A couple of weeks ago, my friend Beverly who is music Director at the UU Church in Tamworth, asked me to give a talk on \u201cCreativity and Social Justice.\u201d\u00a0 I thought it sounded like a great topic, but didn\u2019t know enough to give a talk.\u00a0 I mentioned Journey into Courage.\u00a0 Beverly got back to her committee and said they wanted me to come and my topic would be \u201cJourney into Courage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Journey into Courage is a theater piece written and performed by women survivors of domestic violence.\u00a0 It started as a \u201cdrama class\u201d for survivors.\u00a0 I signed up because I\u2019ve always loved theater.\u00a0 The exercises were really interesting.\u00a0 Bess would ask us to remember a really bad time and then she\u2019d ask questions: are you inside or outside? what clothes are you wearing?\u00a0 what time of day is it?\u00a0 I found this fascinating.\u00a0 It shifted my attitude toward painful events in my life from feeling ashamed and sad to seeing them as raw material for art.\u00a0 After about six weeks of getting together, doing exercises, and writing monologues, Bess revealed her REAL agenda.\u00a0 She said \u201cWe\u2019ve got a date for a performance, who\u2019s in?\u201d\u00a0 Some women dropped out, but there were 8 of us who agreed to perform.\u00a0 Bess had set up a structure: the first section was Fear, followed by Anger, and finally Courage.\u00a0 They were separated by \u201cmusical numbers\u201d as Bess called them, not saying the scary word \u201cdance.\u201d\u00a0 She had cleverly choreographed movements like marching, coming in one by one and taking a place on the stage, coming in as two lines facing each other.\u00a0 There were also slides that were shown as we changed from one section to another.\u00a0 While we were putting it together it became clear how important children were.\u00a0 Some mothers wanted to talk about how her husband\u2019s abuse affected their children.\u00a0 So we added a section called \u201cChildren\u201d between Fear and Anger.\u00a0 I had actually decided to join the performance because I wanted to make the point that alcoholism of the parent is abuse of the child even when there\u2019s no overt violence.<\/p>\n
We did four series of performances from \u201891 to \u201894.\u00a0 Some women dropped out, new women came.\u00a0 Our monologues changed as we remembered or understood parts of our past lives.\u00a0 Along the way, we discovered that every woman who\u2019d married a batterer had been abused as a child.\u00a0 This is not to blame the woman, implying that she had somehow asked for it, but to show how abusive parents are setting up their children to be caught in cycles of abuse.\u00a0 By the time we did our last round of performances, every one of us had remembered something abusive from her childhood.<\/p>\n
A section that changed a lot was the one about anger.\u00a0 At first there were just my Poem, Prisoners of War, another woman\u2019s poem, and one woman\u2019s \u201cDear John\u201d letter to her ex-boyfriend which turned out to be funny.\u00a0 Unfortunately, she started trying to be funny, which wasn\u2019t funny at all.\u00a0 Finally she dropped out.\u00a0 I suggested that we might all write \u2018Dear Ex\u201d letters to our abusers.\u00a0 So we did.\u00a0 I remember the first night we read them.\u00a0 We were all worried, most of us had been punished for getting angry.\u00a0 Ferne read hers first, and the audience clapped and cheered.\u00a0 What wonderful support for what we were doing!<\/p>\n
Finally, Bess decided to make a video about the making of Journey into Courage, and how it affected the lives of the women.\u00a0 There was footage of actual performances.\u00a0 The video<\/a> continues to be used in training emergency personnel in Vermont.<\/p>\n Bess O\u2019Brien is still making documentaries at Kingdom County Productions<\/a>.<\/p>\n Other pages in this blog give information about Journey into Courage. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Beverly who is music Director at the UU Church in Tamworth, asked me to give a talk on \u201cCreativity and Social Justice.\u201d\u00a0 I thought it sounded like a great topic, but didn\u2019t know … Continue reading
\nApril 1994: Interview for Journey into Courage Video<\/a>
\nStopping the Chain of Abuse<\/a>
\n Mean Mothers and Bodily Harm<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"