Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away

By Judith Rudakoff

A tweet by American actor and activist Alyssa Milano, sent on October 15, 2017, opened the floodgates to an outpouring of testimony and witnessing across the Twitterverse that reverberated throughout social media. Facebook status lines quickly began to read “Me too,” and #MeToo was trending. That tweet re-launched the ‘me too’ movement, which was started in 2006 by Tarana Burke.

Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away does not attempt to deliver a comprehensive examination of how #MeToo is performed. What it does aim at presenting is a set of perspectives on the events identified as representative of the movement through a lens or lenses that are multinational, as well as work and analysis from a variety of time periods, written in a diversity of styles. By providing this means of engaging with examples of the many interpretations of and responses to the #MeToo movement, and by identifying these responses (and those of audiences) as provocations, of examples of how not to look away, the collected chapters are intended to invite reflection, discussion and, hopefully, incite action.

It gives writers from diverse cultural and environmental contexts an opportunity to speak about this cultural moment in their own voices. There is a wide geographical range and variety of forms of performance addressed in this timely new book. The international group of contributors are based in the UK, USA, Australia, South Africa, Scotland, Canada, India, Italy and South Korea.

The topics addressed by writers include socially engaged practice; celebrity feminism, archive and repertoire; rape/war; misogynistic speech; stage management and intimacy facilitation; key institutions’ responses; spatial practices as well as temporal ones; academic call-outs; caste/class; political contexts; adaptation of classic texts; activist events; bouffon (a clown technique) and audience response

Forms of performance practice include applied theatre, performance protest, verbatim, solo performance, institutional practice, staging of plays, street responses, academic, adaptation of classic text, play reading events and the musical.

Although there is much to read in the media and alternative media on the #MeToo movement, this is the first attempt to analyse the movement from and in such diverse contexts.

Bringing together twelve writers to speak about works they have either performed, witnessed or studied gives the reader a nuanced way of looking at the movement and its impact. It is also an incredible archive of this moment in time that points to its importance. 

Suitable for use in several graduate and undergraduate courses, including performance studies, feminist studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, environmental or liberal studies and social history.

Essential reading for theatre workers, academics, students, and anyone with an interest in feminism, contemporary theatre or human rights. For artists considering projects that include the themes of #MeToo, and for producers and directors of such projects looking for good practices around how to create environments of safety in their organizations, as well as those who wish to organize communities of artists.

For anyone interested in learning more about how to support the movement, or an interest in the specific social narratives told in each individual chapter. For women, feminists and anyone with an interest in the issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789383836

Book preview

Performing #MeToo

Performing #MeToo

How Not to Look Away

Edited by

Judith Rudakoff

First published in the UK in 2021 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2021 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Cover image: Judith Rudakoff

Production manager: Aimée Bates and Naomi Curston

Author photo: Christoper Gentile

Editorial assistant: Elise A. LaCroix

Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks

Print ISBN 978-1-78938-381-2

ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-382-9

ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-383-6

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Judith Rudakoff

1.Vital Acts of Transfer: #MeToo and the Performance of Embodied Knowledge

Shana MacDonald

2.Bite the Bullet: The Practice of Protest as a Coping Mechanism

Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga

3.Resisting Theatre: The Political in the Performative

Effie Samara

4.Supporting Brave Spaces for Theatre-Makers Post-#MeToo: A Chicago-Based Study on Rehearsing and Performing Intimacy in Theatre

Susan Fenty Studham

5.We Get It: Calling Out Sexism and Harassment in Australia’s Live Performance Industry

Sarah Thomasson

6.Toward the Origin of Performing #MeToo: Franca Rame’s The Rape as an Example of Personal and Political Theatre/Therapy

Laura Peja and Fausto Colombo

7.The Royal Court in the Wake of #MeToo

Catriona Fallow and Sarah Jane Mullan

8.Dissident Solidarities: Power, Pedagogy, Care

Swati Arora

9.Conversations with Noura: Iraqi American Women and a Response to A Doll’s House

Mary P. Caulfield

10.#MeToo: Theatre Women Share Their Stories

Yvette Heyliger

11.Les Zoubliettes: Raging Through Laughter—a Feminist Disturbance

Sonia Norris

12.I’m the person to speak about myself: Self-Declaration, Reversal of Power, and Solidarity in The Red Book

Yuh J. Hwang

Appendix: A Primer on the International #MeToo Movement

Elise A. LaCroix

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and thank the contributors to this collection of chapters for their commitment to the principles of the #MeToo movement. I would also like to thank Serena Dessen and Myles Warren for their comments on the Introduction, and Céleste A. LaCroix for her assistance with tracking down some elusive reference materials. As well, I would like to acknowledge York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design for generously providing funding to support the editorial assistance of Elise A. LaCroix, a promising emerging scholar with a keen eye for detail.

Introduction

Judith Rudakoff

If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote Me too. as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.¹

This tweet by American actor and activist Alyssa Milano, sent on October 15, 2017, opened the floodgates to an outpouring of testimony and witnessing across the Twitterverse that reverberated throughout social media.² Facebook status lines quickly began to read Me too, and #MeToo was trending. Abby Ohlheiser wrote in the Washington Post of October 19, 2017, #MeToo has produced a kind of unity by volume, but when you speak to individual women about it, you find a wide range of responses—empowerment, exhaustion, solidarity, trauma.³

The recent #MeToo campaign has inspired wave upon wave of awareness, witnessing, and commitment to action, sometimes including the powerful tool of creative response. As a result, testimony and expressions of support, artistic interpretation, representation, and performance of #MeToo experiences have become an important way of disseminating information and, in some cases, provided a way of attempting to work through the trauma of both present and past occurrences of sexual harassment. The subtitle of this book, How Not to Look Away, further identifies the role of provocative performance to challenge both artists and audiences to engage with the principles of the movement.

On October 15, 2017, I, like thousands of other women, wrote Me Too on my Facebook status. While this is not the place that I choose to detail the times and places I have experienced sexual or gender harassment, it is the place I claim membership in the movement: as target,⁴ as witness, and as arts facilitator of #MeToo-themed creative work.

Performing #MeToo

Over the course of my decades of work as a developmental dramaturg, I have facilitated autoethnographic performances created and presented by both artists (professionals and students) and non-artists seeking a creative experience. My methods for initiating and evolving new work⁵ can and have provided useful tools to germinate, evolve, and disseminate work that addresses, among other important subjects, sexual or gender harassment and violence against women. From early on in my career, my dramaturgy practise has contained inherent links to themes now referred to as #MeToo-inflected work, through exercises such as the construction and performative presentation of Image Containers, to more complex performance work (The Ashley Plays),⁶ and online projects aimed specifically at inspiring personally driven theatricalized narratives (Roots/Routes Journeys to Home).⁷ These projects have provided creators with the means to express personal memories through filters and frames that offer some degree of protection against the triggering of trauma responses.

When dramaturging new work, I focus on the principle that telling one’s own story is more than just a writing tool: in circumstances where personal safety has been threatened, declaring one’s history publicly through a fictionalized voice can be an important component of the survival process that does not unduly compromise the individual at risk. As well, the core research question I employ to initiate artistic response (What is home?) will often result in creative work that emanates from investigation of home in relation to the physical body, especially if the body has experienced trauma. I propose that this recurring relationship offers a #MeToo-inflected perspective on the artistic work generated.

Given my recent observations about the relationship between home and the body in dramaturg-driven projects I have facilitated, as well as the increasing frequency of engagement with narratives based on sexual abuse in the creative work being generated, and given my concurrent work as a scholar and researcher, initiating and editing a collection of essays inspired by performative work emanating from or reflecting the principles of the #MeToo movement seemed like an organic next step to take.

I offer here several examples from the work I have dramaturged as context for my observations.

Image Containers

In this project, I ask participants to build a container and fill it with physical objects that represent aspects of a pivotal moment in their life. The containers can be unorthodox, and the shape they take should be determined by the principle that form comes organically out of content. The participant is asked to present their Image Container and unpack its contents in a performative manner. The goal of this exercise is to give participants a structure in which to explore and identify elements of a personal narrative that can later be expanded upon and developed into a monodrama. Here is an example of an Image Container that contains a #MeToo-related narrative, though it predates the movement.⁸

Nichola Sawyer is originally from the small English town of Swindon in the United Kingdom. Her Image Container was a pair of men’s boot-cut blue jeans, initially folded into a square, and tightly sealed in cellophane wrap. When the jeans were unwrapped, the air was filled with the pungent scent of a men’s perfume called Addiction. Messages and descriptions were written on small, frayed fragments of white paper, and were placed all over the jeans, affixed with straight pins: tucked into the pockets, attached along the seams, at the crotch, on the knees. These images acted as stimulus for Sawyer to describe a relationship that she had endured with an abusive partner. In one of the pockets she placed a cassette tape of recorded music from 1998 (by Radiohead and Beck) that she associated with the relationship. There were also visual images on some of the paper fragments, including hand-drawn pictures of a house and a car, which Sawyer identified as her abuser’s tools of seduction. The container also included a package of cigarettes and a lighter. Some of the shreds of paper bore the following words: addiction, dependency, tolerance, alcohol, cannabis, amphetamine, ecstasy, cocaine/crack. Sawyer pinpointed the time of this Image Container as March to July 1998, locating it in Swindon, Wiltshire, England. During the initial performative presentation of this Image Container, physical vocabulary, text, and performance style began to emerge.

Sawyer was twenty years old in 2002 when she created this performance piece. In reflecting on the events of five years prior that inspired her Image Container, and by performing it, she was able to re-frame my experience and externalize and detach the person I was involved with from myself.⁹ Sawyer further explained,

Such work as this can be very effective in re-framing in particular; how we once felt about something that happened to us then, may have changed over time without our realizing it or can actively be changed through the work in real time.¹⁰

Currently, Sawyer lives in Uppsala, Sweden, with her Swedish husband, where she works as a treatment assistant in a home for families experiencing some form of crisis or question over their ability to raise their children in a healthy way, but where they might have a chance to turn things around with help.¹¹

More than simply inspiring a creative exercise based on personal experience, Sawyer contextualized the importance of this project and characterized how, years later, the experience it provided continues to influence her life and her work trajectory:

It is my goal to one day become a psychotherapist and eventually a drama therapist and can see myself appropriately using exercises such as this in my own practice. Using autoethnographic work like this would prove very useful in aiding someone in not just reframing negative experiences in their life (or even reinforcing and consolidating positive experiences that might challenge a negative self view), but also in decoupling from those who leave a mark so to say. We all have them. Those people who somehow get under the skin, or perhaps plant a seed which grows weed-like within us.¹²

In terms of value as part of the act of performing #MeToo and as a means of how not to look away, Sawyer explained:

With regards to the value of declaration to the #MeToo movement; to declare is to speak our truth, to state the existence of a thing. We declare in many ways; through text or speech (as in the movement) but also in other more nuanced ways; work such as the image container described, through painting and drawing, sculpting, music, movement and dance.

In declaring a thing, we are again I suppose externalizing it from ourselves. We release it from within our bodies and all the damage such a suppression can do to our health both physically and mentally, we make it separate from ourselves and put it rightly where it belongs, amongst our communities, for the burden to hopefully be shared and dealt with as opposed to tolerated and coped with.¹³

Roots/Routes Journeys to Home

Roots/Routes Journeys to Home (2006–2009) was a project I initiated under the umbrella of Common Plants, a multi-year, international, cross-disciplinary, intermedial project for which I was the principal investigator-creative leader, funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.¹⁴ Roots/Routes Journeys to Home funded four participants to travel to their city, town, or village of origin in order to reflect on where they came from and where they are now, and to express how the journey had impacted on them, incorporating creative writing, photographs, short video segments, and audio clips in their presentations.¹⁵ This collage format was performative in that it offered an electronic installation to viewers, mixing simultaneously playing short audio and video clips, text, and slide shows of photographs. Each of the four journeys presented a distinct world, introduced a character, offered viewers insight into different perspectives on the events being presented within a context, presented a narrative, and enacted moments in the character’s journey. Participants in and audience for this as well as other projects under the Common Plants umbrella viewed and then responded to the journeys through an online forum titled Common Ground.¹⁶ As well, the texts that were part of these electronic installations could also be performed as monodramas in a live theatrical context.

In the case of one contributor, a middle-aged Cuban woman who had immigrated to the United States after marrying an American citizen, the exploration of the central research question (What is home?) and the ancillary questions (Is home a place of safety or a place of danger? Where is home?) that generated the creative work focused on freedom as both a political and a personal status. Issues related to #MeToo were an important part of this presentation. This contributor (now living in a suburb outside of Syracuse, New York) created her piece under the pseudonym of Mercedes Bravo so she could express herself freely and protect family and friends still living in Cuba under the repressive government from potential repercussions.¹⁷

Soon after falling in love with and marrying her American suitor and immigrating to America, Bravo brought her young daughter to live with them. In Cuba, Bravo (who is fluent in Spanish, English, and French) had worked for many years as the head of public relations at an upscale Cuban tourist hotel in the south-central region of the country, which catered primarily to visitors from European countries. Through her constant contact with foreigners, Bravo reached across the tourist apartheid curtain, past the information blockade, and was well aware of the limitations on her future and that of her daughter if she remained in Cuba. By emigrating, Bravo had hoped to escape the constant government surveillance, threat of punishment for perceived transgressions against the state, non-transparent governing practises, and the challenges of living with the restrictions and shortages resulting from the imposition of the American embargo, among other issues: she wanted to build a better and more stable life for herself and her child.

Her presentation focused on her escape from both political oppression and the American husband she soon realized was dangerously abusive: a man who repeatedly told her that he had saved her, threatened her with violence (he kept a loaded rifle under their bed), and isolated her from her new community. She endured this abuse for eight years. For Bravo, finding a place to root herself physically was coupled with the need to recover her autonomy.

Mercedes Bravo created her Roots/Routes Journey to Home in 2008, shortly after she found the courage to leave her husband.¹⁸ She returned to Cuba for this sponsored visit with full knowledge that many of her trauma triggers might be activated. She also knew, inherently, that making the journey at this juncture in her life was a vital part of reclaiming agency and reflecting not only on where she had come from, but also where she was ready to go.

Here is a short excerpt of #MeToo-inflected text from Mercedes Bravo’s Roots/Routes Journey to Home. On the Common Plants website, the cacophonous sounds of the bustling Cuban cityscape as demonstrated in short video clips, as well as the photographic slide shows interspersed throughout her text, create a textured, intricate example of outer experience and inner thoughts of a woman at a crossroads.

February 11, 2008, Cienfuegos, Cuba

There are stories about being in No Man’s Land. There are stories about being in a place of extreme uncertainty, a place where you don’t really know or understand what is happening, or what is going to happen next.

There are stories about waiting in line for the x-ray machine, not only for my luggage to be screened but me too.

I get very pale. My face goes a greenish white colour. There is a line of uniformed men and women standing over by the wall of the Immigration area. Every one of them is staring at me. I am the only Cuban-born person on this tourist charter flight. I am sent to a special area. I am the only one.

Bienvenidos en Cuba. Welcome to Cuba.

[…]

For a split second, time stops and I remember the last time I felt totally calm and safe: on the other side, in the townhouse I have owned since 10/10/07. A place to call my own where I can be free. October 10th is a date that resonates for me, the anniversary of the freeing of the slaves in Cuba by Manuel de Cespedes and now the anniversary when I will be able to celebrate living in freedom.

I won’t be screamed at anymore. No one will criticize or berate me. No one will point an accusing finger at me. I won’t have to hide, shaking, in my daughter’s bedroom, the bureau pushed up against the door to stop him from coming in.

I won’t have to drive my car to the Library on the cold winter nights, park in the lot and sit, waiting for his rage to pass.

I won’t have to live in the Grey House anymore. It was never my home anyhow.

Home is now a place of safety for me and for me daughter. Even my little dog is calming down and his fear of all men is going away. But slowly. This all takes time. We may not be scared anymore, but healing is a slow process. I know I am getting stronger every day.

Three houses, three destinies. The beautiful tiled floors of my Cuban home, the Grey House in USA that has always looked haunted, and the last one, my own house, filled with light and laughter. That is my favourite: my own home.¹⁹

In 2019, Mercedes Bravo is now remarried to a supportive American man and working in social services as a caseworker manager. Her daughter, now grown to adulthood, is a nurse who specializes in critical care. Both have chosen professions where they assist and support people in crisis. She commented:

The #MeToo movement means a lot to me. It is a way for women to liberate themselves from the burden of having been abused. It is empowering to see women having the strength to accuse their abusers and point the finger at them. Disclosing abuse is not an easy thing to do; it’s painful. No one wants to be a victim, no one wants to have the sorts of experiences that belittle you and make you feel vulnerable and weak. Creating this project helped me destroy the final bridge between me as a victim and my abuser. Writing the text helped me regain control of myself and my thoughts. I realized that I was not under censorship anymore by any person or government.²⁰

The Ashley Plays

Another project I frequently dramaturg is the Ashley Plays, a cycle of short, thematically linked plays that are usually site-specific, live performances.²¹ These plays are typically monodramas, performed without production enhancements such as sets, lighting, or props, and must focus on a character named Ashley. Each Ashley character is unique. (I chose the gender neutral name Ashley as it is easy to pronounce in many languages and has equivalents in different cultures: Ashevok in the Inuit communities of the Canadian High Arctic, Ashok in India, Acheli in Cuba). In the live iterations of the Ashley Plays, the cycle is performed to roving groups of audience members who are led on a prescribed route from site to site to view the plays in a sequence. The sites are typically intimate spaces, with little distance between the performer and the spectators, and no fourth wall. There have also been virtual Ashley cycles created in India, South Africa, the Canadian High Arctic, Iran, Israel, and elsewhere.²² For some Ashley cycles, the creators collaboratively generate a catalogue of specific characteristics to draw upon as inspiration. Not all the Ashley profile characteristics must be incorporated into the monodrama, but none may be contradicted.²³ The theme of each cycle is usually related to exploration of the self in relation to safety, danger, and home.

One of the important features of the Ashley Plays is the freedom it offers participants to use the character of Ashley as a mouthpiece to tell their own stories. Often, the stories told in these plays are deeply personal and difficult for the creators to tell. Speaking through the Ashley character has proven to offer participants the courage to speak freely. Here is an example of one such Ashley play, from a cycle presented in the autumn of 2016, in Toronto, Canada. The writer-performer was emerging playwright Amanda Custodio-Vicente.²⁴ Custodio-Vicente wrote, in the voice of Ashley:

I was eight when my heart stopped beating. He’d be in the kitchen. I’d walk in to grab my juice. He had his wine. I’d pass by. And I was grabbed. Holding onto me tightly, he’d grope it all—my breasts, my ass, and my fucking pussy. This happened every Sunday. Sunday’s holy day. Some Catholic, eh? He eventually stopped, though. He continued to live with us.²⁵

[…]

I’m like a public washroom; un-fucking-kempt. No one refills me with toilet paper when needed. No one cleans me regularly. People shit on me. I’m dirty inside. No one wants to touch me. I feel like the words, "ela é uma cadela suja porra [she is a dirty fucking bitch] are yelling out at every person who passes by; or who sees me. But in reality, I bring it upon myself. I’m aware of this, but I still do it. But could you blame me? I mean, who would love someone dirty? He would tell me this at night time when he’d sneak into my room—Você é muito mais bonita agora que você é magro" [You’re much prettier now that you’re thin]. I got filthier with age.²⁶

Custodio-Vicente explained her context for creating the play:

I didn’t speak up about the sexual assault I experienced as a child until I was twenty-one years old. Which is wild because anyone who knows me knows that I never shut up once I start talking. But The Ashley Plays allowed the voice of that little girl who was traumatized as a child, to speak up.

I am of Portuguese descent, so I brought some of the Portuguese language into my piece. This worked since my abuser was in fact, a family member. At the time of writing my piece, I was going through my own trauma of remembering and realizing what had happened to me as a child.

This project allowed me to speak up and express how this trauma affected my childhood and my relationship with those around me. This project allowed me to speak up and grow into the person I am today, because without it, I would still be bottling it up.

I wrote this piece because I did not want anyone else to be quiet for any longer. I wanted to not only get it off my chest, but I wanted people to understand what I had to go through, and how these types of things affect people.²⁷

Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away

When I realized that pretexts and provocations for voicing #MeToo stories have long been part of my dramaturgy practise (and that of other theatre-makers, past and present) and I decided to initiate and edit a collected volume of chapters about performance emanating from the #MeToo movement, I wasn’t sure what the response would be. Would scholars want to engage critically with performances that had been inspired by or based on such meaningful personal and often extreme experiences? I circulated a call for proposals widely to a variety of national and international communities, and then I waited to see what would be submitted.

I was not prepared for the outpouring of emotionally charged, often personally driven, abstracts that reached across generational, political, social, and national boundaries. I spent days combing through many worthy proposals to try to hone the acceptance list down to a manageable number of chapters. This was challenging given the quality of the submissions.

Ultimately, I strove to achieve a balance of voices from distinct communities; content that moved from examination of performances of personal narratives to engagement with work created by others; and documentation of new ways of preventing environments where so-called #MeToo activities might occur. I expanded the definition of performing beyond the stage to include Twitter threads as a platform for presenting narratives. I also committed to representing voices of both emerging and established scholars and artists.

The chapters selected for inclusion also represent different types of engagement with the topic of performing #MeToo (testimony, witnessing, interpretation, field reports) and come from people who speak from personal experience, as well as allies, activists, and scholars. In some cases, a contributor belongs to more than one of these designations. Chapters examine contemporary work, work from the pre-#MeToo era, and adaptations of works from other eras. A range of cultural voices is represented.²⁸

Canadian scholar Shana MacDonald reads the #MeToo movement as a live, ongoing performance within the digital media sphere. She proposes that performance theory offers a unique means of grasping at the movement’s significance and ongoing potential as well as its limitations. MacDonald asks the following questions:

[W]‌hat are the iterative gestures of the movement? What forms of affect and assembly does the movement and its practices allow for? What is promoted, lost, refused in the translation of embodied knowledge and lived experiences brought forward by the #MeToo hashtag? What forms of feminism are now visible on the world stage and how are they dialoguing with each other through the movement?²⁹

Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga reflects on ways to protest rape, performance as protest, and how performing protest can be a complex coping mechanism. Working from and through her own devastating experiences of rape, South African Msimanga discusses three of her own performances: SA’S Dirty Laundry (2016), On the Line (2016), and uNokuthula (2018). Situated within a South African context, Msimanga works from the understanding of specificity as key to the disruption of oppression. She seeks to continue the work of pursuing new knowledge through praxis (interconnected theory and practice) and reflects on how her protest performances have provided coping mechanisms as she considers new conceptualizations in the ways we discuss rape.

Effie Samara examines the #MeToo movement in performance in Scotland, in the production of Locker Room Talk (2017), a verbatim testimonial piece created by Traverse Theatre’s artist-in-residence Gary McNairn and directed by Traverse Theatre’s Artistic Director Orla O’Laughlin, at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. Samara aims to situate testimonial theatre, commissioned by and performed within established theatrical spaces, as an epistemic phenomenon, a very particular kind of knowing and receiving of knowledge. She focuses on achieving a clearer conception of how this can successfully challenge current biases against women’s cognitive and political access to truth, not only within the confines of private spaces but in established loci of performance.

Susan Fenty Studham introduces Not In Our House, an American, Chicago-based advocacy organization created in 2015 in response to sexual harassment in the local theatre industry. Galvanized by a series of incidents spanning two decades, this interconnected theatre community developed a code of conduct known as the Chicago Theatre Standards. Following two years of development and trials, the established set of principles engage the overriding tenets of communication, safety, respect, and accountability. This chapter explores the distinction between safe and brave spaces, analyzing the role of the intimacy designer in professional theatre and procedures designed to shift industry vocabulary and protocols, investigating tools developed to navigate a culture of consent in areas such as intimacy, nudity, and violence in scene work.

Sarah Thomasson discusses Australia’s 2015 production of We Get It written by Marcel Dorney and Rachel Perks and created by Melbourne-based contemporary performance ensemble Elbow Room, arguing that it provides a prescient institutional critique of sexism and racism within the Australian theatre industry. Presented as part-audition panel, part-reality television-style competition, in We Get It five female actors battle it out through a series of degrading tasks to achieve their theatre dream of being cast in a professional production by a mainstage theatre company. We Get It examines the local industry, highlighting the gendered and raced experience of actors working within it. Presenting analysis of this performance within the context of the momentum for change sparked by the #MeToo movement, Thomasson offers an opportunity to re-examine the material conditions of theatrical production and reception and how they are shaped by the broader ideological positions of neoliberal postfeminism.

Laura Peja and Fausto Colombo examine Lo stupro (The Rape, 1975), a theatrical monologue by well-known, politically committed Italian actress Franca Rame, which was subsequently identified as being based on her personal experience in March of 1973, when she was abducted by a group of five men, then raped and tortured. Peja and Colombo