Veil

Political art is motion: The motion of life. For one to make an expression of political art, one must simultaneously make an expression of life. Often, when an aspect of life is left  unexpressed, the internalized feelings of such a repressed topic become purely personal issues. When art seeks to express these compartmentalized topics, the art then becomes a personal experience. In this way, political theater becomes an artistic medium that can touch lives, bring volume to the quiet, and, as in all political art, change lives.

There are many different personal issues for art to try and tackle. One of the most repressed and silenced voices in modern-day patriarchal societies is that of the average woman. The many problems facing any given woman in America are as wide as sexuality, personal responsibility, political voice, and basic human rights. Many women, at some point in their lives, feel a clash between their femininity and their identity outside of gender. While many women seek to solve this problem through any specific method, a majority simply push the issue out of their heads and make the issue purely subliminal.

Political theater is the opposite of this phenomenon: Reaching deep into the subconscious mind, pulling out severe issues of importance, and throwing them into the laps of an audience. A frequently spoken mantra of feminism is that “the personal is political.” This statement certainly holds much water in today’s age of repression and mass social silence, and the objectives of political theater are to capture these corrupt “personal” sentiments  and turn them inside-out for examination, ridicule, and progression. Such is the goal of the Feminist Performance Artists and many other political playwrights througout theatrical history. Feminist performers dealt with, and still deal with, issues of maternal obligations, political voice, and the lack of female input vs. the sexual avarice of men. By bringing such issues to light, a purely personal issue becomes an issue for all to ponder. The chief problem with tackling issues of repression is that of recognition, and political theater is just the human, personal experience to create the necessary awareness and empathy to overcome.