V-Day Blog Archive

From Superdome to SUPERLOVE–V-Day at 10

by Marianne Schnall

In 1996, when Eve Ensler premiered The Vagina Monologues at a small performance space in downtown New York, she received the type of response playwrights dream about: critical acclaim, an Obie award, and sold out houses. Featuring her interviews with more than 200 women talking openly and intimately about their bodies, her play had struck a chord, and as Ensler puts it, “Language leads the way.”

The play was a catalyst for an unexpected response: after every show, women would approach Ensler to share their personal stories of surviving violence, at the hands of relatives, lovers, or strangers. Overwhelmed by their number, and having been physically and sexually abused herself by her father, Ensler began to see her play as more than a work of art about women’s bodies, but as a vehicle to help protect them.

At a benefit performance on February 14, 1998, Ensler launched V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls. Ten years and thousands of benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues later—including a star-studded run on Broadway and a sold-out event at Madison Square Garden—V-Day has raised over 50 million dollars for anti-violence programs across the globe and staged events in more than 120 countries. Even Ensler is astonished. “Look, I hoped we could do one big event in New York,” she laughs. “And the weird thing is, it’s still going. Every year I think, ‘OK, this will be the end of The Vagina Monologues, we’ll be done.’ And in fact, I think this is the biggest year we’re ever had.” With more than 1,250 locations signed up, 2008 will see some 3,500 V-Days, she estimates.

To what does Ensler credit V-Day’s incredible growth and reach? “Art has an alchemy that straight-on politics doesn’t have,” she says. “But I also think that the movement is so truly grassroots that it has just spread from one woman to another… it just organically happened.”

Credit also must go to Ensler’s out-of-the-box thinking, as she shaped the movement’s trajectory. “V-Day is both the method and where we’re going. It’s an organizing tool and a media communication system. But it’s not only that,” she says. “It has all these prongs. It is a way of energizing women and breaking taboos, of bringing people together around particular spotlights, of speaking truths that we weren’t able to speak before. And it’s events.”

The “mega event of the decade,” as Ensler describes it, is certain to be V-Day’s ten-year anniversary celebration, V to the Tenth, on April 11-12 at the New Orleans Arena and Louisiana Superdome. Says Ensler, “We’re turning the Superdome into ‘SUPERLOVE.’ There’s going to be music, there’s going to be slam poets, and story telling, and amazing speakers.” She mentions urban environmentalist Majora Carter, educator Johnnetta Cole, law professor Kimberly Crenshaw, personal finance guru Suze Ormond, actress and activist Jane Fonda, health and human rights advocate Stephen Lewis, and journalist and activist Naomi Klein. “Every day someone else agrees to come. There’s going to be rituals of girls coming of age, women from Afghanistan and Iraq, and Korea, and Africa—everywhere.” Also, she says, an art exhibit, a red tent for storytelling, and “wellness suites,” where women of New Orleans can go for free “massages and yoga and meditation and makeovers and love. So everything that should have happened in the Superdome [after Katrina] happens there.”

Scheduled for the weekend’s special performance of The Vagina Monologues are Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Jennifer Hudson, Ellen DeGeneres, Salma Hayek, Rosario Dawson, Ashley Judd, Julia Stiles, and Oprah Winfrey. For Winfrey, Ensler is writing a new monologue “about a woman in New Orleans.” As impresario of women’s empowerment, Ensler picked the Superdome partly to show “how women have been burdened with surviving and keeping families together.”

Ensler believes the ultimate answer to truly ending violence against women involves connecting issues in order to change the culture. “It’s in what we teach boys, in our acceptance of practices like racism and classism.” Those behaviors, she says, contain “a level of humiliation and hierarchy that allows for the mechanism of violence to continue.… If we didn’t need to sustain oppression, why would we need violence?”

In changing the culture, Ensler believes, the media has an enormous role to play, “The media is a huge part of perpetuating sexist and patriarchal images.…How women are mangled and demeaned and just reduced in the media—that is a crucial question.”

Asked what she would like to be celebrating in another ten years, Ensler answers immediately. “The end of violence against women.” For now she hopes the V to the Tenth event will “celebrate our victories,” honor and raise funds for the women rebuilding New Orleans, and create a “collective gathering, unity, energy that will really launch the next ten years of transformation.”

V-Day Celebrates Ten Year Anniversary This Valentine’s Day In NYC

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Susan Celia Swan/Kate Fisher
917-865-6603

“V to the 10th: NYC – Kickoff To New Orleans” –
AT HAMMERSTEIN BALLROOM WITH
JANE FONDA, GLENN CLOSE, BROOKE SHIELDS, EVE ENSLER, LA CHANZE, KERRY WASHINGTON, CITY COUNCIL SPEAKER CHRISTINE QUINN AND MORE

V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2008 with women and men from the U.S. and throughout the world. Founded by playwright Eve Ensler on February 14, 1998 at the first benefit of her award winning play The Vagina Monologues at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City, the global non profit has raised over $50 million for local anti violence groups with events taking place in over 120 countries to date and thousands more planned during the upcoming anniversary year.

On February 14, 2008, exactly ten years after the very first V-Day benefit, V-Day is going back to the Hammerstein Ballroom for V to the 10th: NYC – Kickoff To New Orleans. This event will kick of V-Day’s anniversary year, leading up to V TO THE TENTH, the V-Day event of the decade, on April 11 – 12, 2008 at the New Orleans Arena and Louisiana Superdome.

V to the 10th: NYC – Kickoff To New Orleans will feature appearances by Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Brooke Shields, Eve Ensler, La Chanze, Kerry Washington, NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and more. The evening will offer a New Orleans inspired tasting menu and desserts by guest chefs Megan Roen Forman from Sucre; Brittany Casciato, Pastry Chef, Cochon; Simone Fleming, Executive Pastry Chef, The Ritz Carlton and Christy Phebus, Pastry Chef, Bayona. Following dinner, the event will turn into a post dinner dance party. Special guest Carole Bebelle from the Ashe Cultural Center in New Orleans, will join Co- Chairs Pat Mitchell and Jennifer Buffett, to help kick off V-Day’s official 10 year anniversary with a look back at our victories and successes, and a re-commitment to the next ten years to end violence against women and girls.

The event has support from the following companies and individuals: Bloomberg, Grey Goose Vodka, Melody Hobson, Newman’s Own Foundation, Carole and Lisa Pittelman, and Linda Schejola.

Thursday, February 14, 2008, 6:30 Cocktails, 8:00pm Dinner, Performance, 10:00pm Dance Party & Dessert Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 West 34th Street, NYC

Gala Ticket Prices from $350- $2,500 and VIP Tables of 10: $10,000 | $25,000 | $50,000 | $75,000 | $100,000.

Dance Party $25 tickets available for dessert, open bar and dancing from 10 PM on.

For more information and ticket sales please contact The JFM Group at 212-921-9070, x. 12 or email amandam at thejfmgroup

About V-Day

V-Day is a global movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of Playwright/Founder Eve Ensler’s award winning play The Vagina Monologues. In 2007, more than 3000 V-Day events took place in the U.S. and around the world. To date, the V-Day movement has raised over $50 million and educated millions about the issue of violence against women and the efforts to end it, crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns, launched the Karama program in the Middle East, reopened shelters, and funded over 5000 community-based anti-violence programs and safe houses in Democratie Republic of Congo, Haiti, Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq. The ‘V’ in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine and Vagina.

Eve Ensler Tapes Radio PSA at Clear Channel in New Orleans

To download an mp3 of the PSA, click here.

Alba, Holmes Fight Violence Vs. Women

By SANDY COHEN

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson were among the celebrities who celebrated the 10th anniversary of V-Day, a global effort to end violence against women and girls.

Alba, who made her stage debut performing Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” offered a poem at a private luncheon Thursday sponsored by Glamour magazine. But first the 26-year-old actress warned that she was “popping out” of her dress.

“If you guys don’t know, I’m pregnant,” Alba said as her fiance, producer Cash Warren, beamed. “You’re all women. I think you understand your breasts are engorged and your stomach is getting bigger by the second.”

Ensler founded V-Day, which now reaches 119 countries and has raised $50 million to increase awareness about violence against women.

“It literally started from one woman’s voice … and it’s exponentially grown,” Dawson, 28, said. “It’s about embracing being a female and reclaiming that.”

V-Day will celebrate its anniversary with a two-day event at New Orleans’ Superdome in April.

Dawson, who is a V-Day board member, performed a poem about New Orleans, calling it “the vagina of America.”

Katie Holmes, Val Kilmer, Kerry Washington, Ali Larter, Gina Gershon, Judith Light and Jennifer Beals also attended the event. Cindi Leive, editor in chief of Glamour magazine, said last year’s V-Day luncheon raised over $200,000.

Holmes said her friend Paula Wagner — a longtime business partner of Holmes’ husband, Tom Cruise — inspired her to become a part of V-Day.

“It’s important for women to support each other and communicate with each other and be each other’s friends,” the 29-year-old Holmes said. “We should be working on stopping violence for people, for everyone.”

V TO THE TENTH! (Fundraising Success Magazine)

In 10 years, V-Day has raised more than $50 million and made advocates, donors and ‘warriors’ of thousands of women in its effort to combat violence against women around the world. Fundraising Success Magazine sits down with Eve Ensler to talk about V-Day’s worldwide success, and ten year anniversary V TO THE TENTH.

Click Here to Download a PDF of the Full Article >

Read about V TO THE TENTH in “The Big V-easy”

THEATER GUY
The Big ‘V’-easy
‘Vagina Monologues’ playwright Eve Ensler plans a star-studded V-Day 10th anniversary performance here in April

DAVID CUTHBERT

When playwright Eve Ensler first performed “The Vagina Monologues” in 1996 at a small downtown New York performing space called The HERE Theater, “There were maybe 50 people in the audience,” she said.

On April 12, “The Vagina Monologues,” which has become a worldwide phenomenon, launching the V-Day project to end violence against women, will play the 17,000-seat New Orleans Arena with a cast scheduled to include Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Jennifer Hudson, Ellen DeGeneres, Charmaine Neville, Salma Hayek, Rosario Dawson, Ashley Judd, Julia Stiles, Marisa Tomei and Oprah Winfrey, for whom Ensler is writing a new monologue.

April 11 and 12 will find the Louisiana Superdome interior turned into a pink and red vagina — “with a big vagina entrance,” Ensler said — as a setting for performance events, parties, parades, workshops, wellness and education programs, speakers, even spa treatments, which will be free to residents of New Orleans and the Gulf South. (Men are excluded only from the spa.)

For those two days, New Orleans will be “the Vagina Capital of America,” Ensler said. “We’re coming here to say that we should celebrate New Orleans, cherish it, protect it, just as we do our vaginas, and make sure it goes on and on.”

Ensler penned “The Vagina Monologues,” culled from interviews with more than 200 women, at a time when the word vagina was rarely used except in a medical context. In just 11 years — directly as a result of her play — the word is in common usage, in headline type, prompting new euphemisms — such as Winfrey’s “Va-jay-jay” — to join the parade of nicknames, both delightful and derogatory, that Ensler collected in her play.

“Naming is about existing. Naming things says they exist,” she said, although she made a face when told of “Talk Soup’s” recent “Vaginapocalypse.”

By turning her reportage into art with stories both humorous and harrowing, laughter existing side-by-side with first-person accounts of sexual mutilation, torture and atrocity, Ensler created powerful theater that has been performed in 45 languages, and a movement that has taken on a life of its own. There are V-Day activists in 119 countries, Ensler said.

The New Orleans event — “V to the 10th” — marks the 10th anniversary of the V-Day Project and will be the culmination of thousands of worldwide productions of the play, as is the case every February and March, and Ensler’s own 20-city U.S. tour. A 10th anniversary edition of “The Vagina Monologues” will be released along with the paperback edition of Ensler’s book “Insecure at Last.”

To date, performances of the play have raised more than $50 million for local anti-violence groups in more than 120 countries. V-Day now raises “more money than any group in the world to stop violence against women,” Ensler has written, “four to six million every year, which is the cost of 10 minutes of the war in Iraq.”

Visiting New Orleans this week with several members of her V-Day team, Ensler said she expects the April events to attract attendance “between 30,000 and 40,000.

“Every year, we have our major V-Day event in a different city, focusing on women’s problems in that city,” Ensler said. “There are so many reasons to have it in New Orleans, from the vanishing wetlands to the man-made levee failures that flooded the city to the abandonment and complete neglect of human beings. Violence against women was committed physically, economically and environmentally. And the women of New Orleans, the ‘Katrina Warriors,’ totally understand that.

“In New Orleans, Katrina exposed what was going on here, the lack of resources, the lack of care for its poor in general and its women in particular. And we are finally seeing people standing up and saying ‘No’ to this, to the destruction and desecration of a city and its people. Our government is so concerned with ‘securing the world,’ they have forgotten to protect their own people. They have made the people here profoundly unsafe.

“As a result of disaster, I think we are seeing a profound change happening in New Orleans, a shift in perception, and we want to continue shining a spotlight on that.”

There will also be a disbursement of money to local, sustainable, long-term projects for women in the arts and business.

In addition to the all-star staging of “The Vagina Monologues,” Ensler has nurtured and served as dramaturge to a local production that will be featured in the Superdome April 11. Called “Swimming Upstream,” it tells the storm stories of local women.

“We came down here several months after the storm and saw women who were already addressing problems in a variety of ways,” Ensler said. “Carole Bebelle, (the director) of the Ashe Cultural Arts Center, had gotten a group of women active in the cultural community together, who had already started meeting to talk about their feelings in relation to the storm. Then they started writing about them, from three perspectives: before the storm, during the storm and after the storm.”

Included in this group are Carol Sloane, Troi Bechet (“who has written some wonderful songs,” Ensler said), Karen Kaia-Livers, Carol Sutton, Adella Gautier, Kathy Randels, Dollie Rivas, Anne-Liese Juge-Fox, Tommye Myrick and Dina Roubeze.

Just last week, Kenny Leon — who directed August Wilson’s final play, “Radio Golf,” on Broadway, was long associated with the Alliance Theater Company in Atlanta and now has his own group, The True Colors Theater Company in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — came to a reading of a first draft of the work, assembled by Ensler.

Leon will direct “Swimming Upstream” here and the plan is to take it beyond New Orleans. Several national theater artists also may be involved.

“The intention,” Bebelle said, “is to have the voices of New Orleans women heard and to create a work that will last, that will tour, that will bring continuing attention to what we have faced and are still facing here.

“The fact is that when anything like this happens, women have the harder struggle. They are the ones who hold up the men, the children and elders of the family. With Katrina, it was convincing their families that they were going to make it, to keep going until we could get to a place where we could catch our breath and see the situation more clearly.

“We have had the time now to ruminate and tell this complex story with perspective. Theater allows you to do this. This is no sound bite. It has been a year in the making. We have created exciting theater, with the help of two theatrical dynamos — Eve and now Kenny Leon.

“The thing I like about it,” Carol Sutton said, “is that it is an uplifting, inspiring piece, with a lot of humor in it.”

“It’s still a work in progress,” said Dollie Rivas, “but we were encouraged to let everything out.”

Troi Bechet, the actress-singer, has written four songs and one, “Going Back Home,” allowed her to unleash a lot of feelings she said she hadn’t allowed herself to express since the storm. “It’s about not letting tragedy wash away all the things that our city means to us,” she said, “what makes this home. It speaks to what we love about the city and about the strength and fortitude we need to move forward.

“All of us involved in ‘Swimming Upstream’ feel a need and a responsibility to help bring this city back,” Bechet said. “And at the first reading of the play, you could feel that spirit embodied in everyone in the room. We, as creators of music, art and theater, need to let the world know what this city really is. Our story needs to continue to be told, because it’s going to take years to recover.”

“What Eve told us was, ‘Write what’s true,’ ” said Anne-Liese Juge Fox. “She has a way of creating an atmosphere of intimacy immediately. And with so many different kinds of women contributing, you meet people you might otherwise never have met, hear stories you wouldn’t otherwise have heard. And Eve knows that there’s a power in this.”

“Even at this stage, I can see that ‘Swimming Upstream’ is going to be beautiful,” Ensler said. “And it’s happened the way all this work has happened, with women talking and sharing with each other at a grass-roots level.”

Ensler’s work involves constant travel and 14-hour work days, “eight to 10 of those hours on V-Day,” she said. Does it allow her a personal life?

“My love is my work,” she said, “and my work is empowering women. My life is taken. But I have people I love and who love me in different parts of the world. (Among them is stepson Dylan McDermott and her two grandchildren.)

“I’m on the road 90 percent of the time and wherever I am, I feel I’m home. I can’t tell you how fantastic, how freeing this is.

“The more I do this work, the less of me there is and the better I feel. By taking my life, it has given me a life.

“If you put something out there, something will come back.”

. . . . . . .

CURTAIN LINES: “Saying the word I was not supposed to say is the thing that gave me a voice in the world.”

— Eve Ensler, in her introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of “The Vagina Monologues.”

. . . . . . .

Theater writer David Cuthbert can be reached at dcuthbert@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3468. To comment on this story or read others by Cuthbert, visit http://blog.nola.com/davidcuthbert.

_________________________

V-DAY TO THE TENTH

WHAT: The Tenth Anniversary of V-Day, celebrating the worldwide activist movement to end violence against women.

WHEN: April 11-12 at the Superdome, featuring performance events including the locally created theater piece “Swimming Upstream”; speakers; economic, education, empowerment and wellness workshops (details to be announced in January). An all-star production of “The Vagina Monologues” will be April 12 at 7:30 p.m. at the New Orleans Arena; tickets $25-$1,000.

TICKETS: Now available at www.vday.org/tickets. Go to Ticketmaster link.

The general V-Day link is vday.org.

Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource Campaign: Stephen Lewis Interview on WHYY Radio on The War On Women in East Congo

The war on women in east Congo.

The sexual violence towards women in an area that borders Rwanda has been called the worst in the world by a top United Nation’s official. To get a better understanding of why we’re seeing an escalation in violence and what’s being done to help the victims, WHYY Radio talks with CHRISTINE KARUMBA, who was born in the Democratic Republican of Congo (DRC) and is now the country director there for Women for Women International. She is currently visiting the United States. Also hear from STEPHEN LEWIS, who is a former United Nations Envoy on Aids in Africa, is calling for the creation of a UN Women’s Agency to devise a plan to stop the violence in eastern Congo

Listen here >>

Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource Campaign: “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War”

On the front page of The New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman reports in “ Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War” on violence against women in Eastern Congo and interviews survivors and Panzi Hospital’s Dr. Denis Mukwege.

To read the article, visit http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/world/africa/07congo.html?_r=1&hp&oref…

To read Eve Ensler’s GLAMOUR magazine article on her May trip to Eastern Congo, “Women Left for Dead, and The Man Who Is Saving Them”, visit http://www.glamour.com/news/articles/2007/08/reallifedrama

To read about V-Day and UNICEF campaign – Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource – visit http://www.vday.org/drcongo

Listen to the PBS Podcast: A Conversation with Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler Deschryver: Ending Femicide in the Congo

Eve Ensler and activist Christine Schuler Deschryver talk to journalist Michele Kort of Ms. Magazine about the horrors of sexual violence and its aftermath in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Listen here: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2007/lumo/special_ensler.html

Watch Eve on AlJazeera’s Riz Khan Show talking about the V-Day/UNICEF Campaign to End Rape and Sexual Torture against Women and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DmK8etNdQg