Shining light on body image

Six women stand on stage, reciting hurtful words they’ve been called in the past.

Slut. Whore.

The piece, called the Post-It Note piece, is one of 19 that comprise an original theater production, “Mirror Mirror,” that deals with issues of beauty and body image, how women perceive their bodies and how those perceptions are shaped by outside forces such as the media. The actors are women from Russell Sage College and area high schools; they developed “Mirror Mirror” in workshops facilitated by Leigh Strimbeck, the play’s director and a part-time lecturer in theater at the University of Albany.

“Mirror Mirror” will be performed in the James L. Meader Little Theatre at Russell Sage College in Troy from Feb. 28 to March 2. A special matinee production for mothers and daughters between the ages of 14 and 17 will be held at 2 p.m. on March 1 as part of a free day-long event, held in conjunction with Women’s History Month, focusing on body image.

Strimbeck said the production was developed with its audience in mind; it’s PG-13, though language hasn’t been censored. When researching “Mirror Mirror,” Strimbeck interviewed two middle school girls who told her they’d been called “whore” and “slut” at school. “This was a day-to-day experience,” she said. “I hope parents realize that what we’re doing is shining a light on it. We’re doing something very boundary breaking, but it’s not all in good fun.”

Reflections

The message of “Mirror Mirror” is fairly simple. “We’re all spending a little too much time thinking about how we look,” Strimbeck said. “It’s not like we’re saying, ‘Don’t worry, eat whatever you want.’ ... Too much energy is spent trying to look the way the media tells us to look.” Women, she said, should be able to feel comfortable with how they look, even if it doesn’t conform to idealized images in television and movies.

As a theater director, “My first goal is connecting to a community,” Strimbeck said. In this case, “the community is mothers and their teen daughters.”

Twenty-year-old Phyillicia Bishop decided to audition for “Mirror Mirror” shortly after she recited a Maya Angelou poem, “Phenomenal Woman,” as part of The Beautiful Women Project, a traveling exhibit that visited Russell Sage last fall and features the photographs and biographies of 35 women between the ages of 3 and 90. “I started getting more interested in how women view their bodies,” explained Bishop, a Brooklyn native who is majoring in communications with a minor in dance.

Each member of the cast is responsible for one of the pieces in “Mirror Mirror.”

Bishop, whose family is from Jamaica, said her piece explores the way people in a different culture might look at a woman’s body in a different way than mainstream America.

“In Jamaica, having a shape is nice,” said Bishop, the first person in her family born in the U.S. “Intelligence is nice. They say that if you’re not smart no one is going to talk to you.” In the U.S., it’s different, she said. “If you open a magazine, everyone is thin. You think, ‘I just want my stomach to be flat.’ ”

In her communications classes, discussion often centers around how the media portrays women, Bishop said. “You never see someone who is a regular-sized woman,” she said. “Everything is air-brushed.”

In another “Mirror Mirror” piece, one cast member talks about being fat. Other cast members talk about their experiences with eating disorders.

Other segments are less personal, even absurd.

One piece shows a pig watching two women getting dressed up to go out; the pig is narrating a documentary and trying to figure out what the women are doing. The bra, the pig speculates, is what women use to keep predators away from their udders.

Body Reflections will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and will feature discussions such as “The Powerful Princess — Breaking the Looking Glass” and “It’s Just Food — Or is It?”

body image

As a women’s college, Russel Sage is “well positioned to address issues of body image,” said Leigh Davies, an assistant professor of creative arts in therapy at Russell Sage. “Hopefully we’re empowering ourselves as community members to take on body image in a non-controlled way.”

Davies will facilitate a workshop on tattoos and body art. Students with tattoos will talk about their tattoos, and what they mean, and how it relates to transitions they’ve gone through in life. Tattoos, she said, “are much more a part of the youth movement of today.”

The “Mirror Mirror” project began when David Baecker, assistant professor of theatre at Russell Sage, approached Strimbeck and asked if she would be interested in directing a play at Sage.

“He thought the young women at Russell Sage would benefit from having a woman director,” Strimbeck recalled.

She looked through published scripts, before telling Baecker that she wanted to create an original work that examined women, self-esteem and the media. “I had always wanted to do this,” she said.

The process of developing “Mirror Mirror” was open-ended and collaborative, Strimbeck said.

She ran a workshop last spring with six women from Russell Sage, and created about a half hour of material.

Last fall she decided to expand the work, and brought a new cast together; the production is now over an hour long. They read the book “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body” by Courtney E. Martin.

food survey

They distributed surveys to women. One survey focused on how women feel about food, their weight, and eating. It asked women what they think about when they sit down to eat, or how they feel when they see someone who is overweight.

Another survey included questions about self-image: would they ever have plastic surgery, what is their favorite body part, do they wear make-up.

In all, Strimbeck and the cast member conducted more than 100 interviews with women between the ages of 5 and 85.

About 25 percent of women on campus have had an eating disorder such as anorexia or bulimia, Strimbeck said. Noting that gender equity has improved since the 1970s, when she attended college, she said, “We’ve come a long way, but I don’t think we’re as healthy as we should be.”

Strimbeck said women are receiving confusing messages from the world about what they should do and who they should be.

She said women on television are typically “intelligent, groomed, always ready for sex,” but that in real life women cannot “do it all.” They’re trying to do it all, “and they’re driving themselves crazy,” she said. Much of this, she said, is the fault of television, movies and magazines.

“I’m becoming middle-aged, and I feel barraged, like I should look 18,” she said. “Why should I look 18 when I’m the mother of two adolescents?”