CREATEELIMINATING THE GRAY: LEVERAGING THEATER TO END SEXUAL VIOLENCE ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES
An all-female theater collective creates an original, interview-inspired play that sparks change-activating dialogue about consent, rape culture and sexual violence on Los Angeles College Campuses
Are any other organizations collaborating on this proposal?
At our current stage, we are collaborating as individuals and cultivating relationships with organizations. Once we have a script, we plan to enlist organizations to help collaborate.
Please describe your project proposal.
Inspired by interviews with the Los Angeles college community, The LadyParts Collective is writing an original play about consent, rape culture, and sexual violence on Los Angeles college campuses. The play will be offered to local colleges as a tool for sparking a productive conversation about sexual violence, brainstorming actionable solutions, and enacting specific changes. We plan to work with colleges to personalize the play to their specific campus needs.
Which of the CREATE metrics will your proposal impact?
Arts establishments
Employment in the creative industries
Jobs per capita
Measures of cultural and global economic influence (“soft power”)
Minority- and women-owned firms
Percentage of graduates from local higher education institutions that remain in LA County 5 years after graduating
Recruiting and retention rates for local higher education institutions
In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
County of Los Angeles
City of Los Angeles
Describe in greater detail how your proposal will make LA the best place to CREATE?
In this bustling entertainment city saturated with talent but plagued by gender inequity and lack of diversity in the arts, The LadyParts Collective will make Los Angeles the best place to CREATE. As an organization, The LadyParts Collective provides opportunities to women who want to explore the range of their creative talents and leadership abilities in a supportive environment, and who want to apply their skills towards creating a safer, happier, more equitable existence for all women. Members of The LadyParts Collective derive from all over the world and country; several are Los Angeles natives, but all of us currently call Los Angeles our home. Our creative talents and backgrounds run the gamut: writers, producers, actors, dancers, designers, stage managers, singers/musicians, visual artists, educators, mothers, social activists, casting directors, creative executives - the list goes on. Some of us have long resumes of professional experience, while others are just starting to pursue their artistic endeavors professionally. Our group is inclusive to all female-identifying artists, and our doors are always open to new members. The only prerequisite to be a 'Part' is a passion for serving the Los Angeles community. This grant will enable us to offer the play to the public and to colleges for free, and also to provide paid opportunities for women to direct, design, build, facilitate dialogues, write, choreograph, dance, stage manage and perform – and all for positive social change.
In all stages of our project, we enlist the community’s participation in creating our play: we provide a safe space for anyone impacted by the problem of sexual violence to share their stories, invite them to help us transform these stories into a fictional theater performance by using fun, collaborative writing exercises, and offer the final script to colleges for free as a collaborative tool to make their campuses safer, more equal places for students to learn.
For many of us involved in this project, the topic of sexual violence aligns with personal experiences, and writing this play serves as a cathartic and proactive way of healing and helping others. We all feel the urgency in fixing this problem and want to use our combined skills to make a positive impact.
Please explain how you will define and measure success for your project.
After producing a free prototype of the play for the public at large, we plan to offer the script and production for free to colleges in Los Angeles, work with multiple entities within each college to personalize the script to their specific campus, help guide the production element in order to involve as many students and departments as possible, and facilitate post-show dialogues from which specific actionable ideas can emerge. Afterwards, we would love to help the colleges implement individual and institutional change. The more colleges and voices that are involved in this conversation, the more successful our project will be. We will calculate the number of people involved in making this project come to life: the number of people interviewed, contributors to the script, participating colleges, performances, audience members and post-show dialogue participants serve as a measure of awareness created. We also want to count the number of potential solutions that emerge from the post-show dialogue, and to then track how many of those ideas were realized. Although, if our work prevents even one sexual assault, that will solidify our project as a success.
How can the LA2050 community and other stakeholders help your proposal succeed?
Money
Volunteers
Advisors/board members
Publicity/awareness
Infrastructure (building/space/vehicles etc.)
Community outreach