Equity for the Arts

Are you bored of this shit? #MeToo

I am SO tired of shitty stories about women.

I am tired of shitty stupid, how-many-times-do-I-have-to-watch-this-same-old-ass-trope, kinds of narratives about ladies.

I am quite tired of listening to the same supposed allies defend the same small NOT reprehensible parts of a female character that makes her, um, remotely a baseline human as clear evidence of a writer or director’s progressive ability to write women.

I am tired and, frankly, completely BORED of boring, boring, BORING stories that are so impossibly predictable in the way they dehumanize female characters that it has essentially become a farce.

I am tired of only seeing stories that have more women then men in them.

I am tired of every show set in a past period in history requiring women to be introduced in their roles as wives and daughters.

I am tired of women roles in which their romantic potential is ALWAYS the key factor of their plot line.

I am tired that there is never, ever, EVER just a rando female scientist or doctor or computer programmer or lawyer or ANYTHING with an actual substantive character underneath her dialogue who contributes to the larger plot scheme who is not also a lover to another character, (unless of course she’s just there to add some forwarding exposition and will never be seen again).

Here is a thing I do now on the regular: every time I am taking in a story in which women are outnumbered by men, in particular when female roles are essentially decoration or only defined in service by their desirability I just say out loud that this is happening.

And you know what, it gets to the point sometimes with articulating outrage that it gets BORING HOW OFTEN I DO HAVE TO DO THIS.

But do you know what’s more boring than pointing out places we should be annoyed and frustrating with diminutive places for women in the arts? HOW BORING IT IS TO KEEP WATCHING THESE STORIES.

Here’s a boring thing that happened to me yesterday that also made me tired:

I turned on Netflix to put on a little background noise while cooking. I searched for any random movie that popped up. The first one Netflix recommended me was something called Sleeping With Other People. It had been a long day and wasn’t in the mood to think hard and the two main actors are people I usually find funny I didn’t FEEL like doing a lot of work to figure out if this movie would be BORING in the way that almost all stories are, and so in this moment of fatigue and weakness I just turned on the movie.

In the first scene a woman is scorned by a nerd and sleeps with some other dude because he’s there. Then both she and the dude flash forward in time to when they are caught cheating on other people.

In the male character’s scene his girlfriend is RUNNING AWAY FROM HIM until he PHYSICALLY STOPS her in order to mainsplains that she needs to apologize for reacting to his serial lying about non-monogamy with dozens of people. His vehement tirade ends with him demeaning her single objection to a pointed targeting of her best friend as actually being her fault for not expecting that ANYTHING he EVERY wanted to do to her was on the table unless she actively received explicit agreement from him not to be a terrible human. That and she’s being emotional and irrational.

Male character leaves unrepentant and intact. He is personally unaffected by his behavior or the feelings of those around him. No one around even seems to notice him screaming at the female he ostensibly has feelings for.

In the female character’s scene she is quiet and repentant and demure to her boyfriend who talks loudly and at length seemingly unconcerned for anything she has to say until she throws herself on the table to tell him how she and her therapist have realized that she needs to come clean about the single other person she has been with since they started dating. He proceeds to scream about how she is a slut in front of an entire restaurant. He yells without being checked by anyone as she receives a myriad of blows hypothesizing an irrational and untrue litany of insults and screams as he storms out while she is left standing there in red like a scarlet indecency.

Female character is completely destroyed emotionally and publicly shamed for a fractional amount of equivalent behavior to dude in previous scene. Mostly she stands still making small mouse-like sounds to indicate her complete lack of worth in any capacity whatsoever.

This is FIVE MINUTES into a movie I turned on because Netflix RECOMMENDED it to me.

OH MY GOD I AM SO BORED OF THIS!!!!

I will not mention that the 15 minutes of the following show that I tried putting in which I realized that the licensed therapist was hiding a secret identity of an irresponsible nympho (despite clearly doing the vast majority of child-rearing duties even though she and her husband are both working professionals) because it is TOO INSANELY BORING to talk about!!!

And I will not speak at length about the comedy set in the early 80’s that I watched a bit of after that in which the main female computer programmer sleeps with some guy she’s known for 10 seconds without protection cause she’s CRAZY and her CRAZY is apparently the thing that makes her the only girl who can do computer-based things and after he says sleeping with him won’t get her the job she looks hurt and tells him not to worry because she’s not one of those girls who gets her feelings hurt, which is why we understand that he CAN hire her because she is willing to put up with tough emotional situations like this one without displaying any girly feelings because if I were to talk about the first 10 minutes of that show I would be SO BORED OUT OF MY MIND THAT I MIGHT DIE!!!!

Want to know part of the reason why men think it’s ok to harass women? Because the stories they grow up with tell them that this is how the world is supposed to work. From the moment one is born they are indoctrinated with narratives that normalize and reinforce abuse of women and the subjugation of their identities in service of the narratives of males. We shove the stories of “don’t worry your abuser is actually a prince underneath” of Sleeping Beauty and the “it’s totally not a biggie if you are forced to spend a substantive portion of your life inactively passive progressing to the point in which you are literally asleep, so long as a prince wakes you up with a non-consensual physical act” of Snow White down their throats until they are so populace and so commonplace it never even occurs to imagine otherwise.

And seeing the vast number of #MeToo’s that filled my Facebook wall yesterday I was made tired but I was also so freaking BORED.

Not because these women are boring. Not because their experiences are not real and emotionally charged.

But because it is so IMPOSSIBLY BORING AND TIRING AND INSANE to have to experience these stories over and over and OVER in an omnipresence that is narratively PLAYED-FUCKING-OUT.

Maybe all the #MeToo creators on my Facebook feed need to start moaning in pain the next time someone hands them a script with a cardboard deep female character or overtly yawning in the face of a director who is telling them to play something “sexier” or bend forward and start lightly hitting their forehead on a table during a male-dominated season planning meeting. Maybe we should all go to the movies and just start loudly stating that we are BORED of what we are seeing because misogyny is SO IMPOSSIBLY BORING and we are tired of watching this BORING PROBLEM CONTINUE TO BORE US.

So here’s a thought for those that want to do something to counteract the displays of BORING, SHITTY and emotionally EXHAUSTING stories you’ve recently seen:

If you produce, if you write, if you direct, if you defend stories and plotlines and characters that do these tiring and damaging things in relationship to women, if you don’t acknowledge that these tropes and limitations are also part of the violence that perpetuates the behaviors, if you cannot see how it is just one more boring kind of control, if you cannot think of women as something that does not require them to inhabit the roles of victim or princess or witch or old hilarious hag or nympho or life changing manic pixie dream girl, if you are silent and standing by to the constant assault of intelligence capability and capacity and depth and potential of women…

If you see this and you don’t SAY something, if you create this and find it too tough to figure out how to DO something else, if you participate in things like this without BOTHERING to notice or comment, you are not simply observing the problem.

You PART of the problem. And a BORING one at that.

Because until we ALL are BORED of having to deal with this, nothing will get fixed.

– A

Awesome Lady Superhero League

Following our first Brainstorming Town Hall, the Awesome Lady Squad (which we’ve starting likening to a real life “Justice League,” fighting against inequality in the world) reconvened to dream up more concrete action plans and flesh out the specifics for a few of the ideas so we can get down to saving – or at least improving – the world, one mission at a time.

After reviewing the problems and hopeful visions the group had listed at the last meeting, we dove right into an idea generation exercise. We each took a stack of post-its and spent fifteen minutes dreaming up projects or creative solutions to tackle specific issues or problems relating to inequity we see in the world.

When we finished, all the ideas were briefly pitched and grouped into similar projects, eventually developing an inspiring web of proposals. Click here to download a list of all our ideas.

Then, we all took another look at what we’d generated. Adrienne asked a few ladies to self-nominate as “mission leaders” to develop a project they were drawn to. These volunteers were joined by others interested in working on the same project. Thus divided into four groups, we set to work.

Each team received this Mission Task Sheet, which features a series of questions to guide each group in thinking about the practical requirements of implementing the project proposal and the “superpowers” required of team members to most successfully conquer a mission. You’re welcome to download a copy at that link and fill it out for any project you’ve been thinking about but aren’t quite sure how to begin working on.

Here are the ideas the teams fleshed out:

Family Communication Skills Workshop

Hosted by community hubs (libraries, YMCAs, etc.)
Theater/improv games for kids
Improv games for adults (of the sort taught to standardized patients helping to train new doctors)
Kids and adults reunite in family groups and share activities that each did, in hopes that the age-appropriate experiences of shared themes will give them the tools to start discussing their experiences
Perhaps end each session in a potluck without phones

Mystery Resistance Choir

“Bangin’ arrangements” of 4-5 songs created with new lyrics responding to issues like islamophobia, misogyny, climate change, LGBTQ, and immigration and spreading a message of love and positivity
Volunteer choir rehearses these songs and goes to malls, lobbies of corporations, and possibly neighborhoods for caroling-style impromptu performances of the songs
Potentially hand out flyers/calling cards
Party for people who participate

“Thanksgiving Dinner” Conversation Game

Inspired by My Gift of Grace, a card game designed to spur comfortable conversations around dying and living well – a conversation game that will guide people to openly consider and share where their values come from through entertaining thought experiments, ethical dilemmas, etc. – a step back from politics and into the morals that drive them
Collect questions/topics that people have trouble having with friends and family and develop ways to address them from a less political, more value-driven perspective
Play-test different versions and develop game that can be played with both family/friends of starkly different opinions and those you just want to get to know a little more specifically

State of Reunion (Civic Practice Fair)

A live event for civic organizations to come together in one place to pitch their mission to citizens and engage them in their practice
Each organization gets a booth and three minutes to pitch the state of the world and how their org can help to improv it
Listeners of each pitch can sign up to volunteer/donate/sign petitions for the orgs they’re interested in supporting
Food and drink vendors to make it a fun overall experience

These projects are in varying states of action/interest in further development, but if you’re interested in learning more and/or volunteering to lead/participate any of these missions, email swimponypa@gmail.com. Likewise, if you want to lead a different mission and are looking for volunteers to help, let us know and we’ll help you get the word out. Beyond that, the Awesome Lady Squad will be gathering again January 5, 7-9 PM at the front studio at Headlong, to continue this work. Join us!

Awesome Lady Squad Town Hall Dispatch

Awesome Lady Squad is back with a vengeance: a huge thanks to the 20+ ladies who joined us at last night’s meeting. Here’s a dispatch on what we got up to and what’s next:

First, the TL; DR version:

Made a list of the specific fears, dreads, and causes for concern that we see
and feel in the current political and cultural landscape
Made a list of concrete hopes and dreams we seek instead
In small groups, brainstormed tangible action plans the Awesome Lady Squad might take in response to the above

In more nitty-gritty terms…

After realigning ourselves with the values set forth in the Awesome Lady Squad Ladyfesto, we each had five minutes to individually answer each of the following questions to develop a sense of the landscape:

What is it specifically that you see and feel? What are the manifestations that create your cause for concern?

Given these negative outcomes you anticipate, what would you hope for instead, as concretely as possible?

We came back together and shared our individual thoughts to collaboratively compile a list of responses for each question. Thoughts for the first question came fast and furious, ranging from “visible apathy towards hate speech on social media” to “lack of accessibility to support systems for people who are poor or don’t speak English as a first language” to “Where does art fit now? Does it still matter with all this?”

Then, we switched to our hopes, sharing ideas and challenging each other to spin negatives into positives towards a visionary response to the challenges at hand. Here, ideas ranged from “develop language or a cheat sheet for talking about our issues/concerns” to “volunteer with non-artistic organizations to share art with kids” to “tap into the bridge-makers to disconnected communities.”

For a full listing of all our brainstorms, click HERE. If you weren’t there, we encourage you to take a moment to write down your own responses.

img_0022-copy

After putting these lists together, we switched to small groups for a Project Brainstorm, in response to the following question:

Knowing the problematic issue or outcome, and knowing what we might want to have in its place, what are projects or creative solutions that we could manifest? Assume that money is no option for now. What are tangible actions to take?

We shared the initial action plans folks dreamed up, including a Family Communication Skills workshop and making protests inherently theatrical.

On Saturday, December 10 from 2-4, we’ll continue that conversation. Newcomers should come having thought through their own sense of the artistic landscape and be prepared to dive into brainstorming projects, while returners will have a chance to flesh out their ideas even more. Then, we’ll move forward in concretely planning ways the Awesome Lady Squad can move forward with some or all of the projects.

Hope to see you there! We’ll be meeting in the rear studio at Headlong (1170 S Broad St).

An Open Letter to my Awesome Ladies and my Awesome Lady Allies

Before I get started lemme just say if you’re not in the mood to read a lot and just want the details on the upcoming Awesome Lady Squad event, jump down to the bolded stuff down below…

At the end of April of last year, as civic unrest was sweeping Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, I was feeling awfully heavy about the world. That sense of weight was born out of the inequity I saw in society, in the brutality of an “othered” community being discriminated against, and a sense of helplessness about what to do about it. It seemed clear to me that I could no longer sit back in my own privilege, that I needed to ask myself some hard questions and begin to find better ways to hold myself accountable for how my personal actions echoed out into larger cultural forces in the world around me.

At the same time, I was teaching a class called Voice for the Stage. The course was structured to end with students performing a monologue of their choosing in the college’s main stage theater, a place that required them to show off their newly acquired vocal prowess. During the final session of that class I watched a female student perform a monologue from the movie Lord of the Rings in which she took on and totally owned the character of Gandalf the Gray. As I watched her I felt a moment of something cracking. It was a thread that pulled on my desire to show empathy for those who were suffering unfairly. It also pulled on the frustration I felt as a teacher for the way that our society’s impoverished narrative landscape had pushed so many of my female students towards male roles as they sought to embody power and status as characters.

In the wake of that class, I wrote a post for the Swim Pony blog called A Million Female Gandalfs. That post was my attempt to make sense of a deep heaviness I felt at the time. A bit from that writing:

I have seen female Gandalfs and female Jack Nicholsons from A Few Good Men. I have seen African-American students play Abraham Lincoln and Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson (saving his daughter from kidnappers) and Liam Neeson again (this time fighting wolves in the woods). Today I see two girls with long black hair, girls whose heritages are both Mexican, play Carrie Bradshaw and Gretchen Weiner from Mean Girls. I am sad that between the very occasional For Colored Girls… monologue there is so much Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap and Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone.

Another quote from farther on in the piece:

I think about the stories we as a culture force on people without their consent. I think about how we also allow those stories to be forced onto people while apathetically doing nothing. It makes me think about the way that stories about thugs and gangs and riots are used to distract us from the larger more terrible and oppressive stories about the world we live in. It makes me think about the way that we shove these stories into the brains of children who do not yet have the ability to judge these stories for the garbage they are. I think about all the work we are now responsible to do as adults to pull them out of ourselves.

Awesome Ladies and Awesome Ladies’ friends, I don’t know about you, but the last few weeks have evoked a lot of the same heaviness of feeling. I’ve been feeling a lot of the same sense of frustration about the landscape of dialogue and narrative we’ve been living in. And similarly, I don’t have a clear sense yet about what exactly it is we do about it.

But, once again, I do know that I can’t sit passively by.

And so.

I’m reconvening the Squad.

Because if there’s anything possible to be done, I know that Awesome Ladies are the ones to do it. And thanks to a generous space donation from Headlong, Swim Pony’s Awesome Lady Squad will host:

A Two-Part Awesome Brainstorming Town Hall

Monday Dec 5 from 8 – 10pm &

Saturday Dec 10 from 2 – 4pm

at Headlong Studios (1170 S Broad)

The focus of this time will be to share our feelings and responses to recent events, imagine some concrete actions that we as an intersectional Lady community might imagine being useful to the world, and come up with a plan to put our Awesome might into action.

Come to one or both armed with your ideas and your readiness. We’ll do our best to facilitate a convo that helps create a plan of attack from there.

RSVP to SwimponyPA@gmail.com if you can (though please still come if you haven’t and pass along to anyone in the creative community you think would want to take part) so we get a sense of size to watch for.

Keep on Awesome-ing and hope to see you soon.

– Adrienne

This is the Cost

I see a lot of theater.

If you know me well, you know that this is a thing that too often makes me grumpy. There are a lot of reasons this is so, but in a conversation with a friend the other day I lamented that the biggest reason I needed a break from theater was because lately everything has started to blend together. I know that what I see are different productions and I know that the people making them have worked very hard and I do not want to denigrate that effort. But at some point, good lord, they all start to feel like the same story told in the same way by the same people.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing An Octoroon at The Wilma and for once I didn’t have that feeling.

ocotoroon

There are lots of things I could say about the craft of the production. I could talk about the smart script or the direction that allows a clarity and precision but doesn’t over explain. I could talk about the pleasure of watching ILL DOOTS in their jangly musical splendor as people in the audience sank into their rhythmic loop. I could talk about leaning over to my fellow viewer after watching Jaylene Clark Owens’ killer performance in the first half and saying, “Who the hell is that actress? She’s amazing. Why isn’t she in all the plays I see?” I could talk about a moment with a sudden image dropped on an audience, one that made them gasp, literally pulling breath into their bodies to gather strength in order to deal with what they’d just seen. I could talk about seeing familiar theater faces perform with a purpose and drive that must surely come from making something they deeply believe in.

I could say these things and they would be true. And in saying them it might lend one small additional assent towards a general consensus that this was a very good play done very well.

But at the same time, walking out of the theater the overwhelming thought I had was not of this praise. Instead it was this: This is the cost.

It’s a phrase that has rolled around in my head all week. This is the cost. This is the cost. This is the cost. Like a mantra I keep going over in order to unravel why it is repeating in my mind.

This play, this lauded work, this celebration of something so surprisingly and vibrantly alive, this is the cost of our prejudice. Because for every work like this that manages to sneak by the barriers our collective cultural illiteracy puts up, there are so many that are trapped and denied. For every work that makes us gasp and think and feel, offers us the chance to understand something new about the world we think we know, there are myriads more that have been shut out.

And this is the cost. We are costing ourselves exactly this thing that when given we proclaim to value.

This is the cost. This is the cost. This is the cost, I keep thinking. This is the cost of safety. This is the cost of comfort. This is the cost of apathy and weakness. How ironic that the farther something looks from those in power, the less likely it is to survive. Shouldn’t it logically be the opposite? Shouldn’t it be that the more something has capacity to move us into deeper and fuller wonder and newness, the more likely we are to risk bringing it into being? This this is the cost of such unreasonableness. This is the cost of such ignorance.

In person and online I see a vast collection of regrets for the passing of An Octoroon. I wonder if some of the intensity of feeling towards its ending is due in large part to its uniqueness, to its rarity. We should not need to mourn so deeply for the end of a work like this. It points out that we recognize its anomalism. It shows that our system is not set up to support that which might feed us best. It points out the embarrassment of riches we systematically and voluntarily deny ourselves.

Our cultural myopathy is blinding us and this is the cost.

White people, straight people, cis people, able bodied people, all the people who have never had to question the default of their existence, we people with our luck un-earned, those of us who have had not the opportunity to see from a different point of view, we must strengthen ourselves to better carry our discomforts. We must better learn to shoulder our fear and widen our empathic abilities. The rest of the world has been practicing while we have sat idly by. We must do it, if not for the obvious reasons of altruism and empathy and respect for our fellow companions on this earth, if not for these reasons than for no other than as an act of charity to ourselves that we might reap the benefits of a richer understanding of experience.

For if we do not do it, this is the cost.

– A