V-Day Blog Archive

Feeling the ‘Superlove’: Playwright Eve Ensler gets New Orleans ready for a star-studded 10th anniversary

By Doug MacCash

An unusual second-line chugged rhythmically down Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard on Sunday afternoon to the blare and beat of brass-band music. The marchers called themselves Katrina Warriors. Most were women, some wore pink T-shirts with a symbol that suggested a body part that women have and men don’t.

Eve Ensler — the woman near the front of the parade, with the jet black bangs, waving the pink peacock feather — wishes it weren’t so hard for most of us to use the word “vagina.” In 1996, she wrote a play titled “The Vagina Monologues” that became an international feminist phenomenon, helping usher the V-word from the shadows into the spotlight.

“The most radical play I’d ever written went mainstream,” she told a gathering of 150 mostly female students at the University of New Orleans on Friday, the blustery night before the parade. “I never could have dreamed of this. I was just trying to get the word ‘vagina’ out of my terrified mouth.”
Ensler said she felt that society’s reluctance to use the word implied unjustified shame. “The Vagina Monologues,” she said, has helped dispel that attitude, inspiring strides in women’s dignity and safety.

“We’ve had incredible victories,” she told the UNO audience. “We’ve changed the landscape of the dialogue.”

The play, based on intimate interviews with women, has been staged 4,000 times since its first New York production, from Pakistan to the Philippines to Iceland to Haiti, said Ensler, who has been on a 16-city tour promoting what will be the grandest “Vagina Monologues” ever: a star-studded extravaganza titled “V to the Tenth” on April 11 and 12 at the Superdome and New Orleans Arena.

Oprah Winfrey will lead a cast that includes Jessica Alba, Glenn Close, Rosario Dawson, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Christine Lahti, Julia Stiles, Marisa Tomei and Kerry Washington, with musical performances by Common, Eve, Faith Hill, Jennifer Hudson and Charmaine Neville.

Ensler said that each year she chooses a location to celebrate the anniversary of the play and raise money for the anti-violence nonprofit organization she founded. For the 10th, she considered staging V-Day, as she calls the anniversary, in Nairobi, Kenya, and other locations, but settled on New Orleans, where the effects of Hurricane Katrina still are being felt.

During her talk at UNO, Ensler read an original poem that was both comic and tragic, in which she described New Orleans as the most female aspect of America. The city long satisfied the country’s desires, she said, yet the country “disowned” her when she had needs.

The desperate situation among New Orleans residents in the Superdome after the flood inspired her to plan an April conversion of the Dome into an enormous free healing, arts, education and entertainment center dubbed “Superlove.”
The story of the post-Katrina Superdome, she said, was “the story of the world.”

“The idea is to make sure that everything that should have happened in the Superdome in the flood, happens in those two days,” she said of the April event.

Ensler said that during a news conference on Friday with Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, Carol Bebelle of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center and Mayor Ray Nagin, the mayor had an emotional moment, “kind of a flashback to the storm,” as he described women holding their babies during the evacuation.
Ensler said she plans to bring 12,000 women from the Katrina diaspora back to New Orleans to see “The Vagina Monologues” and participate in “Superlove.”

. . . . . . .

To contact the Katrina Warriors, go to www.katrinawarriors.net.

POWER OF PINK: Second-line parade draws attention to effort to end violence against women

By Ramon Antonio Vargas

Heidi Klee was driving along Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard on Saturday afternoon when she noticed a crowd of people with light-pink umbrellas and brass musical instruments.

It didn’t take her long to realize that someone had organized a second-line parade, and because she’s never one to miss that kind of impromptu party, Klee said, she immediately parked her car and “followed the music.”

The parade, she discovered, was known as “Jumpin’ in the Pink” and was being staged to celebrate the effort of the Katrina Warriors Network, working with V to the Tenth, to unite women of the New Orleans and Gulf South in improving their condition and opposing violence against women.

Wearing white Elton John-like sunglasses and a black hat, Klee, an Ohio native and Irish Channel resident, enthusiastically fell into step with the snare-drumming of Renard “Teeter-man” Henry and the trombone blasts of Larry Brown, both with the Free Agents Brass Band.

The band belted out tunes such as “The Streets of Cairo” as the second-liners marched from the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in Central City to Armstrong Park in Treme.

A marriage between jazz music and a message opposing violence against women simply made too much sense to pass up, so the Katrina Warriors — a regional network of individuals and organizations dedicated to enhancing the well-being of women and girls — decided to consecrate it with a tactic meant to draw passers-by like Klee.

All for awareness

The Warriors kicked off a monthlong “awareness festival” by enlisting the Free Agents and New Birth brass bands to lead the second-line parade.

For the next month, the network will stage events such as a wine-and-cheese silent auction at the Craig Cultural Center and a six-week “Rites of Passage” curriculum focused on girls’ self-esteem and empowerment.

The festival will culminate April 11-12 at the Superdome, where “V-Day” will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the play “The Vagina Monologues” by Eve Ensler.

The Superdome will be transformed for the occasion into “Superlove,” a giant vagina enclosure offering speakers, singers, theater performers, storytelling, art and healing. Tickets to “Superlove” are free with the purchase of a ticket to the all-star production of “The Vagina Monologues” April 12 at the New Orleans Arena.

Among those scheduled to perform in Ensler’s play — which has grown into the worldwide V-Day movement to stop violence against women — are Sally Field, Jennifer Hudson, Glenn Close, Salma Hayek, Jessica Alba, Marisa Tomei and Jane Fonda. Oprah Winfrey will perform a new monologue by Ensler. Musicians Faith Hill, Common, Eve and Charmaine Neville will also be featured.

“New Orleans has one of the rich cultures of second-lining,” said Barbara Lacen-Keller, the cultural outreach coordinator for the Ashé center and organizer of Saturday’s parade. “We’re collaborating with culture to celebrate the awareness of violence against women and girls.”

“We hope people bring the message of V-Day, to end violence, into their own community spaces,” said Jennifer Sachs, the festival’s coordinator.

The festival will focus on trying to spread the message against violence “through a celebration of creativity, activism and culture,” Sachs said.

While some members of the Free Agents Brass Band — who said they had never before paraded alongside 40 people toting pink umbrellas with candy-apple red frills — snickered at the event’s offbeat name, they found their instruments were natural media for spreading the message the Katrina Warriors hope to convey.

Hearing the message

The revelry that bandleader Ellis Joseph and his mates ignited drew the attention of many motorists driving along Oretha Castle Haley and Martin Luther King boulevards, two of the streets where the second-liners paraded.

Drivers slowed down and waved over marchers wearing light-pink T-shirts, asking them what was going on. The second-liners handed out fliers listing the next month’s activities to the drivers and curious bystanders.

Klee said that a parade like Saturday’s is effective at getting “the buzz” going for someone trying to spread a message.
“It was very impromptu New Orleans,” she said. “I just followed the music and here I am. A second-line is a party for the people, for any people — man, woman, black, white, purple or green. Anybody can join the party that wants to.”

Not long after she fell into step with “Jumpin’ in the Pink,” Klee moved away from the formation and toward a group of men standing in front of a corner store. Seemingly unfazed, they started to pump their arms and bend their knees with the beat, chuckling as they danced with her. Soon a woman toting fliers handed them the list of Katrina Warriors events.

“People listen to us, man,” bandleader Joseph said. A second-line parade “is something you can’t get anywhere else in the world . . . (so) a lot of people know our worth. People listen to us and respond to us because they kind of consider us leaders in the community.”

Trumpet player Julian Gosin added that he hoped some of the notes he played fell on the ears of men responsible for abuse of women and had an effect on them.

“Every time we play, we try to make something positive come out,” he said. “That’s what we try to do. That’s all the music is. It’s uplifting.”

. . . . . . .

For a calendar of events during this month’s Katrina Warriors community festival, go to www.vday.org or www.katrinawarriors.net.

V-Day event by creator of The Vagina Monologues gets set to turn 10 in April (Toronto Star)

Susan Walker

http://www.thestar.com/article/310180

Anyone who ever doubted the power of art to effect social and political change has never heard – impossible as this seems – of The Vagina Monologues.

Gathering stories and statements from women about the body part that dare not speak its name, New York playwright Eve Ensler put together the show and first performed it as a one-woman monologue in the basement of a SoHo café in 1996.

Daring to utter in public the V-word, she launched a worldwide movement to stop violence against women, which led to the formation of V-Day two years later.

She’s an old-school feminist in a contemporary guise, a petite warrior in fighting trim dressed in ninja black, with a T-shirt bearing the pink, stylized vagina symbol that is the banner for V-Day. And in this year of American elections, she’s out stumping for the issue she says political candidates would rather not discuss. One in three women, surveys have consistently shown, is either raped, beaten or abused.

“When I started this I had no idea of the (size of the) epidemic of violence against women,” she says. “I just wanted to survive doing the play. I just wanted to get the word out of my terrified mouth.

“I had no idea how women had hungered to have happy sexual lives and to be in their own sexuality and feel good about their sexuality and how far away some women are from living that life.”

The Vagina Monologues had a demonstrably empowering effect. “When I started doing this you couldn’t say `vagina’ on television,” Ensler says. “I seriously believe that naming things, giving visibility to things, allows people to have agency over them. When women can’t identify their genitals or their body parts, often they are disassociated from them, so they have no power over them and no rights over them.”

After she did her first tour of the play, which was still pretty much an underground affair (but later earned her an Obie, the award for off-Broadway theatre), Ensler realized The Vagina Monologues could be a tool for change. After each performance, “so many women came up to me and waited in lines to tell me how they’d been violated.”

She began to offer the script as a means of raising money to fight violence against women. In 1998, the play became the basis for V-Day, an annual event first celebrated on Valentine’s Day that now can occur any time in the first three months of the year.

This year, Ensler and a staff of nine, who administer a website that stands in for an office, will see some 4,000 productions of The Vagina Monologues in 1,500 locations around the globe. The play has been produced in 45 languages in 120 countries. V-Day raises from $4 million to $6 million annually, with the 10-year tally at $50 million.

Ninety per cent of every dollar that comes in, she says, goes to fund women’s shelters and safe houses, raise awareness, promote legislation or establish community anti-violence programs. And The Vagina Monologues continues in commercial productions; it has been running for seven years in Paris and eight in Mexico City.

The Monologues’ power to move an audience not only to laughter but to action stands in inverse ratio to its simplicity.

Comic Maggie Cassella remembers when she did the show in 2001 along with actor Margot Kidder and singer Amy Sky at a theatre on Yonge St.

“I’m a product of late ’70s feminism,” she says. The message was not new for her. But the play became a relaunch for feminism in an era when women’s liberation was losing ground.

“To be able to perform that in front of women for whom it was empowering made it empowering for me. What Eve did was she reignited a movement.”

Ensler’s life as an activist has not eclipsed her writing. She has published two more plays – The Good Body and The Treatment – and a book, Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security Obsessed World, since her name became inseparable from the V-word.

But this time of year she is working rooms in support of the movement to stop violence against women. And she makes a very persuasive orator. In Toronto Tuesday as the keynote speaker at Nightwood Theatre’s FemCab event in honour of International Women’s Day (today), she spoke about the small victories and the long road ahead for a movement the need for which has not diminished.

In the lead-up to April 11-12, when V-Day will celebrate its 10th anniversary with an enormous event in the Superdome in New Orleans, Ensler has honed a new weapon in the form of the word femicide, a term she uses to describe systemic violence against women. When she mentioned it in a meeting with a U.N. official after reporting on her trip to Congo, he told her he was “uncomfortable” with the word.

“When I started doing this work 15 years ago, I think I believed, or maybe hoped, that violence against women was something random, or individual or accidental,” she says. “But after visiting 50 countries, after hearing thousands of stories, I don’t believe that any more. I believe there is a global pattern that is systematically undermining and destroying women.”

Using the acknowledgement of global warming as her analogy, Ensler speaks of a pattern of violence around the world – escalating violence and an unspoken agreement among world leaders to turn a blind eye to the systemic and often horrific treatment of women and girls. “The problem,” she says, “calls for billions of dollars, not mere millions” – still a fraction of what America spends on the war in Iraq.

With the spotlight on the women of New Orleans, V-Day’s Katrina Warriors will welcome thousands of women delegates, speakers and entertainers including Salma Hayek, Oprah Winfrey, Faith Hill, Jane Fonda, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Hudson, Glenn Close, Julia Stiles, Ali Larter, Sally Field, Marisa Tomei, Calpernia Addams, Rosario Dawson, Kerry Washington and musicians Common, Eve and Charmaine Neville for a weekend shindig that will include free medical and wellness treatments for the beleaguered women of New Orleans and the largest ever production of The Vagina Monologues.

“I’m a firm believer in movements,” says the 54-year-old author and grandmother to the two children of her son, actor Dylan McDermott, whom she adopted after marrying his father.

“I was brought up in the ’60s where I saw people’s movements stop a war. As V-Day grows, it’s going to be possible to say we are going to end the violence. But we have to keep going deeper into the issues, such as how poverty is interrelated with violence against women, how racial shaming is interrelated and, really, how we bring up boys.”

The issue, she says, is not a women’s issue to challenge the future of the human race. In New Orleans, in a place where women were raped and abused during Katrina’s rampage, she proposes to set the agenda for ending the subjugation of women with words, not war.

“Really, I think it’s going to change the world. I do.”

Women Hold Up Half the Sky (City of New Orleans)

Eve Ensler’s V to the 10th will reclaim the New Orleans Superdome, transforming the site from one of pain into a healing ground for women the world over.
Eve Ensler, creator of the worldwide V-Day movement to end violence against women and girls, is bringing the 10th anniversary here to New Orleans, in an event that will see the Superdome transformed into “a place to heal, gather, celebrate and actively change the story of women.”

Many of New Orleans’ women remain in the shadows where they hurt silently. Others are so busy recovering that they have yet to address their own needs.

V to the 10th will allow the city’s women to begin to heal, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, said at a recent press conference. In the process, many of the grassroots New Orleans groups that were here during and since the storm, such as the Katrina Warriors and Women of the Storm, will be recognized.

The star-studded event will include Salma Hayek, Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Hudson and our city’s own Charmaine Neville. As part of the event, displaced women scattered throughout the Gulf Region will be brought back home for the event. The City of New Orleans will provide busing. “Women hold up half the sky,” as the Chinese proverb goes. And, the women of New Orleans can lead the world’s women in ending violence against them,” Ensler said.

Events will take place over April 11 & 12th. For more information, go to v10.vday.org

Eve’s Speaking Tour: Author Visits Providence Production (The Providence Journal)

By Scott MacKay

Journal Staff Writer

Eve Ensler, playwright, performer and activist, speaks yesterday at the Beneficent Church in Providence.

PROVIDENCE — The Vagina Monologues is one of the iconic plays of women’s history in the United States, an artistic work meant to provoke, wipe away the shame sometimes associated with the female anatomy and heighten awareness of something much more shameful than any part of any woman’s body — the high rate of violence against women and girls around the world.

The play cannot be produced at Providence College, where the president, the Rev. Brian J. Shanley, banned the play from campus because he believes it is not “consistent with the mission of the Catholic Church.”

So yesterday, segments of the monologues were presented at the Beneficent Church downtown, a Congregational church that took in the play after PC banned it.

Eve Ensler, the play’s author, received a warm reception from about 100 people, most of them women, at a “V-Day” celebration to raise awareness of the oppression of women around the world and end violence against women and girls.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the campaign to transform performances of the monologues into social and political action, Ensler will join thousands of other supporters at the Superdome in New Orleans on April 11 to raise money and awareness of violence directed at females. The annual events have raised more than $50 million to combat violence.

“Thanks for helping make Rhode Island a vagina-friendly state,” said Ensler, to applause and laughter. “Every single place on the planet … suffers an insane amount of violence.”

Yesterday’s event was sponsored, in part, by PC students upset that their college does not allow the production. Danielle Bax, a PC senior from Nyack, N.Y., said students have not given up their quest to eventually get the play approved for campus production.

“For those of you who think the students of PC have forgotten, that’s not the case,” said Bax. She praised the Beneficent Church, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination known for focusing on the social justice imperatives of Jesus Christ’s teachings, being racially and ethnically inclusive and an emphasis on women’s rights.

Ensler was very critical of the Roman Catholic Church, saying that UCC churches around the world have been supportive of the monologues, but that Catholic prelates have censored her message and perpetuated the stereotype that women ought to be ashamed of their bodies and repress their sexuality.

“The highest percentage of money spent in the Catholic Church is spent on attorneys’ fees and settlements for pedophile cases,” said Ensler, referring to the many instances of priests abusing children that have surfaced in recent years.

She quoted a woman she met at a male-dominated religious meeting some years ago as saying, “even Jesus Christ came out of a vagina.”

Yet, she remains optimistic that fundamentalists in Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions will eventually come around to embracing more openness toward women.

Violence against women is ubiquitous, said Ensler. While such Third World plagues as genital mutilation and gang rapes in war zones may not be as prevalent in industrialized western countries, violence against women is by no means confined to the poor or undereducated, she said.

“The rates of sexual abuse in the U.S. military are out of control,” said Ensler. “Can you imagine that you’re on the frontlines defending your country and you’re being raped by your colleagues.”

Ensler is alternately witty and serious and her approach was applauded by the mostly female audience, especially when she got around to political issues.

At times she described the most horrible crimes, including one she was familiar with in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, Ensler said, she met an 8-year-old girl who had been raped repeatedly by men and was left ashamed and incontinent.

The United States spends too much blood and treasure, Ensler said, on wars and the military. She attributes this to a “macho culture” that places emphasis on raising boys as future soldiers who are not supposed to cry or show any strain of emotional vulnerability.

“You can’t support protecting women and children and support bombing Iraq,” said Ensler. “Ending violence against women is all about us being a kind of different human beings.”

SALMA HAYEK ON COVER OF GLAMOUR, INTERVIEW BY EVE

V-Day board member and V TO THE TENTH performer Salma Hayek graces the cover of this month’s GLAMOUR Magazine. In a candid interview with Eve Ensler, Hayek discuss her role as V-Day activist, the connection between art and activism, and being a mother.

Click here to reach Eve’s full interview with Salma Hayek >

Eve Ensler Focuses on Violence Against Women in New Orleans and Gulf South (Democracy Now!)

Playwright and activist Eve Ensler discusses the ten-year anniversary of the first benefit performance of her award-winning play, The Vagina Monologues, to spread awareness about violence against women and girls. Every year, “V-Day” has focused on women’s struggles from a different part of the world. This year the focus is on the women of the Gulf South, with a major event planned in New Orleans on April 11th and 12th.

Listen >

“The Vagina Monologue” V-Day movement marks 10th anniversary (International Herald Tribune)

NEW YORK: Glenn Close and Jane Fonda are joining other celebrities and politicians for a 10th anniversary kickoff of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls started by “The Vagina Monologues” playwright Eve Ensler.

The Valentine’s Day event at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom on Thursday night is one of several planned fundraisers leading up to the “V To The Tenth” celebration in New Orleans on April 11-12.

Ensler was also to be joined at the Hammerstein by Brooke Shields, Kerry Washington and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

Each year, the organization spotlights a group of women who “resist violence with courage and vision.” This year, the focus is on “Katrina Warriors” ? the women of New Orleans ? “for their strength and resilience in the face of devastating loss.”

To commemorate the event, Random House has released the 10th anniversary edition of “The Vagina Monologues” and the paperback edition of Ensler’s most recent book, “Insecure At Last.”

The first benefit performance of Ensler’s award-winning play was at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Valentine’s Day in 1998. She is embarking on a nationwide 20-city “V To The Tenth” speaking tour to coincide with the anniversary.

The play is a series of monologues, performed by at least three women, that deal with intimacy, vulnerability and sexual discovery. Beside Close, Fonda and Ensler herself, the roles have been played by Calista Flockhart, Kate Winslet, Susan Sarandon and Melanie Griffith, among others.

The New Orleans SUPERLOVE celebration, at the New Orleans Arena and Superdome, will feature performances of “The Vagina Monologues” and V-Day activists from around the world.

Salma Hayek, Oprah Winfrey, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Hudson, Julia Stiles, Sally Field are among celebrities scheduled to attend. Also slated to perform are musicians Common, Eve, and Charmaine Neville.

Over the past decade, the nonprofit group has raised more than $50 million (?34.19 million) and funded more than 5,000 community-based anti-violence programs and safe houses around the world.

BRING 10! SEND 10! TELL 10!

V-Day often gets emails from dedicated V-Mail subscribers asking what you can do to support the movement. For our 10th anniversary Valentine’s Day, there are three ways that you can support V-Day’s work to end violence against women and girls, join your fellow V-Day supporters and activists and bring new activists into the movement by giving the gift of V-Day!

In celebration of V TO THE TENTH, BRING 10! people with you to New Orleans to V TO THE TENTH at the New Orleans Arena. The V-Day event of the decade, in New Olreans we will celebrate the V-Day movement and honor the thousands of activists who have made this movement a success over the years. What better way to welcome the next decade of ending violence against women and girls than together with your friends, family and fellow activists!

Click here to BRING 10!

V-Day is also offering you the opportunity to SEND 10! When you SEND 10!, tickets will be distributed by our New Orleans and Golf South based Katrina Warriors Network to women and girls in the Gulf South so they can attend V TO THE TENTH at the New Orleans Arena on April 12, 2008 free of charge. Sending 10 tickets is a fully tax deductible donation in support of V-Day.

Click here to SEND 10!

With TELL 10!, spread the word about V-Day and V TO THE TENTH, sign up to TELL 10! Expand our network by inviting your network to the V-Day anniversary festivities and campaigns and encourage them to join us in New Orleans for this once in a lifetime event!

Click here to TELL 10!

And don’t forget, to buy your tickets to V TO THE TENTH!!!

http://www.vday.org/tickets

See you in New Orleans at V TO THE TENTH!

Happy V-Day!

Entertainment Tonight Premieres PSA featuring Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Ali Larter and Kerry Washington

Entertainment Tonight premiered V-Day’s New V TO THE TENTH PSA featuring star supporters Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Ali Larter and Kerry Washington. The PSA was shot in Los Angeles on January 10th backstage at V-Day and Glamour magazine’s annual women’s luncheon.

To check it out, visit:
http://www.etonline.com/news/2008/02/58283/index.html