The Women’s Resource Center will hold “Our Voices,” at 7 p.m. on Friday at Alexander Music Building.
The “Our Voices” show will feature 13 women performing personal monologues or monologues written by other students. Each monologue will be approximately three to four minutes long.
“They’ll learn about those particular women’s stories in general. The stories were anonymous unless the women want to self-identify,” said Ellen Lassiter Collier, a Women’s Resource Center coordinator. “The people reading won’t necessarily be reading their own stories. We provided that safe space so if someone wanted to tell but wasn’t totally comfortable claiming it as theirs. They had the opportunity to do so.”
The Vagina Monologues, based on 200 women across the country, was created by Eve Ensler in 1996. It has been performed at EMU for 14 years.
This is the first year women at EMU will share their own stories.
“I don’t think that [The Vagina Monologues] are outdated, but I think what’s important is that we’ve got roughly 12 thousand women on campus who all have their own stories to share as well,” Collier said.
Throughout January, participating women attended workshops where they received help from Collier and Peggy Lee, a graduate student who participated in a similar event at UCC Santa Barbara.
The topics range from mother-daughter relationships to sexual assault.
“Women experience a wide variety of life events. They have complicated and complex and rewarding and awesome relationships with one another, their partners and their family members,” Collier said.
Experiencing someone else’s story can help listeners.
“Some people might walk away knowing that they're not alone. I think that it’s really powerful for people who feel that they’re the only person in the world who’s going through an experience,” Collier said.
