The 90-minute workshop at the conference will focus on the text-based approach and invite participants to explore their relationships with their vaginas, through role-playing and theatrical rehearsal. The workshop will begin with an opera libretto that tells the story of a woman arriving at a Department of Lost Genitalia to search for her missing vagina who had somehow decided to walk out. The woman has to identify her vagina from the other genitalia residing in the storage room, and the two discuss terms and new arrangements for a possible reunion and new partnership. Participants in the workshop will be invited to travel to and try on the perspectives of their genitalia, inspect their relationships with their human embodiments, and consider new possibilities as genitalia. The workshop will encourage participants to relate to their bodies in a safe, playful, and stimulating environment where they can reflect and explore individual and collective narratives around the vagina and people who identify as having them.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vagina is a word that we rarely hear in plain, day-to-day conversations. The imagery of the vagina is heavily censored and infrequently depicted in mainstream visual media. Lack of representation, myths, and social stigma have resulted in the vagina being portrayed in reductionary, utilitarian, disembodied, and hypersexualized ways throughout the history of human knowledge production. The alienation of the vagina, combined with strong but oppressed sexual tensions, has made the vagina and its human embodiment a provocative and performative site where people can explore and express personal, artistic, and political statements.
Feminist artists and art movements have been exploring this site both for creative experiments and as a standpoint from where they lean into mainstream conversations. Vagina Chorus, which started in 2019, joins this site as a community-engaged art project that explores and reconstructs narratives about the vagina and those who identify with it. Initiated by Althea Rao as the facilitating artist, the project involves conversations, physical exercises, and home visits with community members who identify as having a vagina over time. These interactions result in a multimedia performance where participants control a vaginal instrument using pelvic floor movements, creating a musical chorus that represents the voices and newfound knowledge of their bodies. A video of an iteration of the multimedia performance can be found at
https://vimeo.com/681479292.
The overall goal of this work is to facilitate a consensual reframing of minds, particularly around one's relationship with their vagina, through speculative worldbuilding, play and rehearsals, and embodied experiences. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval argues that “a differential oppositional consciousness recognizes and identifies oppositional expressions of power as consensual illusions.” When one becomes conscious of this consensual illusion assumed, established and reinforced by default and chooses to engage with otherwise, the work of rewriting and reclaiming agency has started. Thus, Vagina Chorus offers a framework in which people with vaginas stop responding to the tags, targets, connotations traditionally tied to the genitalia. Instead they make up new tags and meanings, and share these vocabularies with the world as new perspectives.
Vagina Chorus has received funding and mentorship from the Map Fund, Theater Mitu, Barnes Foundation and Perifit, among others. Commissioned by the Seattle Opera, Rao is currently developing an operatic variation of Vagina Chorus, as past participants showed interests in trying out text-based work as creative self-expression.
The 90-minute workshop at the conference will focus on the text-based approach and invite participants to explore their relationships with their vaginas, through role-playing and theatrical rehearsal. The workshop will begin with an opera libretto that tells the story of a woman arriving at a Department of Lost Genitalia to search for her missing vagina who had somehow decided to walk out. The woman has to identify her vagina from the other genitalia residing in the storage room, and the two discuss terms and new arrangements for a possible reunion and new partnership. Participants in the workshop will be invited to travel to and try on the perspectives of their genitalia, inspect their relationships with their human embodiments, and consider new possibilities as genitalia. The workshop will encourage participants to relate to their bodies in a safe, playful, and stimulating environment where they can reflect and explore individual and collective narratives around the vagina and people who identify as having them.
The workshop is open to people with vaginas or those who identify as having them. People with penises are welcome to attend, understanding that the primary focus of the project is the vagina and the vagina-embodied experience. No nudity or vaginal instrument use will be required during the workshop. Participants should expect activities such as drawing, conversation, improvisation, and some level of physical movement. The workshop prompt took inspiration from sex educator Al Vernaccio’s ongoing work.
