During the academic year 1993-1994, every 5 minutes: R.A.P.E.
Forum Theatre performed for roughly 1,300 students, the majority
of these students being women. At times we wondered if we were
preaching to the converted, but time and time again we were to
realize that a significant number of both male and female students
still had much to learn about the issue of rape and sexual assault
on campus. Judging from the tyupes of questions reasied in our
interactgive theatre perfomrances, young college men are not the
only members of society who have bought into the social myths and
dating rituals that serve to perpetuate acquaintance rape. There
seems to be a standing belief amoung men and women that if women
just elarned to assert ourselves with men or if we maintain our
"good girl" images then we would not become targets for rape.
Clearly there is still work to be done, work that should not
be the burden of women alone. And yet, e5m has found that our
membership over the past three years has been ,like our audiences,
predominantly female. As Aaron Propes, one of our "token males,"
has put it
Over the first year I learned a great deal...
Acquaintance rape was more than "bad"... The
real big hit came in the second year where
(for most of the year) I was the only man in
the group. It woke me up to what I felt was
a responsibilty to keep male audience members
from zoning out, to keep them from thinking e5m
was just a raving hoard a women out to castrate
men. It was never the case. I [have] always
felt comfortable with the people in e5m, and
during performances... I can honestly say that my
time in e5m was the most influential time that
I have spent in college.
Rape is not a woman's issue. Rape is everyone's issue. Rape
is not only sexual assault. Rape is social assault. And peer
education programs like e5m do much to get the message across to
those who attend our programs and to those who hear about our
programs and the issues at stake-- without resorting to male
bashing, or for that matter pseudo0feminist-why-can't-they-learn
to-assert-themselves victim-blaming. The sad truth remains,
nevertheless, that students and faculty alike would rather not
hear that rape can and does occur on university campuses, our
academic safe-havens.
At Cornell University and at Syracuse University, putting
reserach into perfomrmance through interactive theatre has had the
effect of making the relevant facts and figures come to life, in a
sense. It is a process of which reflects back to student audiences
the harsh reality of the social cultures that perpetuate sexual
violence and the silences that aid and abet. It is aprocess which
encourages every participant to speak out and to change their
lives. It is, by and large, a process through which information
and knowledge is shared and reconstructed by both the audience and
the actors. Says e5m member Charlotte Kirschner,
The amount of knowledge... that every actor
needs to have before walking into a
performance is amazing. And without that
knowledge the whole thing is worthless...
I have written my share of academic papers
from the info that we need to know... All
I have had to do is find the exact percent
or the exact workds for the quote, but the
basic info is all there.
Even though I am no longer the coordinator of e5m, via the
internet I am still very much a part of the group. My e5m sisters
and brothers have become imporntant resources for me in my present
position as an assistant professor Theatre and Curriculum and
Instruction at the University of Illinois, where I have been
offered yet another opportunity to put into place an interactive
theatre program. An ad-hoc committee of health education
administrators and counseling staff members at the McKinley Health
Center has enlisted my help in organizing an interactive teatre
course designed to teach such health related issues as dating and
interpersonal violence, self-esteem, stress management, and body
image and eating disorders.
Meanhwile, back in Syracuse, with the guidance of a new
education coordinator, e5m has taken on new directions, and thus
new strategies. They perform more guerrilla theatre scenarios in
the student union, and instead of discussing the scenes in large
groups, the facilitator and the performers tend to discuss e5m
scenes in small groups after each performance. While much of the
interactive drnamic between audience mebers and the characters is
lost, these strategies enable the group to reach larger audiences
that we were previousle capable of reaching.
In any case, e5m lives on, and the interactive theatre
process has thus been proven to be both viable and flexible enough
to adapt to changes in leadership, changes in locale, and changes
in subject matter. I have outlines the principles and practices of
every 5 minutes: R.A.P.E. Forum Theatre as an alternative took to
be used by educators, theatre artists, and activists engagued in
the on-going struggle to eradicate the myths, attitudes, and
behaviors that continue to perpetuate sexual violence on our
college campuses and in society.
Works Cited
Kirschner, Charlotte. Electronic mail correspondence. 21
November 1994.
Levin, Rebecca. "Zopie's helps the show go on." The Daily
Orange 12 April 1994: 5
Propes, Aaron. Electronic mail correspondence. 10 November
1994.
Shange, ntozake. "With no immediate cause." nappy edges.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972. 114-117.
Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theatre. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963.
Warshaw, Robin. I Never Called It Rape. New York: Harper
and Row, 1988.