

10. #MeToo Theatre Women Share Their Stories

Yvette Heyliger

11. Les Zoubliettes: Raging through Laughter—a Feminist Disturbance

Sonia Norris

12. “I’m the person to speak about myself”: Self-Declaration, Reversal of Power, and Solidarity in The Red Book

Yuh J. Hwang

Appendix: A Primer on the International #MeToo Movement

Elise A. LaCroix

Biographies of Contributors

Sujets

• Feminist Theory
• Social Science
• Theater
• Performing Arts
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Advocacy group
• Theatre
• Red Book
• General officer
• Feminism
• A Doll's House
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 22 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789383836
• Langue: English

Extrait

Performing #MeToo
Performing #MeToo

How Not to Look Away
Edited by
Judith Rudakoff
First published in the UK in 2021 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2021 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Judith Rudakoff
Production manager: Aimée Bates and Naomi Curston
Author photo: Christoper Gentile
Editorial assistant: Elise A. LaCroix
Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-381-2
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-382-9
ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-383-6
To find out about all our publications, please visit
www.intellectbooks.com
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Judith Rudakoff
1. “Vital Acts of Transfer”: #MeToo and the Performance of Embodied Knowledge
Shana MacDonald
2. “Bite the Bullet”: The Practice of Protest as a Coping Mechanism
Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga
3. Resisting Theatre: The Political in the Performative
Effie Samara
4. Supporting Brave Spaces for Theatre-Makers Post-#MeToo: A Chicago-Based Study on Rehearsing and Performing Intimacy in Theatre
Susan Fenty Studham
5. We Get It : Calling Out Sexism and Harassment in Australia’s Live Performance Industry
Sarah Thomasson
6. Toward the Origin of Performing #MeToo: Franca Rame’s The Rape as an Example of Personal and Political Theatre/Therapy
Laura Peja and Fausto Colombo
7. The Royal Court in the Wake of #MeToo
Catriona Fallow and Sarah Jane Mullan
8. Dissident Solidarities: Power, Pedagogy, Care
Swati Arora
9. Conversations with Noura : Iraqi American Women and a Response to A Doll’s House
Mary P. Caulfield
10. #MeToo: Theatre Women Share Their Stories
Yvette Heyliger
11. Les Zoubliettes : Raging Through Laughter—a Feminist Disturbance
Sonia Norris
12. “I’m the person to speak about myself”: Self-Declaration, Reversal of Power, and Solidarity in The Red Book
Yuh J. Hwang
Appendix: A Primer on the International #MeToo Movement
Elise A. LaCroix
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge and thank the contributors to this collection of chapters for their commitment to the principles of the #MeToo movement. I would also like to thank Serena Dessen and Myles Warren for their comments on the Introduction, and Céleste A. LaCroix for her assistance with tracking down some elusive reference materials. As well, I would like to acknowledge York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design for generously providing funding to support the editorial assistance of Elise A. LaCroix, a promising emerging scholar with a keen eye for detail.
Introduction
Judith Rudakoff

If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me too.” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. 1
This tweet by American actor and activist Alyssa Milano, sent on October 15, 2017, opened the floodgates to an outpouring of testimony and witnessing across the Twitterverse that reverberated throughout social media. 2 Facebook status lines quickly began to read “Me too,” and #MeToo was trending. Abby Ohlheiser wrote in the Washington Post of October 19, 2017, “#MeToo has produced a kind of unity by volume, but when you speak to individual women about it, you find a wide range of responses—empowerment, exhaustion, solidarity, trauma.” 3
The recent #MeToo campaign has inspired wave upon wave of awareness, witnessing, and commitment to action, sometimes including the powerful tool of creative response. As a result, testimony and expressions of support, artistic interpretation, representation, and performance of #MeToo experiences have become an important way of disseminating information and, in some cases, provided a way of attempting to work through the trauma of both present and past occurrences of sexual harassment. The subtitle of this book, How Not to Look Away , further identifies the role of provocative performance to challenge both artists and audiences to engage with the principles of the movement.
On October 15, 2017, I, like thousands of other women, wrote “Me Too” on my Facebook status. While this is not the place that I choose to detail the times and places I have experienced sexual or gender harassment, it is the place I claim membership in the movement: as target, 4 as witness, and as arts facilitator of #MeToo-themed creative work.
Performing #MeToo
Over the course of my decades of work as a developmental dramaturg, I have facilitated autoethnographic performances created and presented by both artists (professionals and students) and non-artists seeking a creative experience. My methods for initiating and evolving new work 5 can and have provided useful tools to germinate, evolve, and disseminate work that addresses, among other important subjects, sexual or gender harassment and violence against women. From early on in my career, my dramaturgy practise has contained inherent links to themes now referred to as #MeToo-inflected work, through exercises such as the construction and performative presentation of Image Containers, to more complex performance work ( The Ashley Plays ), 6 and online projects aimed specifically at inspiring personally driven theatricalized narratives ( Roots/Routes Journeys to Home ). 7 These projects have provided creators with the means to express personal memories through filters and frames that offer some degree of protection against the triggering of trauma responses.
When dramaturging new work, I focus on the principle that telling one’s own story is more than just a writing tool: in circumstances where personal safety has been threatened, declaring one’s history publicly through a fictionalized voice can be an important component of the survival process that does not unduly compromise the individual at risk. As well, the core research question I employ to initiate artistic response (What is home?) will often result in creative work that emanates from investigation of home in relation to the physical body, especially if the body has experienced trauma. I propose that this recurring relationship offers a #MeToo-inflected perspective on the artistic work generated.
Given my recent observations about the relationship between home and the body in dramaturg-driven projects I have facilitated, as well as the increasing frequency of engagement with narratives based on sexual abuse in the creative work being generated, and given my concurrent work as a scholar and researcher, initiating and editing a collection of essays inspired by performative work emanating from or reflecting the principles of the #MeToo movement seemed like an organic next step to take.
I offer here several examples from the work I have dramaturged as context for my observations.
Image Containers
In this project, I ask participants to build a container and fill it with physical objects that represent aspects of a pivotal moment in their life. The containers can be unorthodox, and the shape they take should be determined by the principle that form comes organically out of content. The participant is asked to present their Image Container and unpack its contents in a performative manner. The goal of this exercise is to give participants a structure in which to explore and identify elements of a personal narrative that can later be expanded upon and developed into a monodrama. Here is an example of an Image Container that contains a #MeToo-related narrative, though it predates the movement. 8
Nichola Sawyer is originally from the small English town of Swindon in the United Kingdom. Her Image Container was a pair of men’s boot-cut blue jeans, initially folded into a square, and tightly sealed in cellophane wrap. When the jeans were unwrapped, the air was filled with the pungent scent of a men’s perfume called “Addiction.” Messages and descriptions were written on small, frayed fragments of white paper, and were placed all over the jeans, affixed with straight pins: tucked into the pockets, attached along the seams, at the crotch, on the knees. These images acted as stimulus for Sawyer to describe a relationship that she had endured with an abusive partner. In one of the pockets she placed a cassette tape of recorded music from 1998 (by Radiohead and Beck) that she associated with the relationship. There were also visual images on some of the paper fragments, including hand-drawn pictures of a house and a car, which Sawyer identified as her abuser’s tools of seduction. The container also included a package of cigarettes and a lighter. Some of the shreds of paper bore the following words: addiction, dependency, tolerance, alcohol, cannabis, amphetamine, ecstasy, cocaine/crack. Sawyer pinpointed the time of this Image Container as March to July 1998, locating it in Swindon, Wiltshire, England. During the initial performative presentation of this Image Container, physical vocabulary, text, and performance style began to emerge.
Sawyer was twenty years old in 2002 when she created this performance piece. In reflecting on the events of five years prior that inspired her Image Container, and by performing it, she “was able to re-frame my experience and externalize and detach the person I was involved with from myself.” 9 Sawyer further explained,

Such work as this can be very effective in re-framing in particular; how we on