Standing By

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Standing By is a solo multi-media work COMMISSIONED by Rhodes University, Grahamstown, for Human Rights Week. This work was created during a period in South Africa where the issue of corrective rape and abuse against women spiked.

Choreographer’s Note: We live in a country with the highest rape rate in the world.  A country in which the average South African woman has a higher chance of being raped than of finishing secondary school.  A country in which a woman is raped every 26 seconds.

Within this broader scourge of violence against women, the phenomenon of the ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians has been steadily on the rise over recent years, with an estimated 10 new cases emerging each week.

These violations are happening all around us, all the time.  In our neighbourhoods, on our streets, on our doorsteps and in our homes.  And while there has been a recent peak in media coverage of the issue, triggered by the gang rape of a young girl in Soweto and the video recording of the incident that went viral, putting a spotlight on the issue, these atrocities continue incessantly.

Rather than focus on the broad continuum of patriarchal attitudes and behavior that allow for these atrocities to occur, this work seeks to question one’s own position, where one stands in relation to the issue.  Through a weaving together of a series of performed vignettes, Standing By seeks to create a space in which both the audience and the performer can be viscerally present with the realities of these violations.  In so doing it hopes to wake us out of our de-sensitized state and asks if we are simply standing by while a war is being waged on women’s bodies, or if we are on stand-by, and ready to re-ACT!

Scenes could be identified as (Not named by the artist):

1)    Interrogation

2)    War zone

3)    Audience Standing By

4)    The apartment

5)    Statements

6)    Audience Duet

7)    Naming the victims

Press quotes

http://www.artlink.co.za/news_article.htm?contentID=29971

http://artscomments.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/athena-mazarakis-is-standing-by-are-the-rest-of-us/

Updating: September 2013