Archive for the "V-Day" Category
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We followed a line of women (and a few scattered men) into the Superdome early Friday morning. After being thoroughly searched and promising never to turn on our video camera, we were allowed admittance. The entrance was decorated with a selection of feminist art pieces such as poster board sized pages of a graphic novel entitled, “Oh fuck, I’m a Victim.” In it, artist Vicki Rabinowicz depicts a woman who is followed, kidnapped, and raped. In one frame, she is drawn small enough to fit in her attacker’s hand as he masturbates onto her entire body then flushes her down the toilet. At the end of the strip we discover that the victim is the artist and that she drew this on her 28th birthday, tens years after the attack. Not all of the pieces were as jarring though. To the left lay a ball of bras (think office ball of rubber bands) roughly five feet tall. The only thing holding this work together seemed to be the very godforsaken wired hooks of each boulder holder. Along the back wall was a timeline of shirts, bags, posters, and other promo items representing performances from around the world. Near that was an altar with lit candles to honor those who fell to final rest when Katrina hit.
Past the welcoming gallery inside is where we all met. We were an international collection of women and girls. Represented in the audience and on stage were activists from Bosnia, Kenya, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Iceland, Afghanistan, France, Guatemala, The Philippines, Iraq, and displaced Americans from New Orleans.
The backdrop of the stage was the sparkling pink official logo of V to 10th. Behind this massive { } draped a billowing mauve cloth and a black screen peppered with lights to stimulate stars. Next to the main stage on the right was The Red Tent. This served as an open (shoeless) space for storytelling and sanctuary. Although all events were free, the tent had a sign up list and it was at capacity for every 80 minute time slot.
The opening ceremony was completely successful in its mass cleansing of the space and the attendees of V to the 10th. We were now, in fact, sitting in the Superlove. Joan Roshi, a zen priest in her 60s, initiated a call and response for the following holy vow:
“For as long as space exists and the world abides, may I too remain to dispel the suffering of others.” x3
It may sound a bit hippy dippy, but it was powerful and became even more so when she reminded us that it was our responsibility to hold each other to this promise. “I might be a Buddhist priest,” she said, “but I know when my government can do a lot better.” Word.
Immediately afterwards came a beautiful song with high-pitched sounds like weeping. Only after the intro did I recognize it as a cover and remix of Marley’s “No woman No cry.” Already a favorite, the version this woman sang stung deeper than when I’d ever heard it before. I did not catch her name but I was totally permeated by her presence.
A few more local activists came out and said a word or two. Then the Mahalia Jackson all girl’s choir preformed. Since so many schools in NOLA do not have decent music programs (if they have one at all), this choir was a collection of girls who were neighbors, friends and church mates. They all swayed together and they were so awesome, I almost wished public displays of faith like this made me weak in the knees shouting and jumping like others. An older woman on stage did things with a tambourine that I didn’t even know were possible.
Then came Eve. After a few moments of pumping us up with rah rah vagina VAGINA, she got down to the overall mission of Superlove. She began by reminding us that in our daily interactions we often fail to listen to the full stories of individuals. We avoid this to bypass the yucky feelings of guilt and responsibility that arise when we come in contact with injustices. “We need to take a deep breath this weekend and listen to everyone’s stories,” she pleaded. She encouraged us to see each panel, performance, dance, and song as an offering that we could take or leave. To resist the urge to pick apart something we did not, or could not, relate to and just let Superlove be.
In subsequent posts, we will be sharing details of the parts that we took home with us.
(SMU in NOLA are students Jessica Andrewartha, Meg Bell, and Allie Thompson.)
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FRIDAY MORNING WELCOME – SUPERLOVE
WELCOME EVERYONE. HOW DO YOU LIKE OUR VAGINA DOME?
WELCOME TO SUPERLOVE!!!!
WE STAND WHERE OUR SISTERS AND BROTHERS IN NEW ORLEANS
EXPERIENCED THE GREATEST ABANDONMENT AND VIOLENCE
AND STILL THREE YEARS LATER, MANY ARE STILL WAITING FOR
A WAY OFF THE ROOF TOP.
WHAT DOES THIS VIOLENCE LOOK LIKE?
AN 82 YEAR OLD WOMAN QUIETLY WAVING AS THE WATER REACHES HER NECK
A SCENE OF ANARCHY AND PANIC AND SHAMING RIGHT HERE ON THIS GROUND WHICH GAVE RISE TO RAPE AND DEATH
THIS VIOLENCE SOUNDS AND RESOUNDS IN THE DREAMS OF THE FOLKS of NEW ORLEANS, THE SOUND OF HELICOPTERS CIRCLING AND CIRCLING BUT NEVER COMING BACK
IT IS THE SOUND OF CHILDREN SCREAMING AS THEY ARE SEPARATED FROM THEIR PARENTS TO BE PUT ON BUSES AND TAKEN TO UNKNOWN DESTINATIONS
THIS VIOLENCE IS THE MADNESS OF PAYING RENT ON HOUSES THAT DON’T EXIST
IT LOOKS LIKE A PREGNANT TEENAGE GIRL drinking cleaning fluid CAUSE THERE IS NO FUTURE
IT LOOKS LIKE GROWN MEN BEING SO HUMILIATED BY LOSING THEIR JOBS AND HOMES AND ESTEEM THAT THEY HUMILIATE AND BEAT THEIR WIVES
IT LOOKS LIKE A PRESIDENT FLYING BY AND REFUSING TO TOUCH OR FEEL OF KNOW WHAT MILDEW TASTES LIKE IN A FEMA TRAILER, WHAT MOLD CAN DO TO YOUR LUNGS, WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO LOSE EVERYTHING AND TO GET LOST AND BE A DISAPPEARED PERSON IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY
IT LOOKS LIKE A COUNTRY THAT HAS FORGOTTEN ONE oF ITS GREATEST CITIES, CULTURE, WHERE ELSE CAN YOU DANCE IN THE STREETS, WHERE ELSE DO THEY HONOR THEIR DEAD AND CHERISH THEIR LIVING.
IT IS SPENDING 3 TRILLION DOLLARS TO MASSACRE AND DESTROY AND MURDER AND CREATE MAYHEM IN IRAQ WITH THE FALSE AND MANIUPLATIVE PROMISE TO SECURE
PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN LEFT TO DROWN, GO HUNGRY, BE DISPLACED, LIVE IN TENTS UNDER BRIDGES.
IT LOOKS LIKE ONE OUT OF EVERY THREE WOMEN ON THE PLANET BEING BEATEN OR RAPED OR OTHERWISE ABUSED
IT LOOKS LIKE JUAREZ MEXICO WHERE AFTER 10 YEARS AND 400 WOMEN WERE MUTILATED, DISAPPEARED MURDERED AND RAPED WITH IMPUNITY
IT LOOKS LIKE AFGHANISTAN WHERE WOMEN NOW LIVE IN PROFOUND TERROR AND SUBJUGATION DESPITE A U.S. WAR THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO LIBERATE THEM
IT LOOKS LIKE THE CONGO WHERE 200 THOUSAND WOMEN HAVE BEEN RAPED AND CONTINUE TO BE RAPED AND THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IS STILL PARALYZED RESPONDING.
IT LOOKS LIKE ONE OUT OF 3 WOMEN IN THE US MILITARY BEING RAPED
SUPERLOVE IS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.
IT’S HUNDREDS OF VOLUNTEERS FLYING THEMSELVES IN TO NEW ORLEANS TO OFFER YOGA, MEDITATION, MEDICAL EXAMS, MAKE OVERS, THERAPY, speeches, thoughts. performances TO THE DESERVING WOMEN OF NEW ORLEANS AND THE GULF SOUTH WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES AND HEARTS AND HEALTH TO KEEP THIS CITY AND THE GULF COAST ALIVE.
ITS V-DAY ACTIVISTS COMING FROM EVERY STATE OF THE UNION AND COUNTRIES ALL OVER THE WORLD TO JOIN IN VAGINA SOLIDARITY IN A MOVEMENT TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND EMPOWER THEM. IT’S A SOLD OUT MIDNIGHT TRAIN FROM GEORGIA.
IT’S A MOVEMENT THAT EXISTS IN 110 COUNTRIES IN 45 LANGUAGES
IT IS 1200 WOMEN COMING HOME FROM ATLANTA AND MISS AND ALABAMA AND TEXAS
IT’ S A BRAND NEW PLAY CALED SWIMMING UPSTREAM (YOU WILL SEE IT TONIGHT) THAT GREW FROM THE SOULS OF WOMEN who SURVIVED THE FLOOD
IT IS DR MUKWEGE AND CHRISTINE AND PERNILLE COMING FROM CONGO AND ZOYA FROM AFGHANISTAN AND NIGHAT FROM PAKISTAN AND YANAR FROM IRAQ AND AGNES AND WINNIE AND DUNCAN FROM KENYA
IT IS THE KATRINA WARRIOR NETWORK WHICH HAS SEWN TOGETHER A FABRIC OF COMMUNITY GROUPS WORKING TO STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN EVERY FORM
ITS UNDERSTANDING THAT EVERYONE IS IN THE HOUSE, AND EVERYTHING WE FIGHT TO CHANGE IS CONNECTED AND PART OF THE OTHER. WE DON’T END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AS LONG AS RACISM PREVAILS AND POVERTY AND A MILITARY CONSCIOUSNESS DOMINATES AND BOYS ARE BOUGHT UP TO BE MEN WHICH MEANS NOT TO BE WOMEN AND WE DON’T END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMENS BODIES AS LONG AS ITS PERMISSIBLE TO EXPLOIT AND RAPE THE EARTH WHICH IS THE LIFES BODY AND WE DON’T END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN UNLESS WE ARE WILLING TO ADMIT THAT THE FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURES AND PRINCIPLES THAT DETERMINE THE WORLD ARE RULED BY THE POWER THAT HAS THE MOST WEAPONS, THE MOST POTENTIAL VIOLENCE. ALL OUR SO CALLED FREEDOMS, ARE HUNG ON THE MIGHT OF THAT VIOLENCE. AND SO OUR PRIVILEGE, OUR CONSUMPTION, OUR HAPPINESS IS CONTINGENT ON THAT THREAT.
SUPERLOVE IS THOSE OF US WHO HAVE COME HERE TO CHANGE THE BASIS OF POWER-TO MAKE THE SHIFT TO WISDOM, TO VISION, NOT DOMINATION, OCCUPATION, UNPREPARED FOR EVACUATION, INVASION, BUT RESPECT, COLLABORATION.
IT IS THE GLORIOUS ART THAT SURROUNDS US AND THE AMAZING RED TENT AND THE YURT
IT IS PINK AND RED AND THE POWER OF VAGINAS AND VAGINA FRIENDLY MEN
IT’S MARDI GRAS INDIAN QUEENS AND GOSPEL CHOIR AND SECOND LINE BANDS
IT’S PRIESTESSES PROTECTING THE PERIMETERS
IT’S EVERY GENDER, EVERY RACE, EVERY RELIGION, EVERY SEXUAL PERSUASION
IT IS THE NON LINEAR NON BUREACRATIC NON HIERARCHICAL
ACCIDENTAL EXPERIMENTAL COMING TOGETHER OF THE DIVERSE
MANY WHO ARE LISTENING TO WHAT THEY HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO HEAR ABOUT EACH OTHER OR THE WORLD.
IT’S US KNOWING THAT WHAT HAPPENED IN NEW ORLEANS IS DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO WHAT IS HAPPENING IN MANY AMERICAN CITIES, IT IS CONNECTED TO WHAT IS HAPPENING
AFGHANISTAN, PALESTINE, DARFUR, IRAQ, TIBET, BOSNIA. IT’S THE INSANE DISREPECT AND DISREGARD FOR HUMAN LIFE SO THAT PEOPLE ARE MURDERED. ABANDONED. UPROOTED, AND FORCED FROM THEIR HOMES.
IT IS THE ALTAR THAT IS HERE TO HONOR THOSE THAT DIED DURING THE FLOOD AND REMEMBER WHAT OCCURRED HERE SO IT NEVER HAPPENS ANYWHERE AGAIN.
IT’S THE HUGEST THING V-DAY HAS EVER DONE. WE DID IT CAUSE IT’S OUR TENTH YEAR AND IT WAS TIME TO MULTPLY OUR EFFORTS BY TEN. ITS MAKING ENDING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN THAT CENTRAL, THAT SUPERIMPORTANT THAT THIS MANY HAVE COME AND WILL COME TO THIS WEEKEND CAUSE THEY KNOW THE TIME HAS COME TO END IT.
ITS ALL THE MEN WHO HAVE JOINED BECAUSE THEY KNOW THIS IS NOT A WOMENS ISSUE, WE DO NO BEAT AND RAPE OURSELVES. MEN DO AND UNTIL THE REST OF THE MEN GET UPSET ABOUT IT WILL NOT CHANGE
IT IS EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU WHO CAME BY TRAIN BY PLANE BY BUS BY FOOT BECAUSE YOU KNEW IN SOME ESSENTIAL PART OF YOU THAT THE WORLD WILL NOT BE CHANGED BY PEOPLE AT THE TOP BUT BY PEOPLE WHOSE FEET ARE ON THE GROUND, PEOPLE WHO GIVE THEIR TIME AND LIVES TO EDUCATING CHILDREN, FIGHTING FOR HEALTHCARE, SAVING THE EARTH FIGHTING RACIAL INJUSTICE AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND ENDING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND THE TYRANNY OF MASCULINITY THAT HAS MAIMED AND SHAMED OUR BOYS AND MEN,
YOU KNOW IN YOUR BONES THAT WE THE PEOPLE ARE THE ONES WHO WILL END THE VIOLENCE, WHO WILL CHANGE THE STORY OF WOMEN WHICH WILL CHANGE THE STORY OF HUMANS BECAUSE WOMEN ARE THE PRIMARY RESOURCE OF THE PLANET AND IF THEY THRIVE, IF THEY ARE SAFE AND FREE WE ALL WILL BE SAFE AND FREE.
YOU ARE HERE ALL OF YOU BECAUSE YOU KNOW THAT WHAT HAPPENED HERE IN THE SUPERDOME IS A METAPHOR FOR WHAT IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE ON THIS PLANET. THE SACRIFICE OF THE EARTH FOR PROFIT, THE ABADONMENT AND EXPLOTIATION OF THE POOR SO THOSE THAT HAVE EVERYTHING CAN KEEP IT, THE DESECRATION OF WOMENS BODIES AND BEINGS AS THE MECHANISM WHICH KEEPS THE POWERFUL IN PLACE, THE CONSCIOUS AND RECKLESS ABANDONMENT AND SHATTERING AND DIVIDING OF THE NEEDY SO THEY END UP DESTROYING THEMSELVES.
I BELIEVE YOU CAME HERE BECAUSE YOU KNOW THAT OUR DESTINY WILL NOT BE DETERMINED BY POLITICIANS OR POLLSTERS OR A CORPORATE OWNED MEDIA, OUR DESTINY WILL BE DETERMINED BY US, BY OUR COMING TOGETHER, BY OUR TELLING THE TRUTH, SHARING OUR STORIES, OUR HURT, OUR DISTRUST AND OUR DESIRES. OUR DESTINY WILL BE DETERMINED BY OUR WILLINGESS TO MOVE PAST BEING VICTIMS OR VICTIMIZERS. EVERYONE IS INVITED TO THIS TABLE. THERE ARE NO MORE FRINGES . EVERYONE IN THE HOUSE.
THIS WEEKEND IS ONE HUGE OFFERING EACH PERSON WHO SPEAKS, OR SINGS OR SLAMS OR DANCES OR GIVES THEIR HANDS OR HEART THEIR STORY IS MAKING AN OFFERING. TAKE WHAT YOU LIKE, LEAVE THE REST. BUT KNOW THAT EACH PERSON CAME HERE ON THEIR OWN DIME FROM A PLACE OF KINDNESS. EACH PERSON EQUALLY VULNERABLE AND OPEN IN THEIR OFFERING. THIS V TO THE 10 IS AN EXPERIMENT. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US IS PART OF ITS CREATION. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US CRUCIAL
TO ITS SUCCESS
SO I ASK YOU, DO HERE WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN DURING THE FLOOD.
MAKE EACH PERSON IN THIS ROOM MATTER
SEE THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU, HEAR THEM, LET THEM IN. MAKE NEW ORLEANS THE PLACE CARE DIDN’T FORGET
RESPECT THE PLACE, KEEP IT AS GREEN AS YOU CAN.
TREAT THIS SUPERLOVE AS IF IT WERE THE NEW WORLD V WORLD
WHERE THE VIOLENCE ALREADY ENDED.
LETS SEE IF WE CAN TOLERATE, EVEN FOR A WEEKEND WHAT THAT MUCH LOVE WOULD FEEL LIKE.
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First I have to prove to you that I am indeed here in New Orleans with thousands of women celebrating V-Day; so, here’s a picture, a gargantuan expression of the vaginal symbol associated with the V-Day movement. It’s sitting in the center of the main stage at the Louisiana Superdome. You can see it straight on at this link in a picture taken last night at the The Katrina Monologues: Swimming Upstream production.
Yes, V-Day is a movement, a global movement to end violence against women…
Read the full post with photos >
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Chris Bynum
On Friday and Saturday (April 11 and 12) the Superdome becomes a place for healing, pampering and rejuvenation. Think of it as a spa with free admission.
The occasion is V-Day, the annual consciousness- and fund-raising event that began as an outgrowth of “The Vagina Monologues.” As her award-winning one-woman play toured the world after its 1996 premiere, playwright Eve Ensler heard real stories of rape, incest, domestic battery and genital mutilation. She launched V-Day in 1998. Its mission: to end violence and abuse against women through education, legislation, shelters and safe houses.
Here is a full schedule of Superlove events.
What Ensler has produced in New Orleans — with input from the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women and New Orleans activists such as the Katrina Warriors — is a nurturing event so huge that it fills the Superdome with healing services such as massage, meditation, yoga classes, support groups, performance art and visual art, makeovers, medical exams, plus panels and lectures for and about women.
Those familiar with “The Vagina Monologues” and the V-day events won’t be surprised that the Superdome’s entrance to this event will bear the likeness of a vaginal canal.
The building has been temporarily rechristened “Superlove” for the occasion.
“This is a welcoming vagina,” Ensler said by phone from New York before heading to New Orleans to complete preparations for the weekend’s events. “It’s not graphic as much as it is symbolic. People will emerge into the newly transformed Superdome, the way it should have been (during Hurricane Katrina). It will be … warm, inviting.”
Organizers say their goal is to provide women “a healing place.”
“They will be indulged,” said fashion designer Donna Karan, speaking from her New York office a few days before coming to New Orleans to set up her Urban Zen services at “Superlove.” Her mission — and her mantra — is to help women “find calm where there was once chaos.”
Karan’s contribution is the “well-being lounge,” where services offered will include breath awareness, restorative yoga instruction, meditation, aromatherapy and a range of massage therapy from neuromuscular to Healing Touch and Reiki.
The designer, whose name became a household word dressing modern women, created the Urban Zen Foundation after the death of her husband, sculptor Stephan Weiss, from cancer. Her vision of well-being, now being initiated into select hospitals through the Urban Zen initiative, is about the treatment of patients and their loved ones from “a mind-body-spirit point of view.”
“We work with people to assist and guide them through the emotions and trauma one goes through in mind and in body,” she said. “The women we are addressing at the Superlove event fit into that category. They need someone to be there for them. It is equally important that they learn tools they can take home with them.”
Raw food chef (and guru to detoxing stars) Jill Pettijohn will also be on hand with her “living food” offerings. She made the hip list as the raw food consultant who engineered Karan’s 35-pound weight loss.
Yoga master teachers Rodney Yee and wife Colleen Saidman, who assist Karan with the health and wellness branch of Urban Zen, will open the event with sun salutations and provide yoga instruction.
But nurturing at this event is not limited to meditation and massage. It is also being expressed in storytelling. The Red Tent, designed by Paulette Cole of New York’s ABC Carpet and Home, provides a sanctuary for story circles, each event 80 minutes long. It is curated by Anne-Liese Juge Fox of NOLA Playback Theater.
Among those participating will be actress Jennifer Beals of Showtime’s “The L Word.”
“Telling your own story is a radical act, and you can make yourself victorious by writing your own history,” Beals said by phone from her California home.
The actress will be leading a story circle with “L-Word” creator and executive producer Ilene Chaiken. The two will begin to collect the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender/Transsexual people) stories of the women of New Orleans — a first step, Beals says, in a new performance project.
“With stories, people see themselves mirrored,” says Beals, who views this potential project as a way to “represent, move and connect” women.
For Katrina Warriors and other local activists, the event will also provide another venue for this expression of support for women. It will provide a stage for the debut performance of “Swimming Upstream,” a performance piece about the experiences of women before, during and after the post-Katrina levee-failure flood. The collection of monologues — written by 13 women from New Orleans representing all races, ages and socio-economic groups — began (with Ensler’s blessings) as “The Katrina Monologues,” but as time passed, the local women renamed it “Swimming Upstream.”
“We wanted it to be our own,” said Asali DeVan, a performer and writer and New Orleans native who resides in Treme.
Those who lived and are still living the experience, she says, will readily key into the emotions of fear, sorrow, rage, frustration, indignation, joyfulness and gratitude the pieces will express. But she has high hopes that the play will “speak to the world.”
Ensler has a similar hope. The decision to hold the 10th anniversary V-Day events in New Orleans was anything but coincidental, said the playwright, who estimates she has visited the city to meet with community activists 30 times since the storm.
“We were planning the location for this 10th anniversary, thinking about Nairobi, Paris,” she said. “But when I listened to the stories coming out of the Superdome, and I realized we were putting the spotlight on other countries, I knew we needed to be with these women, these women who have suffered environmentally, sexually, economically, emotionally.”
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/11/v_to_the_tenth_thousands_of
Democracy Now! broadcasts from New Orleans, where thousands of women are gathering to celebrate the tenth anniversary of V-Day, the global movement to combat sexual violence against women and children. V-Day began a decade ago when playwright and activist Eve Ensler held the first benefit performance of her award-winning play, The Vagina Monologues. This weekend, Ensler is organizing a two-day celebration at the Superdome called “V to the Tenth.” Its focus is on helping the women of New Orleans and the Gulf South. We speak with activists from New Orleans, Kenya and Iraq. [includes rush transcript]
Listen to the broadcast >>
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Chris Bynum
Eve Ensler recalls that when she was writing “The Vagina Monologues” in the mid-’90s, she had no idea that she was starting a global movement to stop violence against women.
“I just wanted to survive doing a downtown production,” she said of the play, which first hit the New York stage in 1996.
What she did, however, was create the V-Day global movement, which has raised more than $50 million and financed more than 5,000 community-based anti-violence programs, supported anti-violence legislation and education as well as safe houses around the world.
Ensler also made the word vagina OK to say in 45 languages in 120 countries.
In the past year alone the monologues have been performed 4,000 times in 1,500 places, “from Ho Chi Minh City to Tijuana to Antarctica to Africa,” Ensler said.
On Saturday, April 12, “The Vagina Monologues” come to New Orleans in a star-studded performance at the New Orleans Arena, which is the culmination of the 10th anniversary of V-Day, a two-day event Ensler is calling V to the Tenth.
Oprah Winfrey is among the stars who will deliver a monologue on Saturday night.
Today and Saturday, the Superdome will be transformed into “Superlove,” a free event that includes performances, storytelling circles, workshops, speakers and wellness activities such as yoga and massage.
Ensler chose post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans as the site of the 10th anniversary celebration because she has been working since the storm with local groups including the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women and Katrina Warriors.
Ensler said that what happened in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast after the storm reflects the challenges that women face worldwide — violence, racism, lack of health care and education, financial insecurity, and the failure of local and national governments.
She is bringing 1,200 women from the Gulf Coast who have been displaced and unable to return home since the floods.
“They will arrive on 17 buses,” says Ensler, who will greet them upon their arrival.
Participating in the Saturday night performance are Calpernia Addams, Lilia Aragon, Stephanie Bataille, Jennifer Beals, Peter Buffett, Didi Conn, Rosario Dawson, Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Kristen Krepela, Christine Lahti, Ali Larter, Liz Mikel, Doris Roberts, Leslie Townsend, Kerry Washington, Monique Wilson and Oprah Winfrey, with musical performances by Faith Hill, Jennifer Hudson, and New Orleans’ own Charmaine Neville.
The celebrities and speakers are paying their own expenses and giving their services for free.
The production at the New Orleans Arena has been modified with new material, including a new monologue that will be delivered by Oprah Winfrey called “Hey Miss Pat!”
“I met (Miss Pat) when she was sitting on her porch in Central City,” Ensler said. “She was bereft because her church was destroyed, and she couldn’t cook oxtail for the homeless on Wednesday nights.”
Ensler’s organization helped rebuild God’s Prince of Protection church in her neighborhood.
Actress Jennifer Beals, who will perform with fellow cast members of Showtime’s “The L Word,” has visited New Orleans many times and spent months here in 2002 while filming “Runaway Jury,” but it will be her first trip back since the storm.
The city touched her long before the aftermath of the storm gripped her heart.
“I feel a great affinity for New Orleans,” Beals said. “It was the first time I saw myself reflected in someone else’s face other than my own family.”
This connection could happen, she said, just riding the bus.
“There were many ah-ha moments,” Beals said.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, Beals was “very pregnant” and watched the television coverage from her bed. She recalled that a local fan had given her a sculpture when she was filming in New Orleans, and Beals had never written to thank her. When she looked again at the letter that accompanied the sculpture, she realized the woman lived in Slidell.
“I decided to call her in the off chance she was alive. She answered, and my call was the first phone call to come through since the hurricane. We talked for 40 minutes,” said Beals, who will also take part in storytelling circles during Superlove.
Actress Kerry Washington, who spent four months in New Orleans while filming “Ray” in 2004 with Jamie Foxx, returns to perform not only in “The Vagina Monologues” but also the local debut of “Swimming Upstream,” a play created and performed by local writers and actors.
She, like Ensler, embraces the concept of turning the Superdome into “a home of healing as opposed to the nightmare that it was during the storm.”
She was particularly touched by a piece Ensler wrote for the New Orleans monologues comparing a woman’s vagina and violence to New Orleans and the response to the storm.
The government’s refusal to answer the cries of this city, Washington said, is very much like ignoring the cries of women who face violence around the world.
“I was so moved by the idea of doing the show (here),” she said.
“The world had stared in horror that this was going on. Now we are transforming that space physically and spiritually into a home of healing as opposed to the nightmare it was before the storm,” she said of the Superlove event that precedes Saturday night’s performance.
“It makes sense that the Superdome will be the place where women can come to heal.”
Staff writer Chris Bynum can be reached at cbynum@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3458.
V TO THE TENTH
What: Playwright Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” will be performed by celebrities, including Jennifer Beals, Rosario Dawson, Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Christine Lahti, Doris Roberts, Kerry Washington, Monique Wilson and Oprah Winfrey, with musical performances by Faith Hill, Jennifer Hudson and Charmaine Neville. Proceeds go toward support of V-Day charities for women in the Gulf South and around the world.
When: Saturday, April 12, 7:30 p.m.
Where: New Orleans Arena
Tickets: $25 to $1,000 and available at www.ticketmaster.com or by calling (504) 522-5555. For details on the theater piece “Swimming Upstream ” and “Superlove” at the Superdome, see today’s Living section or visit www.vday.org.
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Making Herstory
Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler and the Katrina Warriors Network mark the 10th anniversary of the V-Day initiative to end violence against women
By Alison Fensterstock
For a decade, playwright and activist Eve Ensler has been using her continuously evolving work The Vagina Monologues to raise funds and awareness in a global effort to end violence against women. During a talk at the University of New Orleans last month, Ensler addressed her decision to hold “V to the Tenth,” the 10th anniversary celebration of V-Day, her anti-violence initiative, in New Orleans. She had struggled, she said, to find the right symbolic link that would perfectly express her focus on the women affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Then it came to her.
‘Duh,” she said, “wetlands.”
It’s a glib but appropriate metaphor and the central point of one of her newest monologues. “New Orleans is the vagina of America,” begins the piece, which casts New Orleans and the Gulf South in the role of the feminine in a culture that disrespects and underserves women; seductive and sustaining — and repeatedly abused.
Ensler developed the new piece during a year and a half when she visited New Orleans almost monthly after Katrina. During her trips, she connected with a group of women who represented local women’s resource providers, educators, artists, advocates and activists, who meet regularly at both Newcomb College’s Center for Research on Women and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center. The group named itself the Katrina Warriors Network as a riff on Ensler’s concept of “vagina warriors,” women who survive trauma and then transform the energy of their pain to fight against violence. They helped guide Ensler and V-Day staff through the traumatic landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans.
Several art-as-healing projects emerged. Working with the group, Ensler presented a show at Tulane University’s McAlister Auditorium in which hurricane survivors presented their own stories. She also worked with local artists and musicians at Ashé to create the hurricane-themed play, Swimming Upstream, which will premiere at the Superdome on Friday night. With the help of the Ashé Center executive director Carol Bebelle, Ensler organized a second-line parade from Ashé to Armstrong Park complete with the New Birth and Free Agents brass bands, to preview coming V-Day events. One evening, she hurried from a speech at UNO to appear, faintly out of breath, in the last act of a student performance of her play A Memory, A Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer at Tulane.
All of this is culminating in a pink juggernaut of vagina-friendly programming this weekend under the V-Day/Katrina Warriors Network umbrella, including a celebrity-packed reading of the updated Monologues, complete with new, New Orleans-inspired stories; a performance in the Superdome of Swimming Upstream; a visit from radical sexpert Susie Bright, art shows, film screenings, radio broadcasts, a wine tasting and a silent auction. A complete takeover of the Superdome (which the V-Day group and the Katrina Warriors Network have temporarily rechristened the Superlove) will open the Dome to the public for free yoga classes, massages, meditation sessions, health screenings, support group meetings, musical performances, storytelling and more. (A full schedule of Katrina Warriors Network/V-Day events is available at www.katrinawarriors.net.)
Actress Kerry Washington, who lived in New Orleans for several months while filming the movie Ray, will perform in the 10th anniversary reading Saturday night as part of a star-studded cast that includes Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Marisa Tomei, Didi Conn (who some may remember as Frenchy, from the film version of Grease) and Oprah Winfrey, who will perform a new piece Ensler wrote based on her interviews with Katrina survivors.
‘The metaphor is that we celebrate New Orleans. It’s hot, spicy, pleasurable, but when it needed us most, we turned the other way,” Washington explains. “We celebrate female beauty, but when it’s being violated and abused, we turn the other way. [New Orleans] is a wonderful place to focus on healing violence against women.”
Washington remembers watching news footage of the Superdome in the days immediately following Katrina and noting, as the world did, the disproportionate number of African Americans that had gone to the shelter of last resort and were left, literally, twisting in the wind. The actress also noticed something else.
‘I remember thinking, “Look at the disproportionate number of women in the Dome,’ too,” she says. “I thought, “Wow, a cross-population is being affected. Women of color.’ Which is what I am, so I need to be involved.”
When Ensler first visited New Orleans in 2006, talks were underway already about where to hold the 10th anniversary of V-Day. Both Paris and Nairobi were being considered. But she found herself intensely moved by the stories of the women she met in New Orleans. The urging of the Katrina Warriors Network, as well as the powerful metaphor she saw in the neglect of the people who took shelter in the Superdome, convinced her that New Orleans was the place. It also inspired her to launch a brand-new element of V-Day — the two-day free lovefest of services, performances and talks in the Superdome on Friday and Saturday.
‘We’ve never done that before,” Ensler says. “We really wanted to gear it toward the women of New Orleans.
‘It’s one part healing, one part reflection, one part culture, one part spiritual uplifting and ritual,” she says. “Part of the grotesqueness of what happened in Katrina was lack of care. People in the middle of the worst experience of their lives were shuttled around and treated like animals — which is something for which the local government needs to make amends.”
Even if the Superdome event has a schticky sound to it, Crystal Kile explains that it is important to remember that it’s only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Kile directs programming at the Newcomb Center for Research on Women and is a founder of the Katrina Warriors Network.
‘It’s an incredibly idealistic thing to reclaim the Superdome as the Superlove with this event,” she says. “But it’s the idea that what should have been there, will be there. The V to the Tenth Superlove project is intended to heal from ground zero, starting with the people who were in the Dome, who were in the water, everything. That’s where you start healing New Orleans, and that has been V-Day’s impulse — to go to the most extreme trauma points, and I think rightly so.”
The original play had its genesis in 1994, when Ensler interviewed more than 200 women about their vaginas and the thoughts their genitals evoked — everything from pleasure to abuse to grooming. The Vagina Monologues opened as a one-woman show Off-Broadway in 1996, and after a six-month run and an Obie award, Ensler took her show on the road. Soon, she realized that what she had thought was her most avant-garde piece turned out to be the one that resonated with the broadest audience. After every performance in every city, the writer was faced with crowds of women eager to meet her and share their own stories. They weren’t happy ones either. Each night, Ensler heard a litany of abuse, incest, rape, fear and shame. This was what the women of America thought of when they thought of their vaginas. The constant barrage of traumatized confessions, Ensler writes in an afterword to the 10th anniversary edition of the play, finally moved her to think that maybe what she had conceived as “a moving work of art on violence” might have the potential to be “a mechanism for moving people to act to end violence.”
On Valentine’s Day 1998, Ensler enlisted a celebrity cast to perform a gala reading of the play at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, and called it V-Day. (According to press materials, the V in V-Day stands for “victory,” “Valentine” and “vagina.”) The event drew 2,500 people, and raised $250,000 for groups that fight violence against women. A campaign ensued to encourage college campus productions of The Vagina Monologues as benefits for schools’ own regional women’s resource providers. Ensler realized that her play was growing new legs as a movement.
‘I don’t think I really got it until the first year of the college campaign when 50 colleges signed up,” Ensler says. “It was a gradual, incremental awareness. Madison Square Garden was really the turning point.” In early 2001, a benefit performance of the show sold out the 18,000-seat venue and brought in more than $1 million.
Kerry Washington was drawn to The Vagina Monologues after watching two of her co-stars from different projects, Julia Stiles and Anna Deavere Smith (who will appear in Swimming Upstream), perform in different Broadway productions of the play. Washington then appeared in several versions of the play, including in one with an all-women-of-color cast at the Apollo Theatre, and eventually came to sit on V-Day’s board. With nearly 15 years of sobering messages about violence against women under the belt of The Vagina Monologues, she’s bemused that some audiences still startle at the words used to describe genitalia, bringing up the recent infamous Today Show interview with Ensler and Jane Fonda.
‘Jane said “c**t” on the Today Show, and for me it’s funny,” Washington says. “Here is Hanoi Jane, who’s had a lifetime of scandal, and the country is in an uproar because she said the C-word. I showed up for rehearsal and just pointed at her and said, “You got in trouble again.'”
It’s both funny and disturbing that women onstage talking about their vaginas can be considered shocking or more shocking than the stories of violence done to them in direct relation to their vaginas. But the instant attention-getter of the word “vagina” is still V-Day’s secret weapon. Mayor Nagin earned the event priceless publicity when he declared himself a “vagina-friendly mayor” at a March press conference. (He went one step further than Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who was present and voiced his support but stopped short of saying the word out loud. Nagin didn’t go as far as the president of Iceland, who before a performance there claimed to be “Iceland’s first vagina president.”)
In general, art will always be political, Washington says. “When you’re creating art, you’re creating a voice. As artists, we’re carriers of culture. When people look back after 100 years to see who a population was, what they believed, what they stood for, they look at art.” And as funny as it is to get public officials to say “vagina” on camera, it is the idea that language has power that remains at the core of V-Day’s vision and mission. From college productions that sell out in alternate locations because university officials ban them from campus to a packed Islamabad performance held in secret, it seems to be working.
‘Talking about women’s private parts,” Ensler explains, “gave birth to a public social movement.”
Crystal Kile describes it as the emotional start to what can be a political process.
‘The whole mechanism of V-Day,” she says, “is that you go the first time, and you hear a story that resonates with you somehow. And you’re motivated to get in touch with your own story, and figure out how that ties in with all the other stories.” Thus bonded by common experience, women can work together, she says.
Talking about private pain can also give birth to revelation and healing. The New Orleans singer Troi Bechet, who wrote five songs for Swimming Upstream, met regularly for more than a year with the 14 women who are part of the play. She struggled for months with one of the songs she wrote. She sat at the piano and started to play it and wound up breaking down in tears. Whether she was ready to deal with it or not, however, there were people depending on her to tell her story. Deadlines and sharing helped it emerge.
‘To me it was a healing process to be able to give voice to what we were feeling personally and what we were hearing in the community,” Bechet says. “I knew I had a safe place, where people would understand what I was saying and embrace it.”
Poetry, Ensler thinks, can succeed where politicians miss the mark. The ritualistic elements of storytelling have been her working tool to prompt catharsis and healing. In her experience, healthy people can then work for change.
‘Theater I believe in as much as anything else,” she says. “I think it has the power to create revolutions. What I’ve seen with The Vagina Monologues is that it’s been able to communicate with people across the world, in 20 countries, in 45 languages, without the polarity that politicians set up. It creates complexity, ambiguity. It’s a place where people come together in the dark and can think without locking into position.”
Each year, in spotlight campaigns, V-Day has focused its attention — and directed 10 percent of the proceeds from every performance worldwide — on the needs of a different group, from women threatened by mysterious murderers in Juarez to the surviving “comfort women” who lived as enslaved prostitutes for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Following Hurricane Katrina, the women of New Orleans got the year’s spotlight, but the V-Day organization, after embedding with the Katrina Warriors Network, wasn’t ready to end it there.
In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans area service-providers for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence reported the same problems (see “Network Difficulties,” Gambit Weekly, March 21, 2006). While the effects of the storm had ravaged their staff numbers, their funding, and in some cases, the physical buildings where they operated, they were faced with a greater and more urgent need for services than before. They were forced to pool their resources — sharing office space, using a single crisis hotline to field calls, and juggling grants to put funding where it was most needed. Newcomb College, which had long been a nerve center for women’s information and resources in New Orleans, was preoccupied and financially paralyzed due to Tulane University’s decision to dissolve it.
Statistics consistently have borne out that following natural or man-made disasters, women suffer disproportionately, says Dale Standifer, director of the Metropolitan Center for Women and Children. Not the event itself but resulting burdens of stess and difficulty coping leads to increases in abuse of women. The frequency and intensity of sexual assaults and domestic violence increase. In a cruel inverse ratio, the availability of services for women in need — from available childcare services to shelter beds — declines. The aftermath of Katrina affected women in shocking ways. Emergency medical services that were functioning had very few forensic nurses — the trained staff who deal with sexual assault victims and collect evidence for rape kits. Abusive partners were able to track down their victims through post-Katrina networks set up to help families and friends find one another. Victims of domestic abuse found themselves dependent on abusive spouses who signed up for FEMA benefits under the abusers’ names.
In conflict zones, some Third World countries, and in nations where religion and cultural tradition incorporate misogyny into law and custom — like Taliban-controlled Afghanistan or West African countries that practice the female genital mutilation referred to as female circumcision — Ensler saw women becoming casualties as a matter of course. In post-Katrina New Orleans, she saw it on American soil.
‘In any war, or any place where infrastructure falls apart, poverty increases, racism increases, abuse increases. And women are on the front lines,” Ensler says.
V-Day’s worldwide approach has been built on a kind of Johnny Appleseed model. Performances of the play garner funds and galvanize communities emotionally as well as raise public profiles for populations in need. Working with local activists is also a key component to the approach of the V-Day team, which employs less than 10 full-time staff members. Women on the ground direct the out-of-towners as to their real needs and provide contacts. Ensler’s combination of art therapy, star power, and — in New Orleans, perhaps most importantly — an outsider’s energy, offers a strong shot in the arm.
‘In most cities we go to, it’s the local base that brings us there,” Ensler says. “We’re trying to help support building infrastructure in cities that are affected by disaster or war.”
Katrina Warriors Network founder Crystal Kile (top row, center) of the Newcomb Center for Research on Women with students.
The Superlove and the V to the Tenth gala in New Orleans are, Kile says, V-Day’s “healing gift” to New Orleans. And in a way, planning it and the dozens of events that led up to it were part of the healing for herself and the other groups involved in the Katrina Warriors Network.
‘It’s been a learning experience, working with each other and with all the groups that have come in from out of town, V-Day being the biggest one,” Kile says. Working together was a fluid process of trial and error, and wasn’t always easy. Charged with being V-Day’s local arm, Kile and the Katrina Warriors found themselves struggling to connect resource providers who were themselves dealing with the aftermath of Katrina.
‘People say, how do you reach the women? Oh, you just bring them all together. Not traumatized women, you don’t,” Kile says. The need to create the V-day event, however, spurred the women of the network to push through, creating new bonds and strengthening old ones. Projects in the network’s future include generating a detailed report on the status of women and girls in New Orleans after Katrina, and designing and disbursing grants from the Katrina Warriors Fund, which will include money raised from Saturday’s benefit show. Once the pink flags and banners are taken down and Oprah has left the building, in many ways the real work of the Katrina Warriors Network will begin anew.
V-Day Events
Swimming Upstream
7:30 p.m. Fri., April 11
Louisiana Superdome, 1500 Girod St., 569-9070, www.acabnola.blogspot.com
Free admission
V to the Tenth
7:30 p.m. Sat., April 12
New Orleans Arena, 1501 Girod St., 587-3663
Tickets $25-up
Superlove
10 a.m.-6 p.m. Fri. and Sat., April 11 and 12
New Orleans Superdome, 1500 Girod St., 587-3663
Free admission
Complete schedule of Superlove events at www.vday.org .
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http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-04-06-vday-anniversary_N.htm
By Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY
Since giving birth to daughter Paloma Valentina last September, Salma Hayek has refueled her inner activist.
“My little baby is the best thing that has happened to me in my life. I’ve got to think about her future and get out of the now. I want all the babies of all the other women to have some of the opportunities and love and peace that my baby is being able to enjoy,” says Hayek, with her daughter cooing in the background in Los Angeles. “I know how much women suffer, and I don’t want her to. I want to give to other women.”
She’s doing just that by taking part in the 10th anniversary of V-Day in New Orleans, a two-day event called V to the Tenth. The V-Day movement, started by The Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler, aims to stop violence against women and girls. And the Big Easy extravaganza, taking place Friday and Saturday, is attracting some big names to the cause: Oprah Winfrey, Faith Hill, Jane Fonda, Jennifer Hudson, Marisa Tomei, Jessica Alba and Hayek.
The first to sign on? Fonda, a V-Day board member.
“It has been 10 years since I’ve been involved in V-Day,” says Fonda from Atlanta. “Eve has become one of my best friends. I performed the monologue at Madison Square Garden a number of years ago. It was the first time in 15 years I had acted, and only Eve could have talked me into it. And Eve’s choice of celebrating the anniversary in New Orleans is utter genius.”
The location is no accident. Ensler picked post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans because “after the storm, the situation was and is such a disaster. We’ve been working on the ground there for two years with local groups.”
Manhattan-based Ensler called each star and personally recruited them.
“What’s amazing is that every single person who is coming to perform or speak is paying for themselves, for their board, and giving their services for free,” says Ensler. “They are flying themselves and paying for themselves.”
Hayek, meanwhile, hopes the V-Day event “is going to raise a lot of money and raise the spirits (of women in need). It’ll give them an injection of courage and spirit. It’s about letting them know how admired they are.”
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PRAISE THE WOMEN | PREACH THE WORD
POWER THE MOVEMENT | PROTEST THE VIOLENCE
PLANT THE FUTURE
PUSH THE EDGE | PLAY THE MUSIC
PLUG IN THE MEN | PARTY | PERFORMANCE | PINK PARADES!
JOIN US!
The Mississippi Gulf Coast is disappearing at the rate of
1 football field an hour! As part of V TO THE TENTH, V-Day will plant trees and marsh grasses in New Orleans. Please join
V-Day and the Katrina Warriors Network as we gather to
protect the Wetlands and plant the future!
WHEN: Tuesday, April 8, 2008, 10am til 3pm
WHERE: 2 locations: Woodlands Trail & Park /
Bayou Sauvauge Nat’l Wildlife Refuge.
If you would like a ride to the locations, please, meet At Parkway Partners at 9am. 1137 Baronne, St., New Orleans, LA 70113, phone: 504-620-2224
DRESS: Long sleeves. Long pants. Closed-toe shoes appropriate for walking/hiking/planting. A hat. Sunglasses.
BRING: Water. Snacks. Sunscreen. Light lunch will be served.
RSVP: 504*400*2171 or coordinator@vday.org by 3/7/08.
JOIN US TO POWER THE MOVEMENT &
REPLANT THE GULF COAST!
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/28/LV2VVR93M.DT…
Michelle Devera Louie, Chronicle Staff Writer
Eve Ensler, whose play “The Vagina Monologues” is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, visited the Bay Area last week to promote V-Day, a campaign to stop violence against women that raises funds through performances around the world.
Of course, it’s a different world than it was when Ensler’s play first sent shock waves through the popular culture. Oprah Winfrey proudly refers to the “va-jay-jay” on her show, and the New York Times chronicled the rise of the word being used on popular television shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “30 Rock.”
Despite the growing acceptance of the word and its cutesy counterparts, the serious problem of violent abuse continues to fuel Ensler’s desire to keep the play – and its message of empowerment – in the spotlight.
Ensler’s Bay Area stop was part of a cross-country trip that began in February, a tour that will have its climactic finale April 11 in New Orleans at an event called V to the Tenth – a two-day, 10th-anniversary celebration featuring the likes of Winfrey, Jane Fonda and Rosario Dawson, among other celebrities.
While here, Ensler was the guest of honor at a private party and fundraiser hosted by author and activist Emily Scott Pottruck that featured cast members from Showtime’s “The L Word,” spoke at St. Mary’s College in Moraga and teamed up with the Filipina Women’s Network to publicly rally for stronger sentencing requirements in domestic violence cases.
On Wednesday, at a press conference at Hotel Monaco, Ensler criticized a decision by a San Francisco Superior Court judge to reduce the murder charges against William Corpuz, who was convicted of killing his wife, Marisa Corpuz, in 2003. As a result, Corpuz received a 16-years-to-life sentence instead of 26 years to life.
“It’s a strange, relative posturing on violence,” Ensler said. “What are we talking about? The woman is dead. The outcome is what matters.”
Ensler said that deaths like Marisa Corpuz’s, coupled with travels to the Congo and Juarez, Mexico, have convinced her that the problem knows no geographic or gender boundaries and that it will only be overcome with more activism.
“We’re not the ones beating or raping ourselves,” she said. “It’s not just a woman issue, but a human issue.”
Ensler spoke at the Filipina Women’s Network event because the organization has produced annual benefit performances of “The Vagina Monologues” and its Tagalog version, “Usaping Puki,” since 2004. This year, it is premiering Ensler’s 2007 companion piece, “A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer,” which includes men in the cast for the first time.
“A Filipina sister has fallen,” said FWN President Marily Mondejar. “We need to give her justice. We’re not lawyers, just concerned citizens.”
Other groups are producing their own versions of the play. Since last month, “The Vagina Monologues” has made the rounds, from UCSF, San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to the Sweetwater Station Cafe in Larkspur.
Though the statistics are daunting (4,500 felony domestic violence cases reported in San Francisco last year alone, according to the Police Department), Ensler said that she hadn’t given up hope that the violence could be completely eradicated one day.
“The level of domestic violence is down here,” she said. “It will be eradicated in the next 10 years. Believe it.”
— For Pinoy Pod’s sneak peek at the Filipina Women’s Network’s productions of “The Vagina Monologues” and its Tagalog translation, “Usaping Puki,” go to sfgate.com/podcasts.
— Vagina Monologues: 7 p.m. Monday. Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Tickets: $5-$100. (415) 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com.
— Usaping Puki: “The Vagina Monologues” in Tagalog. 2 p.m. Saturday. Morgan Auditorium, Academy of Art University, 491 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets: $5-$100. morgan08.eventbrite.com.
— A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer: 7 p.m. Friday. Herbst Theatre. www.cityboxoffice.com. 7 p.m. Saturday. Morgan Auditorium, Academy of Art University, 491 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets: $5-$100. morgan08.eventbrite.com.
— Filipina Women’s Network: (415) 278-9410, ffwn.org.
— V to the Tenth: v10.vday.org.
E-mail Michelle Devera Louie at mlouie@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page F – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle