In “12 Minute Madness” playwright, director, professor and choreographer, Raïna von Waldenberg, goes where few dance shows dare to go. Using twelve characters to depict the twelve psyches that inhabit the mind of a child sexual abuse survivor, von Waldenburg takes a deep dive into a subject that is rarely spoken about with vulnerability and honesty. The play is based on von Waldenburg’s own experiences of sexual abuse and premiered at the Vancouver Fringe in 2017 with sold-out shows. The multi-talented director hails from New York City and taught for twenty years at the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She currently teaches at Simon Fraser University and University of the Fraser Valley, and we feel so fortunate to be able to witness her provocative work at the rEvolver Theatre Festival as academia brings her to the West Coast. The premise of the show had us hooked at the get-go. The play resurfaced just in time for the aftermath of the #MeToo movement that has opened up conversations about sexual abuse in its many forms. We talked to von Waldenburg to find out about her powerful project.
Raïna, you have a very illustrious academic career. Your concentration is physical theatre, which you also teach at SFU and UFV. What led you to choose physical theatre? What about it connects with you and what experiences in your life led you to it?
Yes, serendipitously I’ve been able to teach at the two leading post-secondary institutions in North America that specialize in Grotowski’s physical acting training. For 17 years I was full-time faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (Experimental Theatre Wing) where I taught physical theatre. When I moved to Vancouver in 2012 I taught physical theatre at SFU, and I am currently faculty at UFV.
Physical theatre is about being in the body and in the present. Here there is no bullshit. I LOVE THIS SPACE! I know the audience can smell bullshit—- so why serve it to them? What a waste of time. I want to be real with them. I think theatre is an act of love. I consider the audience my noble partner.
I embody my feelings. I was raised by strict German grandparents who were incredibly precise about posture, proper use of spoon and fork, manners, and curtsies. With the porcelain, chandeliers, and antique mirrors violence and sex abuse happened in this home. Oppression permeated the décor. I knew I had two choices. I could implode or explode. In order for my spirit to survive, I became overly expressive with my body. And my words.
What was the genesis process for “12 Minute Madness”? When did you first get the idea for this 12-part examination of sexual abuse?
“12 Minute Madness” is an excerpt of my full-length play “Das Kaspar Theatre”, first produced at New York University in 1998. The political and social climate in the 90s was very different than 2018. In the 90s, survivors of sexual abuse had to deal with major backlash— false memory syndrome and sex abuse hysteria. Twenty years later, a month after mounting “12 Minute Madness” at the 2017 Fringe Festival, the #MeToo” movement erupted. I was deeply excited to have “12 Minute Madness” selected as one of the main stage productions at the 2018 rEvolver Festival during a time when women’s voices about sex abuse and harassment are actually being taken seriously, with backlash of course, but not close to the backlash we experienced 20 years ago.
The original impulse for “12 Minute Madness” came about in 2015. Two of my SFU students, June Fukumura and Anjela Magpantay, encouraged me to remount “Das Kaspar Theatre”. This ambitious project fell through. A year later, at UFV, six of my theatre students caught my attention. I affectionately called them the Twat Club. They were fierce, bold, fluent in the art of physical theatre, and I wanted to write a play about women for these women to expose their skills as performers. I decided to take an excerpt from “Das Kaspar Theatre” and revise it for the 2017 Vancouver Fringe Festival. I asked Fukumura and Magpantay, and three more of my SFU students, as well as my niece Sasha Scheape (a KPU fashion design student, harpist, and performer) to join the cast. “12 Minute Madness” became a play with 12 twats and a harp.
You created this play based on your experiences. We can only imagine how difficult it must have been for you to confront the difficult emotions that come with sexual abuse. What was that process like? Was it more cathartic and healing than painful?
It was incredibly healing for me to create art from the pain of sex abuse. Rumpelstiltskin spun straw into gold, what a guy! When I was in therapy I experienced a recovered memory of having been sexually abused by my grandfather as a child. My mind exploded into a myriad of feelings, thoughts, and inner battles. By writing these down on paper, a play about sex abuse organically emerged. I had to really listen, though. The voices in my inner landscape (psyche) were quite distinct in character, shape, tone, and point of view. As a playwright, I needed to find courage to accept— and love— all of these voices. Even the shameful ones. I had to accept all of myself.
TO ACCEPT ALL OF HUMANITY IS TO ACCEPT ALL OF ONESELF.
Today as a society we are blatantly facing our denial and shame around sex abuse, racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, ageism, sizeism, and the many other forms of discrimination. I believe that healing on a societal level begins with the individual. If we as individuals can become conscious of our own contradictions and discrimination, we can then be accountable. And when we are accountable we have the agency to recalibrate patterns. The opposite is also true. When we deny and suppress our own contradictions and discrimination, we disarm our agency to affect change.
This is hard and subtle work. To quote Jordan B. Peterson, “There is a proclivity in our society toward moral posturing of sensitivity over truth.” We want to be good people. Tolerant and compassionate people. We want to feel solid in our position on things. We want to feel righteous in our blame and defensive of our pain. We want things to be binary: black or white, good or bad. But the psyche is a messy thing, filled with shades of grey and contradictions.
I feel like “12 Minute Madness” is a shame buster! Writing a play about my past allowed me agency I never had as a child. Through art, I had permission to finally expose what was hidden in my family and in my psyche. I was also able to have control for the first time. I could “rewrite” the story. Fiction is liberating as hell! And, often more truthful than non-fiction.
You mention that the show while dealing with sexual abuse is also quite sensual and “raunchy”. How did you navigate those antagonistic waters?
The raunchy part of this show is the clown, buffoon-like comedy. I knew I was not going to write a drama about my drama. There is a big difference between a victim of sexual abuse and a survivor of sexual abuse. Humor has allowed me to graduate from victim to survivor. I want to show people that it’s possible to have a candid and open dialogue about sex abuse without being overly sensitive and reverent about it. Aesthetic distance is crucial for any kind of true examination. In order to deal with a heavy subject (a big grieving vagina), one needs to pick it up, take it out of the shadows, and wave it around a bit. Bring it to a picnic with a bunch of other vaginas, flick them in the air like little frisbees. Irreverence demystifies and dismantles taboos. It’s a release; this is why we love good stand-up comedy. The aim of this show is to use comedy to expose the secrecy and shame of sexual abuse, and to empower those who have been disempowered by this kind of trauma.
The sensual part of this show is even deeper. There is a pivotal character in “12 Minute Madness”called Linda Kunt. She represents the Pleasure/Shame Body. The trickiest thing about child sex abuse is that the body responds to touch in a sensual way. Linda Kunt admits her grandfather’s touch felt good. She wants to die from the shame. The fact that the body responds sensually to sex abuse automatically makes the “victim” feel complicity with the oppressor. THAT IS THE CRAZIEST THING ABOUT ANY KIND OF SEXUAL OFFENSE! The fine and blurry lines between pleasure, shame, consent, denial, and abuse.
Jerzy Grotowski has inspired your physical acting style. Can you tell us more about his teachings and how they helped you tell this story in particular?
The 12-woman cast is literally creating the choreography in front of the audience, moment to moment. Employing post-modern physical theatre techniques, specifically Viewpoints as a structure, the cast is improvising most of the blocking. They have been trained to kinesthetically respond to each other, the space, and the audience. It’s not easy to balance a linear narrative with physical ensemble improvisation; it requires letting go of ego and surrendering to a larger whole (a beehive mentality). The actors are being asked to be fluid in their character work so that sometimes it is their personalities that emerge in the play with their characters disappearing altogether. It is up to each of them individually when and how this happens. As a united ensemble, as “one mind”, the actors have a lot of control over how this story is being told in each moment. All of this makes sense, since the play is about one mind.
When I experienced violence and sexual abuse as a child I disappeared into the wallpaper. Things were happening to my body that were out of my control. Years later I studied the physical acting training of Jerzy Grotowski. I reconnected to my body. In this psycho-physical work I discovered that my muscles hold memories, feelings, and thoughts. When I went to therapy during this time I experienced a recovered memory of having been sexually abused by my grandfather. I started screaming. Grotowski said “[t]he most elementary fault is the overstraining of the voice because one forgets to speak with the body'” In my physical acting training I began to literally “move”, dance through my memories, feelings, and thoughts. “12 Minute Madness” is the process of speaking about a highly charged topic with the body. Each character in this play is a full embodiment of a feeling.
Grotowski’s approach to presence and inclusion of audience was revolutionary to me. In “12 Minute Madness”,/span> the actors are “sharing the story with” audience, as opposed to “performing for them”.
There is a powerful connection that is made with the live audience in this play. The actors break the fourth wall constantly, and include the audience into the world of the psyche. There is a “we-ness” factor that is crucial to this work; since we humans are all suffering on some level, we need to find compassion for ourselves and others. So, we’re doing it together in shared space and time.
There is an exercise I developed 30 years ago for performers, “I AM ONE WHO”. It is based on the physical actor training of Polish Director Jerzy Grotowski and American Master Teacher Stephen Wangh (“An Acrobat of the Heart”).
“I AM ONE WHO” is a series of presence exercises that train artists to live inside of the present moment with barefaced sincerity by literally inviting all parts– including the “undesirable” parts– of themselves into the work. “12 Minute Madness” is one big “I AM ONE WHO”. The protagonist’s mind explodes into a myriad of disparate parts of herself that have been suppressed for years when she uncovers her first memory of having been sexually abused by her grandfather.
You’ve mentioned that the show is quite provocative and in some ways “offensive”. You’ve also stated that being offensive gets us closer to the truth. Can you touch on that more? How do you think it relates to our world right now politically?
In “12 Minute Madness” I aim to expose the human psyche: the shame/guilt and victim/oppressor cycles that occur in all of us, regardless of whether we’ve been abused or not.
One of the most painful things about child sexual abuse is that the family of the child often can’t help because they are not able to move beyond their own denial and suppression of internal conflict regarding the abuse. Another painful thing is how society (just like the family) doesn’t acknowledge the complexity of the situation, and deals with it in a compartmentalized and binary manner. And the first most painful thing is the profound shame that permeates the survivor’s daily existence. For the survivor, it’s a life sentence.
I think denial and shame do shitty things to people and society.
We shame ourselves when we mistreat or are mistreated. The result is that a part of us feels guilty (victim), and another part feels righteous anger (oppressor). The victim/oppressor cycle occurs in all of us (in our psyche and our actions). The cycle is confusing, smells like bloated toad, and nobody likes it! So… we often just suppress the whole damn thing.
Balancing my political, personal, and artistic ideals with those of some of the cast members has been the biggest challenge of bringing “12 Minute Madness” to life. On a larger scale, the play deals with denial and censorship. What is okay for us to talk about and what is not okay? How much do we need to deny and censor our thoughts/feelings/language in order not to offend others? The question about offensiveness comes down to degrees. What degree of offensive is too offensive? The biggest question in 1998 was “how far do I open my child abuse legs before it becomes offensive to people?” And now, in 2018 the biggest question is “how far do I open my sex abuse psyche before it becomes offensive to people?”. In 1998, I was fighting against denial and censorship regarding the validity of repressed memories and the prevalence of sex abuse. My current challenge with the script is not about sex abuse. It’s about political correctness. In 2018, I’m fighting against denial and censorship regarding the truthful exposure of all aspects of my psyche.
My cast and I have engaged in deep and passionate conversations about truth, political correctness, and censorship: what is appropriate material and language to put on stage?
The most controversial issue in “12 Minute Madness” is a character named Deena. Some cast members argued that having a character of Latina/African American descent in my play was racist because Deena is a cultural stereotype. In each conversation with this young multi-racial cast I tried to hold space and carefully sift through the layers of narrative in order to distinguish the difference between racial sensitivity, artistic freedom, and the truthful expression of a complex human psyche on the one hand—- and racism, artistic moral compassing, and the trend toward moral posturing of sensitivity on the other. The “characters” in “12 Minute Madness” are not actual people; they are stereotype caricatures that represent different parts of my psyche. Is it racist of me to have parts of my psyche be expressed through characters of different ethnicities, specifically Deena, a Latina/African American waitress from The Lower East Side of Manhattan? In NYC, in 1998, Deena’s race, and the ethnicity of any other character in the play, was not an issue. But times are different now!
I continue to feel strongly as a playwright that it is not offensive to have Deena be of African American/Latina descent. For me there is nothing more offensive about an African American/Latina character in my psyche than an Italian one. No stereotype in the play is being denigrated nor portrayed in an offensive manner. I lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for 30 years, I was there when I wrote “Das Kaspar Theatre”. These characters in the play are from people in my own neighborhood. They are in the play to help me cope with the very difficult subject of child sex abuse. These characters say things out loud that I can only think/feel in my head/heart. This experience is so painful to talk about that I can’t be in my own skin to tell this story.
Another point of controversy has been the language used by Smoker, a sexy sadistic nurse who hates herself and others. She lashes out with slurs indiscriminately. Big conversations with the cast ensued about Smoker’s language. The actor who played Smoker quit. She didn’t feel comfortable playing a character who would use words like “fag” and “retards”. It could be argued that Smoker using slurs in this play is so offensive to the audience it becomes distracting to the actual subject: child sex abuse. I would argue back that there is nothing that is NOT offensive about child sex abuse! When one truly delves into it, child sex abuse is full of shit, and a severely offensive experience all around.
It could be argued that “12 Minute Madness” is offensive because it exposes all parts of a human psyche and makes light of– and fun of– sex abuse survivors. Some could call this play offensive. I would agree with them if they did. It is offensive. What I’m doing in “12 Minute Madness” is exposing this offense in order to contend with it. I’m doing it on purpose.
My intention as a playwright is to expose the human psyche, all of it, including our offensive thoughts— as much as we don’t want them, or don’t want to admit that we have them. This is tricky territory.
You had to cast 12 formidable actresses/dancers for the play. How did you seek them out and can you tell us more about them?
Yes! It’s so rare to see a multi-racial cast of 12 women on stage in a play written by a woman about women. It’s awesome. Powerful. 12 parts of my psyche are being represented by 12 women on stage in 12 minutes (…well 40 minutes, but you know, suspension of disbelief….)!
As I mentioned earlier, I hand-picked each of the actors (SFU and UFV students/alumni). I knew that each woman in the cast possessed a sensitivity to the subject matter on some level. It was important to me that the actors be (1) kind human beings, (2) bold, brave, crazy, (3) able to surrender Ego and work as a unit, and (4) trained in the art of kinesthetic awareness and post-modern Physical Theatre.
There appear to be many dance sequences in the show. Are you a trained dancer? How did you choreograph these pieces?
At the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU, along with Grotowski Physical Acting, I trained in Viewpoints, Contact Improvisation, Laban, Developmental Movement, and Experiential Anatomy. I learned a lot from my amazing teacher/colleague Mary Overlie.
Most of my choreography is created by watching the cast engage in Viewpoints and Flocking. When I come across temporal or spatial dynamics that work I create a score that allows the performers to inhabit those particular dynamics. Or, if there are specific moments that pop, I ask the cast to consider these as ‘repeatable choreography’. Most of what the cast is doing, however, is improvised choreography!
The dance sequence is choreographed by Arash Khakpour. And the fight/intimacy choreography is created by Phay Gagnon. Both of these artists whom I highly respect and I am privileged to mentor.
As an artist, what stories are you most interested in telling? Not just for this show but in all your work.
I tell true stories about events and people that society considers taboo. My solo show, “My Friend Andrea”, produced at The Cultch (2015, 2016) is a bold and powerful work inspired by the real-life story of Andrea Yates, the Texas housewife who drowned her five children in the bath in 2001. “My Friend Andrea” is risky, honest and challenges how people think about those in our society who are considered “monsters”. The play is a frank look at motherhood and shows the audience the human within the monster. By understanding the circumstances that drove Andrea makes us realize that we all have the potential to be monsters.
I like to tell stories that I would call “personal living theatre” where the audience and actors share the space and experience together (as opposed to the traditional mode of fourth wall-based proscenium theatre where actors and audience are separated into camps of “us” and “them”). I like my performance work to break the divide between “us” and “them”. I usually deal with sensitive issues where I try to find a way to unite all of us, the entire community, together.
Last year I worked on a performance work called “Grand Theft Terra Firma: Stories of Truth and (Re) Conciliation”. By revealing to an audience our own struggles with this issue and the difficulty in attempting to have an honest, open conversation about this touchy subject matter, the cast gave space to the audience to understand how difficult it is to decolonize our own minds and to affirm how deeply seated these issues actually are. One could say that by facing truth (about ourselves and the issue at hand) one can begin to reconcile these truths on a personal level. Change begins in the mind and heart of one individual. This is what our project was doing: facing truth and reconciliation on a personal level.
Recently one of my favourite writers was exposed for abusing women as part of #metoo and in his defence, and in anticipation of the accusations, he published a piece in the New Yorker coming forward about his story of child sex abuse. The cycle of sexual abuse seems to be perpetual and hurts more and more people, especially women and more vulnerable entities. Have you thought about what methods work for curbing occurrences of child sex abuse? What therapies work and how can we as a society support survivors? What are the conversations that need to happen that are not happening?
It is crazy that I still have to convince people (even some of my friends, family and colleagues) of the ubiquity of sex abuse! I continue to emphasize that sexual abuse is more prevalent than we want to admit (one out of three women, one out of five men, and 95% of all child sex abuse allegations are true). My play “Das Kaspar Theatre” play was produced in 1998 during the explosion of false memory syndrome and child abuse hysteria. Women who spoke out about their recovered memories of child sex abuse were told their memories were false, and that their accusations were just part of a hysterical fad and a witch hunt. 20 years later, only a month after producing “12 Minute Madness” at the 2017 Fringe Festival, the #MeToo movement suddenly erupted! THIS IS REALLY GOOD! Because denial is so prevalent and pervasive in our society, survivors need to find a safe supportive space to tell their stories and be heard. For survivors to find community and speak out together (power in numbers) is crucial.
I have not found methods to curb occurrences of child sex abuse. Sex offenders often appear to be “normal and trustworthy people”, (teachers, coaches, fathers, uncles), not bad guys in bathrobes running around like sleazy monsters. So it’s really hard to tell who you can trust and who you can’t!
I have a son. The biggest weapon I had to protect him from child sex abuse was to make him feel that I was a safe person to talk to. Without judgement or prying, I asked and I listened.
I think we need better systems to support a victim of sexual abuse, as well as their family. Systems that don’t immediately involve the legal system or social services. There is a big problem with how a child who has been sexually abused is dealt with. The child, and often the family, are afraid to “make a big deal about the abuse” because they are afraid of what might happen to the offender, especially if the offender is a family member, or a close friend. Which is most often the case. There is a sometimes a desire or need to protect the offender. And because of this, the abuse gets shoved under the carpet and the wrong people get protected. This dynamic is pervasive. And that’s really sad.
EMDR therapy is really effective! Look it up! It uses bi-lateral stimulation to dislodge patterns in the brain.
The conversations that need to happen are the ones where (1) we can begin to dismantle the stigma. I think for this to happen we need to understand the statics. When people can truly grasp the pervasiveness of sex abuse, maybe the stigma and paradigm around sex abuse can be recalibrated. Society still wants to put victims of sexual abuse into the category of aberrance. People are still fervently clinging to denial because they don’t want to digest the outrageous prevalence of sex abuse— it disturbs a very deep nerve in society. (2) statics become personalized. Numbers don’t mean anything. But stories do. A person’s name, face, and details can often elicit empathy and debunk the fallacy that sex abuse could never happen to them or the people they know (3) the most controversial conversation that needs to happen is the one where we understand that the oppressor is a person who is in great pain. The conversation where we as a society can begin acknowledge the complexity of sex abuse, and deal with it in a holistic and non-binary manner. Help is needed on both sides (oppressor/victim).
What do you hope audiences will get from the show?
This is a show for people who have survived trauma and is ready to have a real conversation about sex abuse and the human psyche. It is also for anyone who knows survivors of sexual abuse. Anyone who has experienced trauma. And anyone who has experienced pain— which is all of us! The point of this show is to say: we are not alone in our shame. Let’s talk about this!
I am hoping audiences will feel inspired by the candidness, the real conversations, the celebration of surviving sex abuse, the outrageous “characters”, the humor, the improvisational and performative skills of the cast, and the simple experience of seeing twelve twats on stage unapologetically exposing the truth. I am hoping audiences will feel closer to what it means to heal. To accept. To face the crazy contradictions of our collective human experience. To not feel so alone in our shame. To laugh at ourselves. To feel connected to other people. Community. The essential motto of this play is: to accept all of humanity is to accept all of oneself.
How do you find inspiration on a daily basis? Are there any works from the past year that made a big impact on you and your creative process?
On a daily basis, I find inspiration from the incredible nature around me, and from the conversations I have about art and life with my partner Peter Bingham, choreographer at EDAM. Peter’s work inspires me deeply. How he values simplicity and listening in performance. The work of Fight With A Stick really blows my mind open. I am inspired by how they play with the perceptions and distortions of space, and how they consider the set as having equal value as the performers: the set becomes a partner on stage.
“12 Minute Madness” plays at the Cultch on May 23, 25, 26 and 27. Get your tickets here!
– Prachi Kamble
Photography: Chris Randle