Differences Between Applied Theatre and Explicit Body Performance

As my research looks at ways that applied theatre and explicit body performance may speak to each other, it is worth starting by looking at how they differ.

I suggest that methods of applied theatre, together with those of explicit body performance, may transform the script of rape. Traditionally these styles are considered to have nothing in common. In fact, theatre-types mark them as distinctly different. I on the other hand, believe they have something to offer each other.

Firstly though, it is worth exploring DIFFERENCES between these performative forms.

Characteristics of Applied Theatre

• The community is at the centre of performance enquiry
• Determines community needs through focus groups, community leaders, writing scripts, and determines themes with community
• Works to develop self-esteem, community-cohesion, education and empowerment
• May be termed an ‘intervention’ because it intervenes in a problem that is recognised by the community, NGO or government organisations
• Teaches performance skills as well as doing issue-based work
• Makes the community or issue explicit
• May draw upon traditional theatre styles, characters, and scripts; yet may also subvert these very structures
• Often draws upon folk art

Characteristics of Explicit Body Performance

• The artist/performer is at the centre of performance enquiry
• The artist reflects on society and uses their body as a magnifying glass to reflect spectators back to themselves
• Aims to awaken awe, wonder, and critical reflection in spectators
• Works to ‘summon the ghosts’ of gender disparity, allowing spectators to re-examine and alter the way they ‘do’ gender/s
• Subverts traditional theatre styles and characters. May use ‘performance outlines’ rather than ‘scripts’
• Makes the body of the artist explicit
• Often works across several artistic mediums

Positive rape prevention?

Isn't it just better to focus on the good?

Can there be a politics of rape prevention that focuses on the good? Can methods of rape prevention seek to build up what is positive, or transformational, rather than focus directly on the problem?

Moira Carmody looks to ways to 'challenge the normalisation of intimate personal violence' through her sexual ethics program for young people.

Rather than looking at what is dangerous and what is safe, Carmody helps young people focus on what makes them feel good in relationships. Rather than impose a morality that insists women guard their virginity, the sexual ethics program explores different values with young people, and looks at some implications of these. The sexual ethics program only explicitly looks at rape towards the end of the program, before that focusing on desire and ethics.

I'm also thinking about what Catherine Waldby says in her paper destruction. Waldby talks about performing fantasies that challenge the rape script. The rape script inscribes men's bodies as dangerous, and women as having a 'vulnerable inner space'. Man give and women receive. So fantasies that challenge this script could involve the phallic woman, or the receptive man. Waldby is speaking specifically of sexual fantasies. She believes that sexual fantasies can be a method of rape prevention. Pretty positive huh?

It's such a movement from the old, yet still very popular of 'no means no' kinda campaign. the type that scares women into staying in their houses cos noone ever gets raped there. And the kind that advocates a kind of 'protector' mentality in men: as if they cannot be attacked.

I'm interested in Waldby's idea of fantasy as a way to challenge reality and then create new ones. I feel like we have to think things, imagine them, even play them out before we can do them.

Waldby also says that merely playing these games out with sex workers is not enough. It is not enough to strap on a dildo or be arse-fucked by a sex worker - we must do them in our everyday intimate relationships. Otherwise there is a kind of theme-park effect, in which the phallic woman and the receptive man contimnue to remain the Other. Reminds me of the Adelaide Fringe - does it really helps us Adelaideans embrace new ideas and artistic styles? Or is it just a visit to the freaks, like going to the circus to see the tatooed lady?

I think it does change us. It helps us see and feel safe in another way of being. It helps us to play and experiment, in safe ways, with other ways of doing things. It helps us to explore the other side without totally going there. I think it's really important.

Why performance as rape prevention?

Well I gave my talk at the AGWSA conference on Emerging Spaces: New Possibilities in These Critical Times. I spoke about performance as rape prevention. Why do I think that performance can be used in rape prevention? Why not good ol' fashioned self-defense? Or law reform? Or street protests? Well, I reckon we've tried those things, and so far, they're not working.

In fact, rape convictions have been falling since second-wave feminism begun a concerted campaign against rape. Last year, only 1% of all rape reports lead to a conviction. Less than 1 in 7 incidents of sexual violence are actually reported to police. If you're Indigenous, have a disability, or are young, then you're at greater risk of rape. the Australian component of the International Violence Against Women survey found that 10% of women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence in the past 12 months.

So, I reckon it's worth looking for some more ways to prevent rape. This is some of what I said at AGWSA on looking to performance as a tool in rape prevention.

Why performance?
Performance may not simply ‘envision a new future, but also perform this future’ (Nicola Gavey 2005). As Augusto Boal puts it, performance can offer opportunities for the make-believe to ‘make-belief’ (Augusto Boal 1995).

Performance may be an emerging space in the field of rape prevention due to its potential for transformation. As a space distinct from everyday social realities, performance may be able to deconstruct, re-imagine, and embody alternatives to the rape script. In occupying this in-between space performance may be an innovative tool in rape prevention.

Performance may be uniquely positioned to transform the rape script, with its opportunity for the theoretical to become embodied consciousness, witnessed in a social arena. On the stage, different subjectivities can be located and played with, creating slippages within the script of rape. Performance may not only critically assess social realities, but also invent and embody new ways of being within these.

The stage can offer people a place to create, and enact alternative scripts that construct gender and relationships differently to those imposed by the rape script. Performance can be ‘a ‘safe space’ of fiction….[to] not only find, but also use a voice to effect change’ (Prentki 1998:419). On the stage, people are offered opportunities to literally let their selves go.

Frighten Rape Culture to Death

It seems there's no way out of rape, that it's just part of our lives. When I look to law reform, it doesn't seem to have made any difference to rape convictions nor to the actual occurance of rape. As a woman, I am just supposed to be afraid, to learn to live with the fear, or with the lack of freedom that fear imposes upon my life. I don't want to live with that. I wanna frighten rape culture to death.

Here's some theory that I've been looking at that may offer another way to look at rape, and be used in a politics of prevention.

Sharon Marcus writes of rape as a 'script'
Analyzing rape as a script, rather than a determining reality of women’s lives, allows for it to be thwarted. Sharon Marcus writes that rape is not an individual act, but instead a process, a social script.

In this script, one person takes the role of perpetrator and moves another into the complimentary role of victim. The rendering of women’s body as victim is not permanent nor inherent, but instead a process that can be studied and averted. Within the dominanat framework, women's bodies are constructed as vulnerable, passive, and receptive. Men, on the other hand, are considered to be active instigators. The rape script relies upon these characterisations. Rape is then a ‘series of signals and steps that both maintains, and is maintained by social configurations of gender' (Marcus 1992:395).


Rape must NOT be seen as an invasion of a precious, interior space

A politics of rape prevention redefines rape as something other than an invasion of precious interior space. Marcus writes that: ‘Rape engenders a sexualised female body defined as a wound’ (Marcus 1992:397). Women are constructed as a wound made real through rape. So, Marcus asserts that rape is neither a taking of oneself, nor an indelible act of violence. Women's bodies must be reconsidered so that rape does not steal a precious, interior sexuality, an object of mystery and fragility. So that women's bodies are not constructed as 'rapable', and men's bodies as able to rape.

Is it possible to end rape?

Rape is just part of life huh? All animals do it. All cultures, all communities. Men and women rape. Gay and straight people rape. Priests rape. Shit - even kids rape!

So why would I waste my time researching, and writing about possibilities for rape prevention. Cos it ain't gonna happen!

Some people reckon that rape is a biological drive. Maybe its a really bad biological drive, but a biological drive nonetheless, and therefore, something we will never stop. These science-y types cite that men have learnt to rape as a way to enable their mighty sperm to live on. They say that rape is distressing because it disturbs an individual's control over reproduction.

Then there are other people, most notably Susan Brownmiller, who have claimed that rape is not biological, but social. Instead of a sexual act, determined by men's excessive horniness, and their desire to have many offspring, rape is conceived as an act of violence.

Basically, in this argument, men rape because they can. It's an act of power, a way for men to keep control over ALL women. Brownmiller says that our bodies are actually made for rape in her 1975 text, Against Our Will:

'Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accomodation requiring the locking together of two seperate parts, penis into vagina, their would be no copulation or rape as we know it'

Within these frameworks, I do not see a way out of rape. It looks like individual women can escape or thwart rape attempts, and individual men can choose not to rape, but it's always gonna be around the corner, a constant in our societies.

Here are some reasons why I disagree with both this biological view and Brownmiller's hypothesis:

1. Rape is not man's biological drive because women rape too

2. Not all men rape

3. Those who can't have babies are raped (ie babies, old people, animals)

4. People are raped orally and anally, and not just with a penis

5. Some communities DO NOT rape (like the Gerai, in Indonesia)

Instead, maybe rape is enabled by cultures which normalise the act with crazy arguments that men are biologically primed to rape.

Yeh, and I'm biologcally primed to cook. And sew.

Right.