CELEBRATING WOMEN THROUGH THEATER

March is always a special month for the New Voice Company (nvc). Every country in the world celebrates Women’s Month at this time of year. While our theater productions often tackle the subject of women’s issues throughout the year, the month of March is the time of year we celebrate women through our theater work.

Since producing the hit play The Vagina Monologues in the Philippines three and a half years ago, March is also a time we mount our annual V-Day fundraising production of the play. We’ve always believed that theater can inspire, awaken, educate, enlighten and incite people to action because in the theater we do not hear the statistics surrounding crimes against women. We hear their voices and glimpse their souls.

Theater pieces such as The Vagina Monologues have naturally been at the centerpiece of many Women’s Month celebrations in the Philippines over the last three years. In 2002, Eve Ensler visited Manila to grace NVC’s V-Day fundraising event at the Folk Arts Theater featuring over 70 Filipina artists who performed the play. The beneficiaries for V-Day that year were Gabriela’s Purple Rose Campaign (to end sex trafficking of Filipina women and children), Women’s Crisis Center, Kalaka-san, and Womenlead.

During that visit, Ms. Ensler brought a camera crew who captured the performance, particularly the moments when thousands of people in the audience chanted "p_ke" with her, and our own comfort women lolas being honored. Two years later, V-Day New York has made a film entitled Until the Violence Stops.

Out of 800 cities participating in V-Day that year, only five cities are featured in the film, with Manila being one of them. The film features our V-Day Manila event, our Filipina actresses, and our comfort women lolas, in a segment that many viewers have claimed is one of the most powerful in the film. The film was launched at the recent Sundance Festival in the US, and had a television premiere on Lifetime Television in America–proof that theater can break many barriers and touch many lives when it has something important and necessary to say.

What makes The Vagina Monologues a compelling theater piece is the fact that women unite and courageously reveal their intimate and deeply painful experiences, ranging from rape to incest to battery and sexual slavery. Theater is a place where joy and humor can also be shared, about a whole range of other women’s experiences, such as empowerment, desire, orgasms, relationships, sexuality and childbirth, as they are in the play. This is the reason why so many distinguished Filipina women artists from the field of theater, film, literature, music, media, education, politics, dance and visual arts, have lent their voices to the play for over three years now.

More than just testimonies and women’s stories, The Vagina Monologues is a play about empowerment and the importance of speaking up in the healing process. The play is a form of theater that celebrates women reclaiming their bodies and their lives. It is theater that leaves us with hope that change can happen.

The New Voice Company is celebrating Women’s Month for 2004 with a special performance run of The Vagina Monologues at the new Republic of Malate Theater on March 18, 19 and 20 at 9 pm, with a Saturday matinee on March 20 at 4 pm. The play, now on its fourth hit year in Manila, stars singing sensation Jaya, nvc leading actress Jenny Jamora, and acclaimed original tvm actress Tami Monsod.

A week later on March 27, nvc stages V-Day 2004: A Benefit Performance of The Vagina Monologues–Celebrating Vagina Warriors!, also at the Republic of Malate Theater. The special V-Day performance will honor the work of some of the Philippine’s finest "Vagina Warriors"–women visionaries, activists, fighters, and dreamers–who work, often times largely undervalued and unseen, to make the world a safer and better place for women.

For tickets to The Vagina Monologues and V-Day 2004, call the New Voice Company Actors Studio at 896-6695 or 899-0630 or email [email protected]. Tickets are also available at all Ticketworld outlets. The shows are made possible through generous grants from The Philippine Star, Revlon, Absolute, Joey 92.3, Lanelle Abueva-Fernando Studio Pottery, 103.5 K-Lite, Sound Design, Pottery Exchange Home Center-Eastwood, and NU107.