Unconscious Curriculum – Rape Culture on Campus (UC), was a 2016 student performance project that interrogated issues in rape culture and the normalization of sexual violence. The project required students and facilitators alike to define healthy boundaries, embrace diverse voices, and interact with an awareness of compassion. Student-performers were tasked with the roles of being devisors, researchers, and activists, while their emotional connection to issues of rape culture were either being re-visited or introduced to their lived experiences for the first time.
Unconscious Curriculum
Arresting Rape Culture on Campus
Performer/Devisor
Synopsis from UWaterloo’s Theatre and Performance Program
How have we become complicit in the normalization of sexual violence? When post-secondary education addresses difficult, personal, and even traumatic subject matter, what kind of learning outcome should we expect? Unconscious Curriculum: Rape Culture on Campus was a performance project that tackled the complicated layers of rape culture in an educational context.
In a multimedia performance, student-performers dug deep to discover how rape culture is perpetuated in their classrooms and on their campus. Part of a yearlong project with the working title “Arresting Rape Culture”, the public performance was drawn from the research and creative work developed by students and faculty in three fall 2016 courses in performance, writing, and design. Unconscious Curriculum asked the audience to be witnesses, and even participants, in an exploration of mutual complicity in rape culture, including hidden factors and post-secondary educational practices, that normalize gender-based violence.
Acting as characters not so far removed from their actual lives, the performers strove to articulate ways of experiencing and understanding themselves in relation to others, with the overarching goal to arrest - to see, to apprehend, and to understand - the causes of rape.
Explore the dramaturgical unpacking of the development of Unconscious Curriculum below.
The First Question We Explored
What is rape culture?
Rape culture can be seen, experienced, and defined in many different ways.
A question of believability within rape culture became an important inspiration in the development performance of Unconscious Curriculum.
In devising this performance between one group of students tasked with writing and performing and another group working with the scenographic elements of video, sound, and light, the way we see and talk about rape culture became a focus of our work.
Recounting As a Student-Performer
Although these student-characters were meant to mimic our lived experience, it was a unanimous decision that our character should be a composite of our own experiences as well as what we were researching about student experiences in post-secondary educational institutions across Canada. Our aim was to not only represent the institutionalization of students in academia, but to represent the institutionalization of students’ bodies and sexual identities, perpetuating sexual micro-aggression, harassment, and assault. There was autobiography, but as facts were filtered through our varying perceptions and experiences of rape culture, what emerged was part creative and part factual; an act of selecting, of ordering, of editing, of forgetting, of embellishing, of venting.
