Assignment/Activity Title DaDa Performance

YearFreshman
Skill Creative
Awareness

Portfolio Category Social

Before doing this project, I knew very little about feminism and rape culture. One thing we had to do for the
project was look up derogatory words used against women and some of the words were nasty and definitely
ones I wouldnt want to be called anytime soon. In order to create our performance, we had to decide how we
were going to convey our message. Would we sing? Would we dance? Will there be words? What will have the
most impact on the audience? With a lot of thinking, planning, and practice, we finally got it down. In my
group, which was Abby, Isabella, Gilda, and Amy, Gilda was our choreographer, being the most experienced
dancer in the group, and it was her idea to have me and Abby going up to Isabella, who was pretending to be a
man saying the words we looked up, in a loop. It looked spectacular, and with each loop the audience could see
how frustrated and sad Abby and I were getting. The part of the show that had a large impact was as Isabella
insulted me and Abby, Gilda would put a piece of tape with the same word on Amy, who was dressed in very
feminine clothes. At the end, all of us gathered around Amy and yelled things at her before placing a piece of
tape over her mouth that read Just A Girl on it, which is the last thing we said to her, and we gathered around
her and watched as she went down on the ground, then broke the circle, helped her up, and took our bows. Our
performance had the impact we wanted, since the majority of the rest of the class was spent talking about the
issues we had conveyed in our play and even made Ms. Jeral tear up.

There were a few obstacles on the way to the final performance, the biggest ones being finding practice time
and getting tape. In the first performance, we used skinny masking tape and one of the critiques we got from our
class was that the tape was too small. For our second performance, we had to borrow thicker tape from another
teacher and people said that they could see the words on the tape clearly this time. This project made me realize
that though there are constitutional amendments and laws that advance women, women and girls are still being
mistreated in the world. Theyre being called sluts, whores; and men and boys continue to judge a woman
by her figure and her body. It is sickening to me that men and boys still pay attention more to the way a woman
or a girl looks than if shes smart, athletic, dramatic, sweet, or other personality traits she may have that are
more beautiful than her face or hair or eyes. Honestly, I worry about the women and girls of the future and what
kind of society we will leave for them. Feminism is still at work because women and girls are still not equal. It
took 107 years for African-Americans to gain equal rights and still people discriminate against them. How long
must we wait for people to understand that women are just as good as men and African-Americans and other
minorities are just as good as Caucasians?

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