“What first ignited your feminism?” Those participating in this week’s Feminist Summer Camp were likely to have a good answer to this question. Feminist Summer Camp is a weeklong program run by SoapBox Inc. that brings college students and recent graduates of various ages from across the country together to discuss a variety of feminist issues and engage with a diverse group of feminist professionals and organizations. This Tuesday, as part of this year’s program, campers met with Katie Cappiello, artistic director and founder of the award-winning youth feminist theater company, The Arts Effect, and the writer of four original feminist plays including SLUT: The Play for conversation and an interactive creative session.
The session began with a brief introduction and background to The Arts Effect, in which she explained the motivation behind the company; the belief that theater is a powerful tool for social change that provides an outlet through which artists and audiences alike can engage in difficult conversations. It’s a space to channel real experiences and emotions into a medium that promotes and rewards self expression, honesty, vulnerability and empathy. It is this idea of finding truth through storytelling and imagination that makes theater so healing to all involved. Following this introduction, the group participated in a theater-based exercise that gave them an idea of what the all-girl company does on a regular basis and how therapeutic the process can really be.
Campers were first instructed to spend a ten minutes writing a response to the prompt, “What was the event that first ignited your feminism?” — participants were assured that this moment could be anything as long as it had a significant impact. After they were finished, they read over their piece and underlined a phrase they believed held a particular importance and captured the overall feeling of their story/experience. The groups was then divided into three mini-groups and campers shared their responses with each other, resulting in many “me too” moments, thoughtful questions about each others backgrounds and childhoods, and deeper communal discussions about feminism. The groups were then asked to to find a way to combine their underlined sentences/phrases and overall experiences into a short theater piece that they would perform– turning the small conference room into a stage.
Each of the three groups approached the project differently and incorporated their personal experiences in unique ways. Since everyone’s moments was singular, the teams had to get creative in order to form a cohesive narrative.
The first group portrayed two different scenes, of a family at the dinner table and a student talking to a teacher. Both scenes commented upon common gender stereotypes. It highlighted the frequent childhood message that there are just some things girls can’t do, powerfully put as “I was told I could do everything…except some things.”
The second group took a much different, more interpretative approach to their piece. They noticed that while their moments didn’t connect, they represented a progression towards a discovery and understanding of feminism and its core values. Each of them gave a small monologue that represented their evolution into feminism and the moments that got them there — starting with memories of being sexualized as a small child and ending with finding and embracing agency over sexuality as a grown woman.
The final group combined everything into one short scene in a very effective and powerful way. The actors portrayed a child playing with dolls who decides to make the two female dolls kiss. Suddenly, the mother walks in and catches the child in the act and tells her it’s fine. Then the father barges in, and scolds them harshly, “You are ugly, dumb and dead.” This managed to synthesize each member of the group’s personal moments –experiences with high school sexual assault, an alcoholic and abusive father and childhood exploration– into a piece about consent and silencing: “I didn’t stop it, but I didn’t say yes”.
By the end of the two hours, the team of Feminist Summer Campers were highly interested and invested in the activity, and many said it felt empowering and freeing to discuss and express these issues this way, even considering many of them had never been involved in theater. Although it was only for a brief two hours, it was an engaging and educational workshop that taught participants about the importance and benefits of theater in the feminist movement, and will most likely lead some of the campers to further involvement in similar projects and experiences.
