--ntozake shange

"If you won't do something about it, I will."

--an e5m character

     Late in the Fall semester of 1992, we wore the above quotes
in white letters that seemed to leap right off our black t-shirts
and into the eyes of those who noticed and, more important, into
the hearts and minds of those who dared to ask and who cared to
listen.. The poem, an excerpt from ntozake shange's "with no
immediate cause" (114, 114), became our signature performance
piece-- audaciously interpreted guerrilla theatre style.
     Alone, in pairs, and in small groups, each group member rose
from his or her seat, uttered a line from the poem, and, without
much further warning or ado, we build to a crescendo and shocked
our audience into an awareness that the persons seated in the
midst were not simply members of the audience. We broke the fourth
wall-- that expected distance between the performers and the
audience. And through our facilitator's brief introduction, we
alerted our audience that they themselves were about to become
participants in our performance, that we were not there to
dispense knowledge to passive recipients, and that we were not
there to dispense campus rape statistics and facts to an audience
who had let a few of us know before the show that they had "heard
it all before." No doubt they had heard it all before. But had
they seen it all before? Had their hearts been touched by
witnessing the trauma of a young college woman, a peer, whose date
just would not take no for an answer?
     As the choral reading of our signature poem came to an end,
voices could be heard whispering "Who are they?" and "What is
this?" Indeed. We were every 5 minutes: R.A.P.E. Forum Theatre, an
interactive theatre troupe sponsored by the Syracuse University
Rape; Advocacy, Prevention, and Education (R.A.P.E.) Center, and
"this" was only the beginning. We were there to open up a campus
wide dialogue around the subject of rape and sexual assault and,
at the very least, to open up a few eyes. We believed that
knowledge generated through the witnessing of rape enactments
designed and scripted to make the familiar strange-- and wrong--
would surely lead to change. And whenever we became discouraged
along the way by the hostility, the apathy, or the victim-blaming
attitudes of certain members of our audiences we would remind
ourselves, as one e5m-er had put it, "If we can reach just one
person out there, we've done our job."
     In this essay, I will resent an outline of the history and
the performance strategies of every 5 minutes: R.A.P.E. Forum
Theatre, to date the newest addition to the University R.A.P.E.
Center's education programming. In this essay, I will focus on the
use of theatre as a viable and effective medium for rape education
and activism, and a powerful agent for change.
     e5m is primarily an interactive theatre troupe that engages
students in discussions about rape and sexual assault issues, such
that the students, as audience members, become active,
responsible, and integral participants in the program. In an e5m
performance, audience members and performers interact and engage
themselves in critical analyses of dramatic representations of
situations engendered by the interpersonal behaviors and social
myths that serve to perpetuate or condone rape and sexual assault
on campus. The goal is not to simply share information as
depersonalized or pseudo-objective fact, but rather to guide
audience members and performers in a dialogical process of values
clarification.