“Cultural Problems Demand Cultural Solutions”: Performing Abortion Stories for Culture Change

"I'M HAVING AN ABORTION! And I'm going to need some help."1 Jane's announcement comes near the beginning of the 2018 play This Boat Called My Body, a production of For Youth Inquiry (FYI), the theater company of the Illinois Caucus for Reproductive Health (ICAH). Their unpublished script sets the play "on an island surrounded by choppy waters. On the South Side of Chicago. In the moment after Jane decides what to do; before she does it."2 In the play, "boat" is both literal and metaphorical. As the audience gathers in Chicago's Palmisano Park on the banks of an old fishing pond, they find the teenager Jane bailing water out of a canoe on the pier. By the end, the audience helps Jane put her boat in the water and wishes her well as she rows off to her abortion and her future. In between, the audience helps Jane navigate the troubled waters of the state's parental notification law, hears her hopes for her life, and witnesses her struggles as she confronts legal, material, and societal barriers to abortion access.

The participatory play was collaboratively devised from teens' abortion stories collected by ICAH, and it centers the experiences of young, queer BIPOC people. ICAH is known for an unapologetic and positive approach to youth sexuality, and a strong emphasis on youth as the experts in their own lives. Overturning the Illinois Parental Notice of Abortion Act (PNA) had long been a priority of ICAH, but parental involvement laws that require notification or consent tend to be popular in Illinois as elsewhere, because many people see the value in parents being involved in their children's health care decisions without taking into account the many reasons why teens might not be able to talk to their parents about this issue.3 Moreover, honest and open public discussions of teen experiences with sex and sexuality, let alone abortion, are often taboo.

Trying to overturn PNA in an era of increasing restrictions on abortion seemed like an uphill battle, so FYI and ICAH decided to use cultural tools like the play to address what seemed like an intractable cultural problem. Specifically, they decided to pair abortion storytelling with performance to tell an abortion story in real-time with the audience as participants. The performance enacts a world its storytellers, writers, and actors want to see, one in which abortion is accessible and stigma-free, and young people who need abortion receive the active support of their communities.

This essay argues that performing abortion stories — in living rooms, on stages, in legislative halls, at protests, in media outlets, on social media, and in plays like This Boat — effects "culture change" that is fundamental to ensuring access to abortion in a post-Roe climate. By culture change, I mean the shift in hearts and minds that precedes or makes possible legislative or judicial change. It is part of politics, and it also makes politics possible. The "cultural" part of culture change, encompasses both anthropological and artistic definitions of culture — i.e., a social group's customs, beliefs, and institutions; and artistic processes and products — and indeed relies on the interrelationship of the two. As Alyssa Vera Ramos, the ICAH Arts Justice Organizer and FYI's Artistic Director, says:

For FYI, that kind of engagement comes through performance.

To understand how This Boat uses performance to produce culture change, we can think of it in the tradition of the Brazilian theater practitioner Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Developed initially during the military dictatorship in Brazil, when Boal was the director of the Arena Theater in Saõ Paulo, Theatre of the Oppressed was later theorized in the eponymous 1974 Portuguese language book after Boal was imprisoned and exiled. For Boal, theater is a tool for revolution and social change that involves the community, helps them to get clear about what they want and need, and enables them to practice the change they want to see.

Key to Boal's method is the notion of the "spect-actor" through whom "the barrier between actors and spectators is destroyed: all must act, all must become protagonists in the necessary transformations in society."5 In Boalian performance, people speak the truths of their daily lives; as they and others witness these truths, they develop together an analysis of the situation that leads to actions towards change. For example, in Boal's Forum Theatre, audience members can stop the action and step in to change the story, whereas in his Image Theatre a group of people transform a static image of what is into another image of what could be. In the case of This Boat, performing abortion stories works as a kind of composite Boalian theater in which the audience participates in helping the protagonist access an abortion. Centering the experiences of youth who need abortions, This Boat destigmatizes abortion and creates a world in which adults support the youths in their lives to make decisions about their reproductive and sexual lives that are best for them.

This Boat can also be read in the lineage of the Women's Liberation Movement and Consciousness Raising (CR) in the United States.6 Emphasizing the political power of recounting one's story for others (i.e., "the personal is political"), CR made space for women to perform their personal experiences with sex, abortion, relationships, intimate partner violence, and other common yet often unspoken factors of daily life to friends and strangers in private home settings or large public settings. Like Boalian theater, CR is an action that can lead to culture change. Performing in both cases is simultaneously action, analysis, and the generation of new ideas of what can be.

According to Kathie Sarachild, CR was started in 1967 by members of New York Radical Women, of which she was a member.7 Sarachild emphasizes that CR was part of a radical feminist movement whose goal was a mass movement of women. The profusion of CR groups was not only an effective means of grassroots organizing, but also a powerful force for "women's issues" to be taken seriously on the national political stage. Susan Brownmiller goes so far as to suggest that the sharing of personal experiences with illegal abortion was central to the legalization of abortion in New York State, which happened three years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision.8

A key moment in this history occurred in February 1969 when members of the all-male New York Joint Legislature Committee on the Problems of Public Health held a public hearing to consider reform of the state abortion law. The hearing featured fifteen abortion "experts": fourteen men and one woman, a Catholic nun. About a dozen members of the newly formed radical feminist group Redstockings (an offshoot of New York Radical Women) attended the hearing. After a former judge finished his testimony, suggesting that abortion might be allowable after a woman had already had four children, Sarachild (then known as Kathie Amatniek) stood up and shouted, "All right, now let's hear from some real experts — the women."9 More and more women joined in disrupting the hearing, calling for the voices of people who had actually had abortions to be heard. When the hearing was moved into Executive Session behind closed doors, Redstockings members continued protesting outside, insisting that they were the experts to whom the legislators needed to listen.

The following month, Redstockings held a gathering of their own, "Abortion: Tell it Like It Is." This first documented abortion speakout took place March 21, 1969 at the Washington Square Methodist Church in the West Village, with three hundred people in attendance. They listened to a pre-constituted panel of twelve women, who performed their stories of illegal abortions; attempts to get a so-called "therapeutic abortion" approved by a hospital panel; and having to carry a pregnancy to term.10 Susan Brownmiller described the evening in a cover story in The Village Voice a week later, quoting a participant who said, "We are the true experts, the only experts, we who've had abortions."11

Although media coverage at the time was limited to only Brownmiller's article and a paragraph by Gloria Steinem in her regular column in New York magazine, word of the speakout quickly spread around the country through a reprint of Brownmiller's article in the Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement newsletter out of Chicago. Soon similar speakouts were taking place all over the country. These performances of personal experience became the spark that turned the legalization of abortion into a popular cause, which in turn buoyed legislative campaigns and legal strategies. As Brownmiller writes, "The importance of personal testimony in a public setting, which overthrew the received wisdom of 'the experts,' cannot be overestimated. It was an original technique and a powerful ideological tool."12 In fact, storytelling formed an important bridge between the personal and the political through the cultural, producing broad changes in society that made the political possible.

Drawing on this lineage of abortion speakouts from earlier generations of abortion activists, contemporary activists with ICAH began working on the play by initiating a storytelling project. ICAH gathered abortion stories from approximately thirty primarily BIPOC and queer youth involved with the organization, including those who had navigated PNA and those who had not. Storytellers received a stipend for their time and had control over how their stories could be used. For example, some storytellers worked with the artistic team to edit their recorded stories down into two-to-three-minute mini-podcasts.13 Storytellers who were interested were subsequently invited into every stage of the development of the play: they were invited into the rehearsal room, to give feedback on work-in-progress showings of the play, and to attend the public production. Some stories were shared as part of a pre-show installation; some were spoken by the actors at the end of the play, and others appeared on postcards that audience members could sign and send to legislators. According to Ramos, "For the people who consented and were interested in doing that, they loved it, they were moved by it, they were grateful."14

This centering of BIPOC and queer youth storytellers is itself part of a culture change happening in the movement for abortion justice. As Renee Bracey Sherman, Founder and Co-Executive Director of the abortion storyteller organization We Testify observes, "nineteen year old Renee, when she had her abortion, didn't see people who looked like her talking about it. It was always older, white women . . . And it was almost never people of color."15 We Testify has led the way in changing whose stories are told and in centering abortion storytellers as movement leaders. As Robin Kimmerer notes, we can choose which story to tell and moreover, "the stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences."16 When the mainstream "choice" movement selected stock stories that focused on the exceptional rather than the everyday, that focus had consequences in terms of how the movement talked about abortion, the kinds of legislation forwarded, the kinds of restrictions left unchallenged, and the kinds of campaigns run. To focus on the stories of the 59% of people obtaining abortions who have had at least one birth; the 75% who meet federal poverty or low-income definitions; and of the people of color who have abortions at disproportionate rates17 requires a movement that addresses the right to access comprehensive sexuality education; the right to a broad range of non-coercive contraception; the right to have a child; the right to have the resources to take care of the children one has, and for those children to grow up in safety, etc. Indeed, Black women created the Reproductive Justice framework to do exactly this.18

Even though FYI attended to the needs of the storytellers and the multiple ways their stories could be told and shared, it is important to note that the goal of the organization was from the start to create a play with a protagonist devised from multiple stories through a collaborative creation process. The play was not imagined as a performance featuring the storytellers themselves, or a performance in which the stories would be directly inhabited by actors. Co-director and writer Nik Zaleski shared that FYI prefers devised plays because when people perform and share their own stories, the audience can sometimes get caught up in concern for the individual, rather than being able to integrate the story emotionally and intellectually. And in documentary theater where professional actors enact the real lived experience of a person word for word, sometimes the audience questions the veracity of the story.

But, she says, with devised theater in which a company is "pulling together lots of diverse, rich experiences from many different kinds of identity points — race, age, gender, identity, expression, sexual orientation — into one narrative that has a fictional container not only [protects] the stories themselves from being questioned or prodded at, but it also [allows] us to be a little bit more imaginative with the aesthetics and the metaphors with which we [are] playing, and that therefore [allows] us to actually be a little bit bigger in the art and draw people in more closely and grab onto folks' hearts."19 Co-Director and writer Quenna Barrett agrees, saying that the devising process allows them to focus more on incorporating aesthetics — including metaphor, humor, and even the absurd — into the performance in a way that is not necessarily possible in the direct telling of one's story.20 FYI Artistic Director Ramos, too, appreciates the possibility of imagery in devised performances, and how that can contribute to catharsis for the audience.21 For example, the play's central metaphor of a waterlogged boat surrounded by water did not come from any one individual's story. But it did allow the creators to site the play in a beautiful park that invites the participants to go on a journey with the protagonist, first to the park, then to the hill overlooking the pond, and finally onto the pier itself to help Jane get her boat on the water and ready to carry her forward.

Another way that This Boat contributes to cultural change is through destigmatizing abortion. Despite the attempts of a White Man Chorus to shame Jane and isolate her throughout the play, she resists their stigmatizing refrains shouted out from high above the pier. She does this with the support of her best friend Dani and the Greek chorus-like Wisdom Keepers — Pat, Mel, and Cass, described in the script as "Everyone before Jane who has ever had an abortion. All that wisdom."22 — who share abortion stories from across history with Jane. The play thus performs changing the culture around abortion from shame to support, and from isolated experience to one of community and love, materialized concretely at the end of the play when the audience joins Jane on the pier.

After Jane has rowed beyond the audience's sight, the actors briefly share other youth abortion stories collected by ICAH. In an audio excerpt of the performance included in the CHOICE/LESS podcast, an actor ends their story by saying, "I'm Jane and I love other Janes." Another one joins in: "I love Jane. Anybody else [love] Jane? Do you guys love Jane? Does anybody know a Jane?" Members of the audience spontaneously respond: "I know a Jane." "I love Jane." "I love Jane."23 Far from stigmatizing Jane's abortion — all the Janes's abortions — the audience instead loudly and publicly declares not only their support, but their love.

Although moving hearts and minds is a goal of FYI's performances, they design their plays to provoke more than emotional or intellectual reactions. Their plays always involve audience participation that is aimed at building the skills of the audience so that they learn and practice tools to take action. Citing Augusto Boal's well-known statement that theater is "a rehearsal for the revolution,"24 Ramos told me that FYI plays are "rehearsal for real life"25 during which the audience is led to ask themselves, "What is my role in this?" The play remains Jane's story, but as the audience comes to care about Jane through her story, they are brought into an experience that shows them that they have a part to play and moves them to act.

In this way and others, This Boat changes the temporality of abortion storytelling. The play does not recount a story after the fact, but rather brings the audience into an in-progress story that they can still impact. The play literally changes the script for how these stories could go. Participants get to practice how to listen to young people and support them not only in finding information but also in showing up for them in ways that they request. In This Boat, performing abortion stories means making a new story possible.

Overwhelmingly, the activists and artists I talked to for this essay said that performing abortion stories as culture change work not only shifts the narrative around abortion quite literally; it also reduces abortion stigma and builds a strong movement led by those most impacted by restrictions on abortion and reproductive health. For these activists and artists, much like for Boal and the creators of CR, performing abortion stories is efficacious, which is to say that it does something in the world. Scholars of storytelling agree. bell hooks writes that "Oppressed people resist by identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story."26 (1989, 43).

Historically, we saw how abortion speakouts changed the culture around abortion in the US by laying the ground for the legalization of abortion, first in New York state and then federally. Indeed, although Illinois required parental notification when This Boat premiered in 2018, the law was repealed in 2021, bucking the trend of increasing restrictions on abortion at the state level. I am not saying that the play changed Illinois law, but I am arguing that the play contributed to the shift in Illinois culture that enabled such a striking legislative win. Stories, whether told from personal experience or through devised performance, can build empathy and shift how an issue is understood. And if we really listen to abortion stories from before, during, and after Roe, we know that Roe was never enough. Performing abortion stories is key to shifting culture so we can build the movement for abortion justice that we truly need.

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Acknowledgments: The author would like to thank Renee Bracey Sherman, Founder and Co-Executive Director of We Testify, for drawing her attention to This Boat Called My Body, as well as Quenna Lené Barrett, Alyssa Vera Ramos, and Nik Zaleski for generously sharing their insights and materials.

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Rosemary Candelario was awarded the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for her book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016) and received the 2022 Mid-Career Award from the Dance Studies Association. She is the co-editor with Bruce Baird of The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018) and with Matthew Henley of Dance Research Methodologies: Ethics, Orientations, Practices (Routledge 2023). Her current book project builds on decades of work for abortion access to examine performances about and in response to abortion by artists and activists in the US. Rosemary is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin and holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA. www.rosemarycandelario.net.

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