Annie Saunders chats to Naima Khan about her See You Next Tuesday festival, a two week celebration of International Women's Day.
On Friday 5th March at New Players Theatre, London will see the launch of a massive two-week festival in celebration of V-day, one of the most creative forces working against violence to women. Almost 100 years after the first ever International Women's day in 1911, the See You Next Tuesday festival, the brainchild of Emma Jane Richards and Annie Saunders will feature films, workshops, cabaret, comedy and theatre events. Annie Saunders and I had a chat about celebrating women and how performance is just the beginning.
How did V-Day become See You Next Tuesday?
While working on V-Day, I came into contact with so many amazing creative women, I wanted to put something together so their talents could be showcased. Fundamentally it's about creating a space where female and male feminist artists could just be for two weeks, starting around international women's day, in a really experimental space, a kind of creative playground.
And the name?
Well, the festival kind of centres around The Vagina Monologues and a lot of that is about throwing up words that are used to describe the female anatomy, analysing and playing with them. A lot of insults, in a lot of languages, are euphemisms for the vagina. We wanted to throw that open for discussion. We're not about preaching or shouting at people. We want to get people having fun with these ideas and thinking about what it means that the worst word you can say in English is a euphemism for vagina. What IS that? Why? What does it mean to us? How does it inform our experience in ways we don't even understand?
What stands out about SYNT?
It's about people seeing something performed in front of them. Either an emotional space that they have never explored or its a situation that is the extremity of experience. We go to the theatre and the cinema to see people in extreme situations. Even if the movie doesn't seem that extreme. If it's a romantic comedy where people are chasing each other all over the city just to give each other flowers, that's extreme, we don't experience that in everyday life. We watch things at the cinema because we want to know what things are like but we don't necessarily want to go through them ourselves.
The Vagina Monologues is very conversational. At the beginning people are not always totally comfortable with it but by the end they feel more liberated and more comfortable to speak about these things among themselves.
What do you say to people who think feminism is done?
There's a lot out there about how this generation of women have either been convinced that feminism is over or it was successful, that it's not only unnecessary but it's unfashionable. The media have perpetuated this. I feel like we're really responding to that through both men and women.
The problem, with any politically motivated event is what you often get an audience that already agrees with you. You get a load of people who already think the same stuff that you're trying to get across. What we're really about this year is bringing people in who have never really thought about this stuff before.
Who were the first acts to sign up and which events are you most looking forward to?
We booked in The Vagina Monolgues and the SYNT Cabaret early on. Lynne Parker of Funny Women signed up early on and she's doing workshops, forum discussion events and a comedy show. Her company is all about championing women in comedy.
We're screening a short film called Leaving which won a load of awards at the London Film Festival. It explains why it's so difficult for women to leave an abusive relationship. The most commonly asked question when it comes to domestic violence is, “why doesn't she just leave?” Everybody asks that and this film expresses what a vicious cycle it is. Statistics actually show that often women are in much more danger when they leave than they were before.
The cast, director, the on-set domestic violence expert and a representative from the Women's Trust, a domestic violence counselling service, will be at the screening on 15th March for a round table discussion afterwards.
We're also screening a documentary called Until The Violence Stops on 13th March. It's about how Eve used The Vagina Monologues to raise over 70 million dollars for women's organisations around the world.
Where does the money go?
We are contributing mainly to the City of Joy which is a safe-house and empowerment centre in DRC. What's happening to women in the DRC in a nutshell is that women and girls of all ages from small children to grandmothers are being raped by groups of militants, very violently and they often end up with a lot of medical problems mainly obstetric fistula, holes in their insides. Eve [Ensler] laid the first brick of the foundation of this safe house. UNICEF came on board and it's due to open in May. 100 women at a time can live there, be safe and also have medical treatment, therapeutic treatment, therapy and arts classes, self-defence classes, various skills training.
See You Next Tuesday runs from 05.03.10 until 20.03.10 at New Player's Theatre
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