Men and Women
1) Male violence against women
– Workshops with men about machismo
– Workshops with “occasional rapists” in Prison
– Workshops with women who have experienced violence
– Workshops with anti-violence centre staff
– Workshops on human trafficking
– Performances on gender violence (video, scenes of Marseille)
2) Relationships between the sexes across borders
– Work in schools
– Training of professionals
– Performances on gender stereotypes
– Invisible Theatre on machismo
1) Male violence against women
The oppression acted out against women is subtle, systematic and spread all over the world. Male violence against women is a result of this oppression and in our work we face it on different levels and in different ways.Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) allows us to make visible everything that is concealed, to bring the aspect which are hard to face to light because they take us back to our education and to the cultural prejudice which is hard to eradicate.
Above all TO allows the audience, when we talk about domestic violence, to look for moments in which the can intervene, to try out unexpected solutions and to discover risky errors which potentially augment the level of violence in a relationship.
Below this you will find the interventions we already have experienced, but surely there are many other ways to use TO against male violence which are still to be conceived.
– Workshops with men about machismo
The campaigns against violence towards women which we see on printed paper or on TV always feature battered women, fallen prey to terror and covered with beating marks but there is little talk about those who commit these acts of violence. To say that all men are potentially violent can get you into trouble; many people don’t accept this hypothesis, in the wake of the media they will bang on the idea that it’s the strangers from outside the EU, or otherwise men in a temporary lapse of reason, who commit violence. We tackled this line of reasoning during a series of workshops with the association Maschile Plurale (Multiple Manliness), which took place between February and June 2011. We have sought to deconstruct the macho culture by working on the male role imposed by society, to understand what elements make men into potentially violent and oppressive, what situations make them feel obliged to demonstrate virility and strength and why they sometimes lose their ability to handle their emotions and really abandon their responsibilities like taking care of and educating their children.We worked on bullying at school and at work, on the pressure of society to demonstrate virility and the absence of emotions. We analyzed binging (alcohol-drugs) as a way to show that a man is a man (“the whisky that sweetly whacks you!“) as well as how man must ignore his own vulnerability when it comes to fear of rejection when he approaches women. In a recent workshop for the UN on male gender – done with people from 23 different countries – it came out that the demonstrations of virility almost always serve to hide vulnerability and that men have problems to handle their emotions. The participants from 5 continents all agreed on this point.
– Workshops with “occasional rapists” in Prison
A pilot experience in using the Theatre of the Oppressed to work with men who have committed rape was implemented in 2013 in a major prison in Rome, Italy. The TO activity was part of a bigger project developed by the Be-Free Cooperative, an anti-violence centre working against trafficking, violence and discrimination. The TO activity consisted in deconstructing relationships between men and women. Far from trying to correct the sex-offenders it aimed to give them a protected theatrical space to show the situations where they feel very challenged in their relation with women. They could then try change and rehearse new positive behaviors. Participants were the ones to define problems and solutions.
The main issues tackled were: approach and beginning of a new relationship, the possible indifference of a women, and the breaking up, all summed up in one question: how to cope with womens autonomy. The tools used were games, image theatre, role play, and mainly forum theatre, where each participant could show what could be done to overcome a very challenging situation. Also some psychodrama tools were used – for instance by reversing roles – to bring men in womens part.
Olivier Malcor who facilitated the process, also uses this approach to raise awareness about male violence against women in schools. Through workshops and forum theatre, students define themselves the several forms of gender violence and those stereotypes legitimizing it. They then try tricks to overcome risky relations and/or to help someone trapped in such situations.
– PDF document: www.parteciparte.com/Alla-periferia-del-maschile_Parteciparte.pdf
– Workshops with women who have experienced violence
TO allows for the reconstruction of an rejected or damaged identity. During the games the participants constantly have to deal with others and to rediscover themselves, how they cope with problems, with competition or with solidarity.The games and exercises, fun and adapted to the participants’ capabilities, can create strong groups and a starting point from which a participant can, using TO, even reconstruct a rejected or destroyed identity.
The creative process with which the TO scenes are spawned are very beneficial, reinforce the group, strengthens the individual and permits observing daily conflicts, even violent ones, from a distance. TO teaches us that if we theatralise a situation we do not only become creators in an artistic but also in a social sense. Subsequently, the mise-en-scene creates a better understanding in the audience of a phenomenon that concerns us all.
The audience has the opportunity to rehearse dealing even with violent situations and, as it always happens, comes up with improvised solutions, intelligent and supportive, which are useful for us who are always eager to learn and also useful for women who need to rebuild a social life.
– Workshops with women’s shelter’s staff
Working with women who have experienced violence is not an easy task. Any minor mistake can cause damage and send the victim back into the arms of the executioner.We did a brief TO training during the Summer School of the BE FREE cooperative, aimed at their staff, which give them the opportunity to learn to confront the most difficult situations of their daily work.
Together they shared and analyzed the challenges they often have to face on their own. They looked for new strategies, for key words but also for attitudes, gestures and words which they should avoid entirely. In the performance they played in the evening, they were able to show how they work, to share their problems, their doubts and their questions to the general public, including men.
– Workshops on human trafficking
When we do work on human trafficking we try to understand how we can fight against this phenomenon in our daily reality. How does culture make it possible that men go around to buy sexual pleasure from female prostitutes? How is this culture transferred? When does this happen?We don’t necessarily work directly on the issue of prostitution but on everything which makes it happen: the process by which purchasing power is sanctified, the gender stereotypes which are transmitted to men and women and which create unequal relationships.
For example during a workshop on trafficking it came out that women are often taught not to approach men. It is them who have to do the approaching, they are the “predators”. In one scene we could see two persons who had the hots for each other, they had met briefly the night before but hadn’t had the courage to approach each other the next day. Her because she thought that a woman couldn’t take the initiative, him because of fear of failure and rejection. It was understood then, that he would have gone to a prostitute, which, all things considered, would have been less embarrassing.
– Performances on gender violence (video, scenes of Marseille)
Our most recurring intervention and the one able to reach the most people in the most efficient way in a short time is our Forum Theatre about gender violence.For a closer look please go to the link of the “Amore Mio” (My Darling) performance videowww.parteciparte.com/video, and to the link of a (translated) performance in Marseille, which we played almost daily with the Family Planning NGO, mostly in schools: www.parteciparte.com/violenza-sulle-donne.html#more-417
Amore Mio (My Darling)
This performance explains the three steps which lead a romantic couple to violence: possession, isolation and the violence itself. Its goal is to raise awareness on a delicate issue, dealing with it in an amusing way.We want to show that we all have a role to play in the prevention of gender violence and that we can all help someone who is getting involved in a relationship in which love turns into possession and control. The play allows us to rehearse intervening, either before a relationship becomes violent or after. It also allows us to collectively determine when a romance becomes pathological and when it is possible or necessary to intervene.
Link to the trailers: www.parteciparte.com/video
Brucio d’amore (Burning Love)
This Forum Theatre play starts when someone suffers from a violent relationship. The audience begins to look for solutions on what to do when a person tries to step out of the cycle of violence.
It shows all the problems that victims can run into when they look for help. For example what can happen at the police station, in dealing with the institutions, including the anti-violence centers who will offer no place for the night to those who have no home or money…, it shows the practical and psychological difficulties one has to deal with upon meeting people who would like to help you but don’t know how.
Where Amore Mio is suitable for any audiences Brucio d’amoreis rather aimed at an audience already aware and not too young; it suits professionals working on this issue perfectly. The show opened at the Casal de Merode, (Rome) in October 2012. The audience discovered the necessity to involve the woman who just escaped from a violent relationship, by not doing anything for her which she hadn’t previously decided on herself.
Closed questions to start with, which just need a movement of the head to reply, a yes or a no, if the women is traumatized.
During the Forum we work a lot on the issue of reception: what are the fundamental gestures you need to make when you receive a person in your safe house who comes out of a terrible relationship? Reassure her and thank her for her confidence, for example, promise her to do anything possible even if it’s not going to be easy, try to build a solidarity net around her so you don’t take the whole responsibility of the assistance on your own, which bears the risk of not being able to help her anymore very soon.
2) Relationships between the sexes across borders
Working on equal relationships between the sexes doesn’t mean ignoring the differences. These differences, however, are often used as a pretext for the exclusion of women: “those family bonds which, by determining childhood, maintain at the same time: the way we take advantage of unpaid female labor, the absence of women in the public sphere, the way subordination to male power is presented as ‘natural’, the ideology that wants them to be mothers forever.”Lea Melandri.
We worked on how to identify situations in daily life in which either gender is confronted with a kind of imposed obligation, be it a profession or a lifestyle, which the other sex wouldn’t accept and which will subsequently not be decided in an autonomous way, on the basis of personal desire. Important work on stereotypes originates from this.
– Work in schools
Workshops on stereotypes are not aimed at teaching something to young people as if they were ignorant. Often they have not yet internalized as many stereotypes as adults have and they have a greater ability to decipher stereotypes which create insupportable situations. With them we develop scenes of daily life in which non-problematic relationships between the sexes are taking place. From family to school, from relationships among them to relationships with adults, we never run out of situations. It’s up to them to determine if there’s a problem.The facilitator will perhaps ask questions to zoom in on every situation and to facilitate the creation o fan aesthetic and clear-cut scene to really understand the mechanisms and the prejudices which sustain an oppression related to gender. In a second stage we work on how to overcome these situations, how to deconstruct prejudices, how to arrive at relationships that respect differences and equality. In this sense we use many games and exercises that make these stereotypes visible to be analyzed and that allow us to try out new relationships, not determined by prejudices. The workshops at schools have been really numerous.
Olivier has led many of them since 1998 going from the outskirts of France to the slums of Nairobi. From 2010 Claudia also offered many workshops, from Roman schools to Afghan anti-violence centers.
Generally we will see scenes of couples with various problems: jealousy, betrayal and non-acceptance of the breakup of a relationship. In those scenes, we always try to understand which elements make up a healthy couple and which ones show oppression of women. Our goal is to find a common denominator in every situation to understand where gender oppression is hidden. We have also seen scenes on homophobia and racism emerge in this process, without any influence from us facilitators.
We want to understand the dynamics that lie at the basis of these phenomena. Mostly it is enough to ask the boys and girls to act the way the scene itself is telling us, because the characters are racist or homophobic. Often a cue line or a gesture makes us understand the gender oppression which is embedded in these phenomena. Foreigners, like homosexuals, endanger our manliness, question it, threaten it, carry a different kind of sensitivity, destroying our most basic gender stereotypes without warning.
Using TO, the boys and girls are able to make really profound analyses and can also develop new viewpoints, try out new behavior, new ways of relating to the other sex: respectful, constructive and creative ways.
– Training of professionals
We trained either professionals working in schools or professionals working on gender issues in particular contexts. We tried to transfer a whole series of games and exercises to generate questions about the relationships between the sexes in a pleasant and gradual fashion. They are exercises that allow us to observe the gender stereotypes, the quotes, the behavior, often unconscious but strengthening the male position.We also show how to use theatre to enact the most extreme and exaggerated situations and subsequently, through Forum Theatre or Invisible Theatre, to provoke change and development. We trained entertainers, teachers, social workers, government employees, UN staff, managers of the gender policy in science NGO’s or institutes in Sweden and South Africa.
– Performances on gender stereotypes
Various performances which allow us to deal with gender stereorypes and their consequences.”Figli di donne (Women’s Children)” for example gives the audience the opportunity to try to avoid women being sent “back to the sink” of domestic labor because of maternity. In 2011, about one million women in Italy were fired from the very moment their pregnancy began. Many of them will not find a job, at least not in the first three years of their children’s lives. How can we prevent this from happening, what is going on in society, but also in the families and in relationships which make this kind of apartheid possible?
During the Forum the audiences often has tried to convince an employer that a pregnant women is not necessarily a cost but rather often becomes more productive after maternity leave. We also work a lot on involving the partners in looking after the children, which makes women not the only ones responsible for doing everything in the household and especially that she is not the only one responsible for child care when it gets sick. In many cases the audiences speaks out that it is necessary to develop solidarity among colleagues in the workplace before female colleagues get pregnant.
A part of the play happens at home when the child is born and she is desperately looking for a new job, while taking care of all the domestic labor. How can we involve a husband in care work who believes he deserves to rest after getting home from work. He is convinced that she’s fine staying home all day, she doesn’t have to get out every friggin’ morning to earn the daily bread…
On many occasions the audiences decides that the only way of dealing with a husband who mistakes his own spouse for his mother or for the cleaning lady is to execute a radical transformation. Put the kid in his arms right away, let him do the domestic work without even asking or begging… for many equality is confirmed through acts and not asked for by words. A solution that audiences particularly like is making a list of all the tasks and calculate the time each of them dedicates to them. For many women it is better not to make children with immature men on the issue of the division of tasks.”Da paura (Scary)” is another play about stereotypes: women who have been scared by newspaper reports on rapes and violence in the parks and streets of the city decide to organize neighborhood patrol rounds and to denounce immigrant suspects, as if the danger for women were outside… A young girl runs into them upon leaving her house. The women scare her, they demand that she let herself be accompanied by a man if she wants to leave at night or at least travel by car and not by bus. The girl is not convinced but fear has crept in and indeed when a young stud tries to approach her, she really gets scared and goes out of her head.
During the Forum the audience rehearses the deconstruction of fears, just like they appear during our everyday life, in a bar, among friends, commenting the news or if you’re just preparing to go out in the dark on your own. The most effective solution is always to talk about personal experiences. They create the only counterweight that is able to balance the confrontation with distorted and biased news reported in the papers. Telling how a friend had problems regarding violence not with an immigrant but with her uncle when he tried to take advantage of her when she was young. Telling how an ex-partner stalked her and didn’t accept that she had left him. All this allows us to have a much clearer image of either something familiar which the papers impose on you (racism and fear) or something familiar which they conceal (machismo and its corresponding violence). The audience, in general, deals with both issues, analyzing them as one single process.
We have done an awful lot of work on the issue of stereotypes, performing many times in various countries. You will find other examples of interventions done in other countries in the section related to sexual and reproductive health.
– Inivisible Theatre on machismo
Marseille is quite a violent city regarding to what women have to deal with. The male approach towards women is continuous and not very subtle. A “you’re as gorgeous as the sun” is immediately followed by “and I can see that you love to have sex” and the ‘dead slap’ is a daily practice which is still very much alive. Seeing a man beating a woman on the street without anyone intervening can happen any time. Rape is a widespread practice, especially gang-rape at school, recorded with smartphones, thus blackmailing the victim to show it to the whole neighborhood if she resists. Anyone who worked in education or social work in Marseille knows how difficult it is to deal with these issues.In Marseille we addressed all these problems with Invisible Theatre, in various ways and with various outcomes. From the simulation of an excessively violent rape in the middle of places where bullying and drug-dealing was going on, to evoke a reaction from the kids. Or a violent scene on the street, first against a dog, whom everyone defended, later against a woman, whom no-one defended, with scattered actors who helped evoke the question “can it be that in France animals have more importance than certain human beings?” and obviously the next question “what can we do in these cases, all of us?”With the Family Planning Center, which is located on the Boulevard d’Athenes, between the train station and Cannebiere, places of heavy approaching attempts, we developed Invisble Theatre scenes, financed by the Municipality.
In bars mainly visited by men we enacted the scene of a man who tried to pick up a girl without any tact and without wanting to know if the woman was willing or not. The woman resisted, involving everyone. After this another stud (actor) would come on and would try the same, in a more subtle way but again he provokes annoyance in the girl and a corresponding reaction. The goal was to show that there is an element in picking up which is really heavy for a woman, no matter if it is subtle or not: her interest and her will in both cases were never explored before the final question…
The audience could understand, in the cases in which the pick-up was successful that the first thing to do is to ask a woman, that you could sit beside her and talk to her for example. And that later on, even in the following stages, you don’t need to pursue the approval of a general consent. We even tried to raise consciousness in the places in which the problem is very much present. The goal of the women in our theatre group was also to ask the men to take a stand for or against this sort of behavior, showing them the consequences time and again.