'The Guerilla Girls on Tour' Celebrate Femininity
The goal of the Guerilla Girls is to address issues of discrimination and racism without revealing their true identities to their audiences. They want to keep what they call the 'herstory' of accomplished historical women alive rather than let it be pushed aside and forgotten.
'The Guerilla Girls on Tour' is a touring theatre company that began in New York City. These self-motivated women write and perform their own comedic plays to honor historical female figures while expressing their radical feminist views on society.
The internationally-renowned Guerilla Girls have traveled all over the world, including parts of Europe and Asia, to express their theatrically-driven minds to portray the rights of women.
Famous female writer Gloria Steinman once commented about the Guerilla Girls.
'Their message celebrates each woman's uniqueness. They can laugh and fight, and be both happy and strong,' she wrote.
The Guerilla Girls theatre company holds workshops and works with surrounding towns to create productions of the town history. They have performed over 200 times and have held approximately 100 workshops.
At the performance last Tuesday night, they took on the roles of three strong, intelligent and inf luential women who have left their inspiring legacies behind: Aphra Behn, Julia Child and Eva La Gallienne.
Behn holds the title of the very first professional female author who became an English spy and even wrote several plays. Child was a legendary French cook who accomplished a great deal in the world of cooking, including the publication Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
As one of the most involved women in American theatre, La Gallienne was an actress, director, producer, teacher, memoirist and even a translator over several decades. In 1926, she opened the Civic Repertory Theatre, called so because of her yearning to make a change to theatre during that time.
During the performance, three hilarious, energetic women randomly broke out into something they called 'spontaneous street theatre,' which allowed the women to let frustrations out about various political issues that irked them.
The women expressed their immense concern for gender discrimination.
'Sexism is everywhere. Every month there is discrimination. We are a touring theatre that fights discrimination,' they said.
One portion of the Guerilla Girls performance was directed toward a more serious issue that left out humor completely. The Guerilla Girls created posters to show a concern for the discrimination of women, specifically rape victims.
The posters depicted images of women age seven and older who were going about their daily lives and doing normal woman things, while a headline stated boldy on the poster, 'This is not an invitation to rape me.'
Along with emotional ap- proaches, the Guerilla Girls also created humorous political posters mocking supposed anti-feminist politicians such as Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. On these posters were phrases such as 'Welcome to My New York,' directed toward Rudy Giuliani, and 'If You Can't Pronounce it, don't Bomb it,' directed toward President Bush.
The 2008 presidential election is an especially active time for such dedicated feminist political activists as the Guerilla Girls. They set aside a portion of their performance, called 'It's about time,' to ref lect on the opportunity of America having a wom- an president. They also honored women in office, including female Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Although the Guerilla Girls are feminists, they made it clear during their performance that they don't have a problem with the male gender.
'We love men; some of us are married to men. Some of our best friends are even men and they are married to men,' they said.
March 11, 2008
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