“People pay attention to and get shocked by the artistic portrayal of political incidents.”
Ju-Yeon Ryu
This month we are examining artwork that wrestles with the deeply personal and highly political issue of reproductive freedom. Three artists on the WomenArts Network have created penetrating and important works – playwright Cindy Cooper’s Words of Choice, Ju-Yeon Ryu’s Beyond Good and Evil – Coin Locker Babies, and installation artist Lisa Link’s Warnings. The artists spoke with Sarah Browning of The Fund for Women Artists about the inspiration for the works, audience responses, and the role the arts can play in moving past the polarities of “debate” to the human stories at the heart of all politics.
To learn more about any of these artists, just search the WomenArts Network by her name. You can write to any artist on the WomenArts Network by clicking the email link at the top of her profile page.
Back to the First Page of the January 2006 Newsletter>>
Introducing This Month’s Artists
Cynthia Cooper
The creator of Words of Choice, Cindy Cooper is an award-winning playwright and journalist in New York City. Her plays have been produced in New York, regional theaters, Canada, and parts of Europe, including at the Women’s Project, Primary Stages, Art and Work Ensemble, the Women’s Project in Minneapolis, Venus Theater, and elsewhere. Among her works is How She Played the Game about six women in sports history.
A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, Cooper’s plays are contained in eleven volumes, including Great Monologues for Women and On The Edge. With a background as a lawyer, she was communications director in the field of reproductive justice. She first created Words of Choice in 2000, working with co-adaptor Suzanne Bennett. Read more >>
Ju-Yeon Ryu
Ju-Yeon Ryu is trained in modern, ballet, and Korean dance. She holds a B.A./M.A. from Seoul National University and an Ed.D. from Temple University. She draws from Korean Shamanist rituals to explore socio-political issues in her choreography.
She is a recipient of the Independence Foundation Arts Fellowship, Leeway Foundation’s Women Artist Fellowship, the New Edge Artist Residency at the Community Education Center, and Dance Advance funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, administered by the University of Arts.
She has collaborated with Tamara Xavier and Victoria Rothstein on Grace Poore’s “Enemies on the Inside: Who Holds You Accountable?” and with Bao Phi, Eric Schofer, Melisa Putz, Cosmin Manolescu, Hanearl Guhm, Hydrogenjukebox, and many others. Read more >>
Lisa Link
Lisa Link earned an AB in Fine Arts from Harvard and an MFA in photography from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Currently, she teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. For the past thirteen years she has been creating art works that address critical social issues. An evolving series of montages and videos, Warnings focuses on women’s reproductive health in the United States and Europe.
Through designs that address racist sterilization practices, class discrimination in the surrogate mother industry, anti-abortion violence, and bias in the legislative/judicial process, Warnings invites viewers to reflect on politics, propaganda, and power surrounding reproductive healthcare in history.
The show toured nationally to forty-nine galleries, and now resides permanently at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles.
Read more >>
Cindy Cooper: Theater offers the possibility of transformation
Sarah Browning: What first inspired you to develop Words of Choice?
Cindy Cooper: Politicians blathered about reproductive rights, but completely ignored women’s lives. Activist groups responded with fact sheets. I wanted to reach people in their hearts. Theater is especially good at doing that; there is a magic in theater where people can begin to reflect upon their own experiences while watching well-told stories unfold in front of them. Theater offers the possibility of transformation. My daily work involved reproductive rights and I became convinced that reproductive freedom, under steady attack, needed the breathing space and hope that theater provides. Words of Choice is the result.
Browning: Did you have any concerns about addressing such a controversial issue?
Cooper: I don’t think reproductive justice is a controversial issue. I think it’s a matter of human rights and freedom. The only controversial thing is the way that our rights have been hijacked by a small minority and used to divide people and amass power. That is a scandal of outrageous proportion.
Choice, by the way, is a very broad canvas to me, encompassing contraception, abortion, pregnancy, sexual relations, gender identity, the right of privacy, and individual liberties. Choice is about whether and when to have children, if at all, and the right to raise healthy children once you do. It is about the right to make intimate and personal decisions for yourself, without the government dictating what you must do.
Browning: Can you describe your creative process in compiling it?
Cooper: Words of Choice is a compilation of works by several writers. I wanted to show the broad panorama of people and stories affected by choice. I began by building a collection of material (luckily I had the help of some interns.) Comic pieces were the hardest to come by, so I wrote some humorous selections to consider. The full compilation came together like Legos, by selecting and fitting the best pieces into a theatrical arc. I worked with a co-adapter, Suzanne Bennett, and a wonderful collection of writers agreed to the inclusion of their works. I must say, as with any good play, finding the right ending proved the most challenging. (We now close with a rousing spoken word piece written by Alix Olson.)
Browning: Please tell our readers about presenting Words of Choice and the kinds of reactions you’ve had from audiences.
Cooper: Audience responses are powerful: profound and moving. The play is presented with a post-show discussion, and I have journals filled with comments. A conservative student newspaper in Kansas printed an editorial saying that no matter what opinion a person has about abortion, “the play presents a golden opportunity for proactive dialogue.”
A few snapshots come to mind. Recently, in Missouri, a young woman at a college came up to me in tears. “Are they going to take away our rights? Are they?” she blurted out. (Actually, I wanted to cry, too, but we talked about action.) A woman in Oklahoma, who said she thought her underwear was older than most of the students in the audience, wanted to tell her story of times before Roe. She found herself pregnant, tried to self-abort and ended up in a hospital, where they hung a sign around her neck that said ‘ABORTION.’ Talk about the scarlet letter! In Minnesota, a woman of Southeast Asian origin looked puzzled: “I never hear these stories in the newspaper,” she said. And in Wisconsin, a young woman said that she had grown up in a pro-life household, but after seeing the play realized that she is pro-choice.
Browning: Did you face any difficulties getting the piece presented? Is so, how did you address those difficulties?
Cooper: Most people understand that this is art. Art tells truths and shares stories. We generate an opportunity for people to talk about the real impact of the issues, and at times we get media coverage, as well. Sometimes we’ve had protests from people who are dogmatically anti-abortion; usually it reflects poorly on them. We deal with those situations as they come.
The harder tasks, quite honestly, are organizational – planning, outreach, marketing. I do much of the producing and formed a nonprofit. Plus, we often find ourselves in the position of educating activist groups about the importance of art, and how to best use it, which is a whole job in itself.
Browning: Did creating or presenting this work alter or affect your own attitudes toward abortion? In what way?
Cooper: Words of Choice has deepened my feeling about the great need for people to be able to express their feelings and concerns about reproductive freedom. Anti-abortion rhetoric has become so pervasive that I’ve been shocked at the great silencing of women’s experiences. I recall several women at one college telling me they would consider getting an abortion if they needed it, but they would never tell anyone about it. Creating the work offers me a positive outlet for letting people know that their pro-choice beliefs are okay. It has altered me to this extent: without it, I might just be furious all the time about reactionary efforts to roll back our rights.
Browning: How do you think Words of Choice has contributed to the debate on reproductive rights? What role in general do you think art and artists can play in a debate as polarized as this one?
Cooper: Words of Choice gives people an opportunity to think and reflect, without having to ‘debate.’ We are breaking open the discussion. A student in Kansas recently emailed: “Being a more liberal person is a difficult task here. However, Words of Choice was truly a blessing. It motivated me to keep organizing in my community … The play was inspirational …I will never think about reproductive choice in the same way again.”
What difference does it make? It affects our personal and our public lives. One woman wrote me that she brought her boyfriend to the play because she didn’t know how to discuss her feelings about choice issues, and they stayed up talking for hours. A state legislator in Kansas came up and thanked me after a show, whispering, “I agree, but I could never say so out loud.” In Virginia, organizers signed up a busload of people to go to a pro-choice lobby day.
Art gives people the opportunity to feel comfort, power, reinforcement that they may not get in their daily lives, and the grace to empathize. And sometimes to laugh. One woman said she was 72 years old and had been working on choice issues for over 30 years, but this was the first she could remember laughing about it in a decade. Art helps people recognize themselves and the world around them; in this case, the importance of freedom to women in a free society.
Ju-Yeon Ryu : Preserving People’s History through dance
Sarah Browning: What first inspired you to develop Beyond Good and Evil – Coin Locker Babies? Please tell our readers about the piece.
Ju-Yeon Ryu: Beyond Good and Evil – Coin Locker Babies is a dance piece portraying the life stories of three Asian women: a Korean woman, who is a former comfort woman during the Japanese colonization of Korea, carrying the tragic experience of being constantly raped; a Taiwanese woman, who lost her husband to cancer 20 years ago and had to raise two children on her own; and a Japanese woman who has had two abortions.
The title came from two books: Beyond Good and Evil is written by Nietzsche and is about forgiveness and the unconditional love of God. Coin Locker Babies was written by the Japanese novelist Murakami Ryu. It is about two boys abandoned by their birth mother in a coin locker when they were newborn infants. I saw this as a “social abortion.” Abortion is not just about pregnant women; social pressure and other aspects are also definitely involved.
The first inspiration was the true life stories of former comfort women who were forced to sexually serve Japanese soldiers during WWII. Many Korean women came out after 1992 and started their Wednesday rally in front of the Japanese embassy [for a formal apology and reparations], which has gone on now for 13 years. I saw that the comfort women issue includes the issues of sexism, imperialism, racism, and ageism all at once.
Three sections comprise the piece. In the first section a “fetus” (a dancer) is inside the wedding veil, with only her index finger sticking out through the top of the veil. Subtle movements of the index finger symbolize the struggle for survival of the fetus as well as of the pregnant woman who went through two abortions. The wedding veil is a trap of dead skin. The dancer eventually gets out of it. She reveals herself. She has two red ribbons attached from her vagina.
I was wearing a skin-colored leotard inside my white dress. I cut the bottom of the leotard in order to pull the red ribbon through it, as if the red ribbon were coming out of my vagina. I was also wearing layers of skirts, red and white. Red symbolizes life, and white symbolizes death. This woman – forced to have two abortions she did not want – is layered with death and life on her body. She looks at herself in the mirror, a two-sided mirror, which also symbolizes the two sides of destiny – life and death. She breaks the mirror to destroy “life” and “death” at the end of the section. Her behavior of breaking the mirror is to destroy the reality she had to face. She loses her battle. She didn’t know that she could have had a choice, because society didn’t allow her that choice.
Browning: Did creating or performing this work alter or affect your own attitudes toward abortion? In what way?
Ryu: I wanted to portray the painful experience and memory of a woman who was forced to face social abortion. For example, the former comfort woman was socially aborted by her community and parents because she was considered to be “dirty.” Even though it was not her choice, she was still treated as if she were responsible for the sexual abuse. Whereas, the woman who had two abortions didn’t know she had a choice and she was afraid of being socially aborted if she had children out of marriage. It was tragic because she didn’t realize that she had a choice which could have changed her destiny.
In a way, by performing the piece, I realized that I have a choice as a potential mother. However, spiritually, I believe that ending an unborn baby’s life can cause a disharmony in my body and the universe. No matter what, though, women must have the right of making choices on their own. They should be free from the social construct built upon a patriarchal society.
Browning: Can you describe your creative process in making the piece? Did you have any concerns about addressing such a controversial issue?
Ryu: I didn’t have any concerns about addressing the issue because I had a strong and clear perspective on it, even though my perspective has changed slightly over the process of creating and completing the piece.
I usually get ideas and images for my choreography from my nightmares and dreams. The section about the woman who was forced to have two abortions came from images of my nightmares. Sometimes I think about certain issues too much and they come into my dreams and nightmares. Sometimes, the issues are mine. Because of the way I was raised, I was already being forced to have a “social abortion.”
In one dream I saw a woman floating horizontally, bleeding. Triangle-shaped, long pieces of mirror glass were slowly penetrating the woman’s body. She was bleeding, but the blood was not red. It was almost black. I saw an almost-transparent fabric-like white skin floating around her body. I tried to portray this image in my piece.
Browning: Please tell our readers about presenting Beyond Good and Evil and the kinds of reactions you’ve had from audiences. Did you have any difficulties getting the piece produced?
Ryu: Some people only care about beautiful body movements and the physicality of dance and dance theater. I don’t necessarily agree with that. Without something to say about society and community where you live and belong, art is not valuable.
I have always had difficulties due to a shortage of finances, and sometimes due to censorship. For this specific piece, I had the freedom to create whatever I wanted. However, some presenters have asked me to perform less political work. Still, it wasn’t difficult to move forward with my piece because I had a clear image in mind which I saw from my dreams, and I just stuck to that.
Browning: How do you think Beyond Good and Evil has contributed to the debate on reproductive rights? What role in general do you think art and artists can play in a debate as polarized as this one?
Ryu: I hope that the audience at least thought about the issue seriously and personally after the performance. People tend to think that if these issues are not directly related to them, then it doesn’t matter to them. I wanted the audience to be connected directly to the experience that the woman in the story had to go through. It is hard to find out (in case of dance theater) whether or not I contributed to social change regarding these issues through my performances. However, I believe that if even one person gets exposed to and influenced by it, I would call that a success.
I strongly believe that art and artists play huge roles in social change. People pay attention to and get shocked by the artistic portrayal of political incidents. Performance is a great tool to reiterate the urgency of the issues being addressed. Premature Burial is one of the sections in Beyond Good and Evil – Coin Locker Babies. Premature Burial has developed into a 20-minute piece about the issue of Korean comfort women during WWII. Many people have told me that they didn’t know about the issue until they saw my performance. It became an educational piece in a way.
I have performed on the street during political rallies and demonstrations. Many people who watched my performances ask me questions about them and the issues I try to convey. It gives me a chance to explain what I believe because performance and its intensity have the power to capture people’s attention. If I had talked about the issue in words, nobody would have paid attention to me. Also, performance is a way to preserve people’s history, stories of people, performed and documented by the people themselves.
Lisa Link: The politics of control at the most personal level
Sarah Browning: What first inspired you to develop Warnings?
Lisa Link: A combination of events inspired me to begin this project in 1990. In school, I had a student job alphabetizing photography books in the library stacks and the only reception I could get on my walkman to keep myself entertained was right-wing talk radio. It really shocked me the kinds of comparisons the hosts and callers made between progressive/pro-choice individuals and the Nazis. I was especially outraged as none of the speakers I heard were Jewish or seemed to have a clue about the history of the time period to which they constantly referred.
I read news reports about the implications of the Supreme Court’s Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services decision (1989) that let stand a preamble that life begins at conception, permitted states to outlaw abortions at any publicly leased or owned facility, and allowed states to require fetal viability testing. At the same time, violence against women’s health facilities and the people who worked there was on the rise. I felt that I had to counteract all this anti-feminist and often anti-Semitic right-wing propaganda with a multi-media exhibition of my own.
I embarked on two years of research and learned that it was the anti-choice groups who have more in common with the early Nazi party. In 1931, Germany had one of the strongest women’s movements in the world. Several thousand people marched for reproductive freedom in Berlin. The elected Nazi party outlawed abortion, converted health clinics to government propaganda centers, started a national birth drive, and supported sterilization of “undesirable” population groups. In both the 1930s and the 1990s, anti-choice groups displayed fear of rising minority birthrates, terror at the growing political/economic power of women, and support for increased international military dominance.
Browning: Can you describe your creative process in making Warnings? Did you have any concerns about addressing such a controversial issue?
Link: I never had any concerns – it was only after several years that I took the precaution of removing my home address from gallery materials.
I am a research fanatic. While some artists might be inspired by sunsets, I go wild reading the Congressional Record or minutes of the Pennsylvania state legislature. I spend as much time in libraries as in the studio. I also interview people and attend events related to the exhibition research. I will never forget the glazed zombie-like faces of the anti-choice marchers who laid siege to a Colorado women’s clinic one sunny afternoon. Their blind obedience to fascist leadership motivated me to keep developing the Warnings exhibit.
I spent months gathering material – historic photographs, my own photographs, video footage, quotes from media and personal interviews, artifacts, statistics… and then I scanned everything into the computer and created photomontages using the software Adobe Photoshop. I began this exhibit on a Mac Classic in black and white. I printed out the text on transparencies, overlaid them on top of the images, and enlarged the pieces on a color copier at a shop that had “late night” artist special pricing. I tiled out the images, trimmed the tiles, taped them together, and laminated them into oversized posters.
The bulk of the exhibit was completed before 1995 and by today’s standards appears very low tech. I also created videos to go with the exhibition. Since 1995, I have added one piece a year and while the technology has changed, the theme of the show remains constant. There is this weird undercurrent of the show that, if you follow it, kind of mirrors the growing sophistication of tools like Photoshop.
Browning: Please tell our readers about touring and exhibiting the piece and the kinds of reactions you’ve had from audiences. Did you face any difficulties getting the work exhibited? If so, how did you address those difficulties?
Link: The most powerful part of showing Warnings came in showing it in areas of the USA that I had always thought were very conservative. What made it worthwhile for me were the conversations with gallery visitors. For example, a woman came up to me and told me how much the show meant and that the next day she was going to bring her mother. I think many people in more “red” states were relieved to see an alternative voice on display. I was especially happy to exhibit in a region where a doctor who performed abortions was being harassed – just to show the public that there are other perspectives on this topic. I learned about most of the reactions from the written comments in the gallery guest books and there were plenty of notes telling me I was going to burn in hell. There were also positive notes like the one below, that inspired me to keep going:
For those few students who had not made up their minds, your show – Warnings – and the Right to Life protesters on campus on the following Monday, perhaps helped them to come to an opinion. This is what universities are about. Thank you.
–Dick DuBord, Dean Arts and Humanities, Moorhead State University, Moorhead, MN,1995
There were a couple of instances where the show arrived at an exhibition space and mysteriously never made it out of the box. But it did show in over 40 spaces and there were a lot of supportive people who took the time to get the work shown. I am grateful to them for their support and wish I could thank each one of them in this interview!!!!!!
Browning: Did creating or exhibiting Warnings alter or affect your own attitudes toward abortion? In what way?
Link: Creating Warnings increased my understanding of how governments seek to control populations through propaganda. The theme of Warnings goes beyond the abortion debate. It’s about the politics of control at the most personal level. Once you control who is allowed to have babies, you control the nation.
An additional point I want to emphasize is that any government that can prevent you from terminating a pregnancy can also prevent you from carrying one to term or keeping the child that you deliver. Warnings includes pieces about the sterilization of Native American and Puerto Rican women by our government. Class and race are central themes in the history of reproductive rights. Warnings also contains pieces about the exploitation of women with fewer financial resources by the surrogate mother and egg donor industries.
How do you think Warnings has contributed to the debate on reproductive rights? What role in general do you think art and artists can play in a debate as polarized as this one?
Link: I hope it has given people who saw the exhibit more ammunition to fight back against the radical right-wing propaganda. I believe art and artists can play a role in just getting people to talk about issues and maybe even vote on them. Election turnout is dangerously low. I put on the earliest versions of Warnings to coincide with voter registration events in 1991, with the goal that it might get a few more people who supported women’s rights to the polls. If you are reading this and would like to bring all or parts of Warnings to your community, please feel free to contact me at: lisalink@yahoo.com
Back to the First Page of the January 2006 Newsletter >>