“I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say, but I’m going to tell you anyways. I’m going to tell you a story. And it’s my story, and it’s yours. But it doesn’t belong to either one of us.”
“Undue Influence,” a College production, begins with a performer from the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble saying these words.
Art is a powerful mode of communication. When someone has a story to tell, artistic creativity helps convey passion and sincerity. Art can breach emotional barriers and break down the wall of taboo topics.
That’s why some students, faculty and staff at the College have opted for art to give a voice to sexual assault survivors, opening space for conversation in silence.
Using art to discuss sexual assault isn’t unique to Dartmouth. Many colleges across the U.S. have sexual assault awareness campaigns that include performances.
Nearly every Ivy League institution, including Dartmouth, has shown “Story of a Rape Survivor” by A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit performance group that employs art as a therapeutic tool.
Of course, each college will have a different take on these performances, approaches shaped by campus climate and the interpretation of students involved. Repeatedly producing a play does not detract from the power of the piece. If anything, it emphasizes the flexibility and adaptability of art as a mechanism of communication.
Still, Dartmouth’s programming actively seeks out student voices. In addition to an annual production of “The Vagina Monologues,” students staged “Voices: An Original Production,” which sought to depart from what some students perceived as the heteronormative focus of “The Vagina Monologues.” “Undue Influence,” presented in 2011 and 2012, demonstrated and analyzed sexual assault at the College.
V-February
In 2000, Dartmouth joined the global V-Day movement, a campaign that uses art and other educational events to empower women and end violence against them. Programming for the College’s annual V-Week celebration, which takes place in late February in various college across the nation.
This year, the Center for Gender and Student Engagement had “V” stand for “Voices” rather than “Victory,” “Violence” or “Vagina,” to “highlight the different backgrounds and experiences of the Dartmouth community.” V-Week was also extended to a month-long campaign, renamed V-February.
CGSE student coordinator Sandi Caalim ’13, who directed “The Vagina Monologues” and co-directed “Voices” this year, said that V-Week in the past was characterized primarily by “The Vagina Monologues.”
This year’s committee aimed to represent “all self-identifying women’s voices and bring up intersecting issues related to sexual assault, such as classism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia and so on,” Caalim said.
While “The Vagina Monologues” was performed as usual, additional performances like “Voices” focused on the experiences of underrepresented minorities of gender identity and sexual orientation outside the conventional binaries. “Voices” presented 33 different stories of sexual assault submitted by Dartmouth students, Caalim said.
Jessica King Fredel ’17, one of the three “Voices” directors, said publicly sharing stories of sexual assault fosters a sense of empowerment and community.
Caalim said that it is time to move on from “The Vagina Monologues” and capture the reality of the issue through more comprehensive, original works, like “Voices.”
“The Vagina Monologues” raised awareness about sexual assault but was not comprehensive, Caalim said. For example, some raised the argument that the play only portrays a static idea of womanhood, while others argue that it does not address sexual assault in the queer community, she said.
“Undue Influence”
In spring 2010, theater professor Peter Hackett ’75 asked his directing students to choose and underscore a theme in a production of “The Tempest.” But when Hackett challenged his students to clarify what power meant to them, one of the six female students in his class burst into tears. She said she did not know what power represented in her life but that she could tell him what being powerless meant.
The conversation that ensued shook Hackett to his core.
“I had no idea any of this was going on,” Hackett said. “I felt angry, like I’d been duped in a way.”
The student said she had been sexually assaulted on campus and that she felt powerless as a woman at Dartmouth. Hackett was shocked to discover that the other female students in the class could identify with her sentiments.
Ford Evans, a former Dartmouth Dance Ensemble director, and Hackett had been searching for a topic for a collaborative piece. They decided to elaborate on the issue of sexual assault on campus through theater. “Undue Influence” was staged in the Hopkins Center in May 2011 and again the following year.
“Undue Influence” drew upon Dartmouth’s culture and threaded together varied sexual assault experiences on campus, examining sexual assault as a phenomenon on campus rather than a collection of survivors’ testimonials.
“Some of the cast were victims themselves,” Hackett said, “And the cast collectively decided they didn’t want it to be testimonials from victims but an overview of the entire phenomenon.”
The choreography itself explored how people interact in settings like fraternity basements and at parties. Through dance, the performers capture sexual tension in these settings and the influence of alcohol.
Hackett and Ford included more voices, especially those of adults, in the performance’s second version in 2012. Hackett performed, piecing together quotations of Dartmouth’s administrators from press releases and into a monologue.
Genevieve Mifflin ’14 joined the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble as a freshman, and “Undue Influence” marked her very first piece at the College. Mifflin said she realized that the Dartmouth culture she experienced through the performance resembled reality.
“It was difficult to be analyzing these things on an artistic level in one space, and being a freshman and experiencing them with my peers in another space,” Mifflin said.
Hackett said that the cast initially struggled with integrating the issue of sexual assault into dance and was unsure how to portray the pain associated with sexual assault. The breakthrough came when each cast member created a character with a fictitious name, ethnicity and identity. The distance between self and character allowed for greater freedom of expression, he said.
In the condensed video version of “Undue Influence” uploaded to YouTube, psychological and sociological aspects of sexual assault are summarized through flashes of quotations and statistics.
“In all-male groups, such as athletic teams and fraternities, the traditional feminine and masculine roles are reinforced and rape myths tend to be more widely accepted,” reads one quotation that bursts onto the video.
“There is no causal connection between drinking and sexual assault,” reads another.
Mifflin said that adding a layer of the pain inherent in sexual violence in “Undue Influence” was challenging. All of the performers related to the pain in one way or another, whether through personal experience or vicariously through the narratives of those around them.
“Creating an artistic piece is not a linear process, and that’s where the collaboration comes in,” Mifflin said.
The performers collectively struggled more with the content of “Undue Influence” rather than the artistic element, she said. Fortunately, the production sparked a meaningful conversation within the cast, which ultimately translated into the reactions of the audience.
