in october 1999 i conducted this interview with sexual violence activist aaron propes, a man who combines theatre, emotion, and education to hopefully end sexual violation. i encourage everyone to visit his website (url listed below) and consider theatre as an option in your healing.
My progression into education theatre came out of high school. I was in a
summer play that was directed by Melissa Beddinger, who was the drama
coordinator for a program called the PG-13 Players; Mark Huffman, who was
also cast in the play, was the program coordinator.
The PG-13 Players was a group that consisted of local high school
students traveling around the Nashville area doing scenes about sex
drugs, decision making, and whatever happens to be requested, for an
audience of their peers (the PG stands for Peer Guidance). The scenes
were short, sometimes funny, sometimes silly, but always with a point,
and always with an open end. It wasn’t a lecture, we knew these kids had
brains, we also knew that the way to get them to change an attitude is to
get them to think about the consequences, and to acknowledge that we
aren’t dealing with absolutes; life is not a math equation. I’m happy to
say that the PG-13 Players are still around, in Nashville, and can be
reached at the Planned Parenthood of Middle Tennessee.
PG-13 didn’t then cover sexual assault (they do now). I didn’t put those
to together until my sophomore year of college, when I transferred to
Syracuse University. Some people was putting together a group similar to
PG-13 (although their inspiration was elsewhere), and Robin
Small-McCarthy (my hero for life) decided to use an audition list from an
on-campus theatre to call people to see if they were interested in
starting this new group, in conjunction to the university’s rape center.
Aside: Syracuse University is one of the few colleges to have their own
on-campus and university funded rape crisis and counseling center. This
happened a few years before I came to the school, after a well-publicized
incident that involved several of the school’s football players. I
believe the players got off , but the courage of the women who came
forward provided the impetus for the R.A.P.E. (Rape Advocacy Prevention
and Education) Center, which has helped so many people, and been a stable
place to base educational efforts. I cannot express my thanks enough.
Sue Rochman, who was the education coordinator of the center, gathered
the nucleus of people who built up the framework of “every 5 minutes”.
The name came from an Ntozake Shange poem, “with no immediate cause”,
which in of itself is immensely powerful, but has a refrain of
every three minutes [a woman is beaten]
Important Admission: coming into “every 5 minutes” (a.k.a. e5m), despite
my work with PG-13, I was as clueless as any boy on campus when it came
to issues of sexual assault. I accepted because I loved the format - I
had no idea what I was going to get into. If you hadn’t figured out by
now, I have a big mouth (as if pissing off Southern Baptists for fun and
profit wasn’t enough). I decided to open mine when they asked for a
volunteer to be the perpetrator in the assault scene; my rationale was
not “I will be a positive force for good!” but rather “I can say no and
be bored out of my skull watching others do things, or I can go ahead and
do it.” Perhaps the road to heaven is paved with selfishness?
I learned a lot - I learned that I did NOT like putting myself in the
position where I had to act out assaulting someone. Again, blessed with
wonderful people (one of which said forget the script, just get in the
position (we ended the scene with my pinning character’s date down on the
couch “in the position”), and stay there - now we’ve found that Twister
is more than just a party game. When I was studying up on perps and going
that discovery phase that men need to go through when leaning about
assault, about our own coercive behaviors, I was able to be assured of a
safe place, and that we all start out ignorant, and we’ve all been guilty
on one level or another.
The second year with e5m pretty much iced it for me, and what my goals
became (and still are). I became the only guy in e5m (the others,
seniors, graduated). I couldn’t rely on answering the tough questions
with the support of other guys, I became aware of just how important it
was to have guys talking about sexism and our own attitudes; because it
sucks when guys won’t listen to women, and just because I have a penis
they’ll listen to me? In that short time, I found out from survivors
telling me just how it affected them, and I could see it when people had
to mentally leave because something was “too close” or some guy made an
asshole of himself to prove his right to assault. The three years I was
as Syracuse, e5m changed me like nothing else. e5m, dealing only with
sexual assault and the surrounding issues reached people who’s attitudes
were on the brink, and helped others identify what happened.
Any type of theatrical work is laden with emotions - it’s part of your
job as an actor. I’m no expert, but what I’ve been told the rule is, when
it comes to acting, is that you don’t act, you become. You surrender your
identity to become the person you are portraying. This means, especially
when dealing with heavy issues, and there’s not too much heavier, that
it’s easy to burn out. You have to become close with your fellow actors,
or it just doesn’t work. It also means that you become very invested in
your work - if something doesn’t go well, you feel it; likewise, all it
takes is one positive comment to keep plugging away, and provide that
burst of adrenaline to go at it one more time.
One of the things we’ve always tried to do it to make the scenes
realistic; that’s the idea, trying to make things as close as possible,
without getting too graphic. We’ve always tried to stop before the
violence get’s too graphic, too intense - usually with the perp pinning
his target. And we’ve received a number of comments about how realistic
it is; people watching will come up to us and tell us how close it was to
their assault, or you’ll see guys eyes widening as they recognize the
behavior that goes into these assaults. It’s encouraging and
heartbreaking all together.
Rape prevention work is one of the few field where you want to eliminate
your job; not by funding, but by demand. And I get frustrated that we, as
a movement, and even groups like e5m seem to be relegated to patch-up
jobs - that there’s not enough of us to go around, but there seems to be
so many more people spreading myths and hatreds. It’s easy to want to see
everything fixed right here, right now - but it won’t happen that way.
But we have made progress - even as we fight the people who would rather
ignore us, or push us out of the way, we, as a movement, are still more
visible than before.
I hope it continues.
please visit aaron'ssexual assault and theatre page.
My family had always stressed volunteerism. Much of that came from my younger brother, who had a severe case of Spina Bifida - we relied on the Shriners, hospitals, and many other people and agencies - it sort of rubbed off onto me.
every five minutes [a woman is raped]
every ten minutes [a little girl is molested]
every day
