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THE "CORPORATION
IN OUR HEADS" FINAL REPORT September 22, 2000 Attendance: 56 Seating capacity: 60 ( 93% ) Almost a full house tonight. The stories came very, very fast tonight, as did the voices, and it was a really intimate evening. The story: a young woman (early 20's) is getting ready to go to a party. (A hot tub party!) She is in the shower, alone, and is assaulted by voices telling her that she has to remove all her "extra" body hair in order to be feminine, attractive, acceptable. The brands she identified were: Nike (being a fit woman is for some reason equated with being smooth S. Do you ever see hairy athletes on Nike ads?) Cosmopolitan magazine and Chanel. No men entered the stage area all evening, although it is true that many, if not most men shave every day. One thing for me: it occurred to me a couple of times tonight what a privilege it was for me to be "in the shower" with all these women, working on this issue. I do not mean this in any kind of sexual way -- it is a political / gender / generational thing. The theatre work takes me into the most amazing places....... I discovered something last night that worked well, so I tried it again tonight. When asking the storyteller to let the Voices know what they are telling her. I also asked her to give them a Brand name. This was easy to do both nights. We know what Brands the voices belong to. We know. One of the really interesting things that came out of tonight was the sense of powerlessness that people feel in the middle of the assault from all the Brand Voices. It is apparent, though, through the theatre experiment, that if we take the time to focus on one Voice give up the need or the desire to solve the entire problem all at once, and just try to change our relationship with one Voice, this can crack the assault. The more we do with a Voice, the more we learn how to cope. What's important is not whether or not a woman shaves her body bits its whether or not that decision is truly hers, or whether it is imposed upon her by corporate/cultural programming. Of course the symbolism of this can be applied to many things in our lives. Once again the audience was very,
very appreciative. I think that for some, even the IDEA that
corporations have taken up residence inside our heads is an important
concept, let alone that we can do something to combat them. |