V-Day theatre
Vagina Monologues at Teviot
Edinburgh University’s Relief Theatre is joining with the V-Day campaign to stage Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues for three performances only at the Teviot Dining Hall in Bristo Square.
Performances take place this week on Wednesday 11, Friday 13 and on V-Day itself: Saturday 14 February. Direction will be by Rachel Bussom and entry will be £5, with a discount for students.
Producer Jacob Close told Æ: “The show explores female sexuality through a series of monologues based on real interviews conducted by Ensler – some are humorous, others are harrowing, but all are real stories. The performance itself is not for profit: all proceeds from the show are going to Edinburgh Women’s Aid, and we have donation boxes going to Abused Men in Scotland.”
The Vagina Monologues was first performed in 1996 and the script is based on interviews Eve Ensler conducted with 200 women about their views on sex, relationships, and violence against women. It is presented as a varying number of monologues performed by a varying number of women.
Ensler was provoked to write the show to “celebrate the vagina” and initially performed it as a solo show, but as she toured it round the world, and heard at every venue accounts of sexual violence against women, her purpose soon changed away from being purely a celebration of vaginas and femininity.
One Billion Rising
“Slowly it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women,” according to Ensler, writing on her publisher’s website. “This realisation led in 1997 to the founding of V-Day, a non-profit grass roots movement dedicated to ending violence against women around the world.”
More recently, this led to the creation of One Billion Rising: the biggest mass action to end violence against women in human history. The campaign, launched on Valentine’s Day 2012, is based on the statistic that 1 in 3 women will be beaten or raped at some point in their lifetime. With the world population at 7 billion, this adds up to more than one billion women and girls.
In recent years, Ensler has written a new monologue each year, to reflect the focus of that year’s campaigning.
Listing
The Vagina Monologues
Wednesday 11, Friday 13, Saturday 14 Feburary 2015; 7.30pm.
The Dining Room, Teviot, Bristo Square, EH8 9AJ
Tickets from: www.eventbrite.co.uk
Details from the event facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1390260151281019/
The Vagina Monologues on Amazon:
ENDS
