Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This study addresses our experience of creating a feminist theatre show at a peripheral college in the north of Israel. Joining with female students who provided personal stories of their own experiences, we used artistic (dramatic theatrical) symbolic language to create a strong social message regarding women’s oppression and coping thus unsettling common perspectives on gender power relation. It all began in a course titled “The Personal is Political: Writing as a tool for activism” which was taught in the Gender Studies Program in Tel Hai College. Tamar was the teacher and Sharon, an actor and a theatre director, was one of the students. During the course the participants, mostly women, read feminist autobiographical texts and were asked to write how these texts are relevant to their own lives. Sharon who was fascinated by the other students’ personal accounts which addressed diverse gender issues combined some of them into a theatre show. Since many of the texts addressed very personal and at times painful details, it was decided to hide the writers’ identity by presenting the names of the writers and actors with no indications who is who. Moreover none of the actors played their own monologues but rather a role written by someone else, thus emphasizing that these stories belong to all of us, that is, the personal is political. In our paper we describe our working process contemplating the power of theatrical symbol language to represent social problems.