Activism with Heart: The Voices Against Violence Project

Two students under the direction of VAV trainer Geeta Cowlagi use Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" methods to explore issues of sexual assault, relationship violence and stalking on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

It’s a muggy fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. As I step into the warm light of the Payne Theatre Lobby, I see book bags strewn across chairs, graduate students chatting about their final projects, health educators quietly taking notes, and undergraduate students warming up their bodies and voices in the corner. It’s a big space, with floor-to-ceiling windows on one side and bricks walls along the opposite. I grab a seat.

The room quiets down as a woman with a welcoming and focused presence draws our attention to the center of the room. This is Geeta Cowlagi, the education trainer of the Voices Against Violence project (VAV). She explains to an attentive audience that we will be watching her class demonstrate scenarios they have been working on that explore issues of sexual assault, relationship violence and stalking on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. “You will be looking for red flags,” she says. “These are things that make you go ‘hmmm.’ If you see a red flag, you can pause the scene, and we will discuss what’s going on and how the outcome could be different.” Then she smiles and says mysteriously, “Please remember, this is heart work as much as it it's hard work.” I love this statement, but I’m not quite sure what it means. I will soon come to find out.

Looking for the Red Flags

I have come to observe the work of the Voices Against Violence project because they use Theatre of the Oppressed (T.O.) techniques to explore issues of domestic violence and interpersonal relationships. As a student in an Applied Drama class, I have studied the theories and techniques of Augusto Boal and other applied-drama practitioners, but I have never seen the techniques used to open up dialogue. I have never seen a true “Forum” piece, and I am curious to see how one group puts T.O. techniques into practice in its outreach work.

Geeta gives the floor to her students, a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate men and women. The audience is ready, armed with the knowledge that we can pause the scene when we get uncomfortable and discuss what we see. The first scene begins with Joy and Marie, roommates in a college dorm room, lazily flipping through channels on the TV and chatting casually about the day — until Joy mentions her ex-boyfriend Marcus. He’s been calling her frequently, even though they broke up, and he even called her mom to get her new number. “I think that’s a little weird,” Marie says, but Joy waves it off. There’s a knock at the door — it’s Alex, Joy’s new girlfriend. Alex sweetly asks Joy to bring her a glass of water, but when Joy leaves, Alex picks up her cell phone to see who she’s been calling. The audience lets out a few gasps and indignant sighs, but no one pauses the scene yet.

“Why is Marcus calling you?” Alex asks, one hand poised on her hip, her voice full of accusation. Joy tries to explain, but Alex is too upset. As things begin to get louder, Marie shouts over the two of them, “I think he’s stalking you!” They’re all interrupted by a knock on the door. It’s Marcus, a stocky young man with a goatee carrying a mimed bouquet of flowers. Marie answers it and shuts the door in his face. He knocks again.

“Freeze,” a woman in the audience calls. Some members of the audience burst into laughter, releasing the tension that has built up during the scene. The volunteer doesn’t think shutting the door on Marcus will get rid of him, and suggests that confronting Marcus about his strange behavior might work better. “Would you like to try that?” asks the student facilitator. The volunteer agrees, and when Marcus knocks at the door, she says, “Joy’s not your girlfriend anymore, so leave her alone.” But Marcus insists they’re just “on a break.” Physically, he towers over the volunteer, and I feel anxious for her, in conflict with a character that doesn’t appear to listen to reason. The facilitator stops the action. She asks the volunteer how it felt to confront Marcus.

“It got a little scary when he was continuing to deny reality,” the volunteer says with a frustrated laugh. The audience laughs with her, and someone else suggests replacing the female roommate with a male roommate to confront Marcus. We are all caught up in the intense activating scenes developed by the students in VAV.

Origins of Voices Against Violence

Voices Against Violence is a campus organization at UT Austin that addresses issues related to relationship violence and sexual assault. It offers support and counseling services as well as education and advocacy. As the director for outreach and training, Geeta Cowlagi’s work has two components — getting the message out about resources for survivors or potential victims, and working toward risk reduction and violence prevention.

VAV has been funded by a large grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to address issues of violence on UT’s campus. The statistics about abuse on a national level from SafePlace and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence are startling. One in four college women has been a victim of rape or attempted rape. One in 12 male college students has committed acts that meet the legal definition of rape but that they do not consider rape. Twenty-to-thirty percent of college dating relationships have involved incidents of physical abuse.

The members of VAV feel that making interventions with college students is an important way to start addressing larger issues of relationship violence. They specifically target the 18-24-year-olds on campus, because many college students are experiencing relationships for the first time. Marianne Wakehouse, a nursing student and VAV member said, “I think this age group in particular, college, late teens, early 20s, this is the age when people start forming their ideas of what relationships are supposed to look like. There’s a lot of exploration going on, and I think if they’re learning while they’re forming their ideas that certain things aren’t acceptable, then they won’t be acceptable. You model what you see, so if they’re seeing something different, maybe they’ll do something different.”

Incorporating Theatre of the Oppressed

When Geeta Cowlagi first became involved in VAV, the education programs were more traditional, focusing on delivering information in a “101 format” with facts, statistics and red flags. She felt that these presentations were effective and educational, but the group was only being invited by people who were already concerned about the issues. “We never got invited to difficult audiences or resistant audiences, like sororities, fraternities and athletes,” Cowlagi said.

She thinks that their old presentations may have reinforced the misconception that domestic violence always involves “the 911 moment,” a moment when the violence is so escalated that calling the police is the only escape. Instead of presenting just the 911 moment, VAV now focuses on the lower end of the violence continuum. “The college population is still figuring out relationships,” Cowlagi says, “and so it’s a perfect population to work on with the lower end of the continuum, because that’s where we can make a change. By the time they’re 45 it’s too late.”

UT students display their new t-shirts.

Although Cowlagi felt the more traditional presentations were effective in their own way, when she discovered the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques of Brazilian director Augusto Boal, their presentation style completely changed. She describes T.O. as “a very active intervention using exercises and techniques to bring a focused awareness of ourselves, people around us and our interactions. It’s a broad way of looking at it because I think I tend to go way beyond interpersonal violence to looking at interpersonal relationships and the power differentials that are constantly in flux within that.”

Cowlagi strongly believes that the only person who can prevent an act of violence is the person who controls whether or not he or she commits the act, so she is invested in presenting scenarios that humanize perpetrators, that identify issues of control on a level that people can relate to. She said that once the group started using T.O., audience members have been much more likely to identify themselves after the performance as having tendencies toward control. This is in part because of their new focus on presenting the lower end of the violence continuum. “We use a lot of verbal, psychological [abuse scenarios], and if we use violence it is much lower in terms of grabbing a wrist rather than a punch or a slap. So people actually see those things a lot more in their lives anyway and somehow do not identify them as violent until you pause or freeze things,” she said.

Who It’s For

Although VAV performs for many audiences, it’s the resistant audiences, such as athletes or fraternity members, who many students in the class believe to be most in need of intervention. These performances, though probably the most challenging, can also be rewarding. Cowlagi smiles wryly as she recalls the experience of working with the entire UT football team—89 players at one presentation. “That was a hard performance for many reasons. One, was there was a pressure to exhibit hyper-masculinity in that group. There were a lot of comments that were very inappropriate. It was hard to allow those to happen. I did, and it was very, very hard. Surprisingly enough, there were football players who stood up and said, ‘that’s not OK. If that was my sister, I’d kick his ass.’ It was great that it came from them but it took a tremendous amount of energy to let that happen.”

The language VAV uses to describe its work changes based on the audience. With trainings for health-service providers or presentations at conferences, Cowlagi uses the term “Theatre of the Oppressed,” but with campus audiences, she does not. She believes the word “theater” can intimidate people or remove them from what is happening, and people often question the use of the word “oppressed.” She prefers Boal’s idea that everyone is a spect-actor, a participant in the drama of life, and they often call their work “peer theater,” implying that the presentation will involve college students performing for and with other college students.

Stories the Body Tells

One thing that makes the work of VAV unique is their focus on bodies and creating social change through personal interactions in intimate relationships. When presenting for direct-service providers, like the UT Police Department or Counseling Services, the group uses the Image work of T.O. to introduce the idea of looking at bodies for signs of abuse. “Most people won’t say, ‘I’m a victim of domestic violence,’” Cowlagi says. “They’ll come in because they’re losing their grades or they can’t sleep. We encourage service providers to look at changes in behavior. I’ve asked people to start focusing on the body, really doing Image work on a day-to-day basis. If someone comes to you and uses closed body language and makes no eye contact, but they say they’re fine, is this person really fine?” Audience members sculpt each other into images of power, violence and feelings related to sexual assault to begin to recognize the way body language communicates trauma.

Nuts and Bolts: How the Class Works

VAV is offered as a yearlong class that students enroll in through the Educational Psychology Department. The students have various reasons for joining the project, from having personal experience with interpersonal violence to feeling inspired by VAV presentations that they saw as audience members. Corey Ann Seldon, a public-relations sophomore, first saw one of their presentations when she served as a University of Texas orientation advisor.

She watched VAV perform a situation in which a boyfriend and girlfriend began to have sex when they were both drunk, but when she passed out, he continued to have sex with her. Seldon described the lively debate that ensued, saying, “People were ready to jump in and try to change things, and people were making comments about ‘It is rape, or it’s not rape. I’ve seen girls do that and I haven’t see girls do that.’ Everyone was very opinionated,” she laughs. “I liked the idea that so many ideas were generated just out of that one scene. It was such a short scene and we had so much discussion. We went over on time because there were 80 of us, all making comments. That’s why I originally thought I had to do this.”

"If you can look them in the eye and show that you care, they’ll leave knowing that it’s not just a show.” —Geeta Cowlagi

During the first semester, the students immerse themselves in reading content material about relationship violence, sexual abuse and stalking, as well as learning T.O. techniques and practicing improvisation. They read about the culture of power, white privilege and male privilege and verbal and emotional abuse, and they study the startling statistics about relationship violence on college campuses.

The issues they read about sometimes hit close to home and affect them on a personal level. Ashley Chytil, a psychology senior, describes feeling surprised by some of the course material. “Stalking was something we covered, and one of the aspects of stalking is just driving by and seeing if they’re home, calling people to see where they are,” she says. “I’ve done that in my life … we did it last week! My girlfriend wanted to see if this cute guy was at a party so we drove by. And I’m not saying that she’s a stalker or I’m a stalker but these little instances happen, just a little bit here and a little bit there. Within themselves they are deemed normal or fine, but it’s the end result that comes out of nowhere, and it’s death, it’s abuse, it’s setting a house on fire. We need to make this community of 18-24 year olds aware that these are symptoms and signs, and maybe within themselves they’re fine, but if they add up, this is what it could lead to.”

Contemplating “Activism with Heart”

Back in the Payne Theatre Lobby, the first scene continues with the audience subbing in, trying different tactics to diffuse the situation, taking a close look at power, gender roles and sexuality. The final image shows Marcus on his way out the door, Alex resting a hand protectively on Joy’s shoulder, and Joy hunched over, looking sad and submissive.

I watch two more scenarios that afternoon. In the second one, a controlling girlfriend tries to force her boyfriend to ditch work to go out to dinner with her parents, highlighting issues of emotional manipulation and class differences between the two. In the third scenario, a freshman fraternity pledge is bullied by his older brother into pressuring his girlfriend into sex. All three are subtle, realistic, and have red flags scattered throughout the scenario for the attentive audience to notice. The student facilitators emphasize that the power dynamics they’re dealing with, and the issues of control and jealousy, could be present in a same-sex relationship just as easily as in an opposite sex relationship.

I begin to understand what Cowlagi means by “heart work” when I interview two VAV members, Ashley Chytil and Marianne Wakehouse, after the performance. We sit on couches in the lobby as the afternoon light fades into evening. Both women talk about how their awareness of their own relationships has been heightened and how their perspectives have shifted, sometimes in uncomfortable ways.

“There was one reading called ‘Red Flags,’ and it was merely just a listing of all the red flags for an abusive partner,” Chytil says. “When I was reading it, I realized ‘Oh my god, a guy I dated is totally — there had been these red flags.’ And it had never even occurred to me, even after being in this program for three weeks already.” She talks about being amazed that she was so blind to these issues in her own life.

“It’s funny — when I first met Geeta and talked to her about this, she said, ‘This is a life-changing course,’” Marianne Wakehouse says. “I heard her, and I believed her, but I thought, ‘Wow.’ That was just such a big statement.” She laughs, but then leans in and says, “ But it’s so true. It’s totally true. It just changes your perspective and heightens your awareness. And it kind of takes some blinders off. It’s even painful at times, I would say.” She looks at Ashley, who agrees with a nod.

“I mean some of it is not comfortable. I’ve left class and cried, literally wept from the stuff that we’ve seen and read, but I think it’s an awareness that’s well worth having. Because I have a son, and he’s three-and-a-half, and I want him to grow up differently. I want him to be aware and have healthy interactions with woman or men or whatever he decides to do.” It’s this personal investment, a willingness to examine the relationships in their own lives and open themselves up to difficult emotions that makes this work “activism with heart.”

“When talking about something with interpersonal violence issues, it will always tug at your heart,” Cowlagi says. “If you don’t engage with the heart, it’s an empty shell.” This deep emotional work that the students do in class carries over into their interaction with the audience as well. “Always when you’re engaged with the heart, you connect to the audience on an emotional level, so the impact is longer lasting. If you can look them in the eye and show that you care, they’ll leave knowing that it’s not just a show.” And this is how I leave the scenes I saw. Not just as a student witnessing a demonstration of T.O. techniques, but as a more thoughtful audience member considering my own relationships and thinking about my ability to intervene when I see situations of manipulation and control. I leave the lobby deep in thought, silently thanking the students in VAV for all of their heart work.

Claire Canavan is a theater artist, writer and documentary filmmaker. She is pursuing an MFA in drama and theater for youth. Visit the Web for more information about Voices Against Violence.

Original CAN/API publication: January 2005