Empowered Young Women Spread Awareness Through Their Own Plays
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Teenage girls belonging to a Brooklyn troupe hope their original theatrical work can make a world of difference. Borough reporter Jeanine Ramirez filed the following report. The Project Girl Performance Collective, a nonprofit theater group based in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, empowers young women by helping them find their voice.
The participants, like Dominique Fishback, write and perform their own material and share some intimate details of their lives for an audience.
"I put it out, which was hard for me to do because it's really personal about my life and my family," says Fishback.
"My writing has gotten so much stronger and I've learned how to convey a message to an audience and I have never done that before," says performer Monica Furman
Project Girl started with 12 girls in 2008 and has grown to more than 80. They not only write about their own lives but also tackle all sorts of issues affecting communities and continents.
"Some of them do our global shows. It's much more difficult work. It's about rape in the Congo. It's about sex trafficking. It's about forced child marriage," says Project Girl Executive Director Jessica Greer Morris.
They've taken their work to stages across the country, including California and the White House. They have also toured with the United Nations' "Girl Up" campaign.
"Having girls tell their own stories about issues affecting them is incredibly powerful," says Morris. "You can go to the UN and talk about policies affecting women and girls until the cows come home, but when you have one girl come up and give one monologue about how she was personally affected, it makes all the difference in the world."
The girls say they hope their passion is infectious.
"One of the things that we definitely hope that they grasp from our performance is just being able to make a difference in the world and making changes," says performer Karen Vigo.
The group's founder, Ashley Marinaccio, says the mission has always been about empowerment.
"I always tear up, especially when they do a piece at the end of our shows called 'Girl Power, Get It.' And it's all of them, the large group singing, 'I'm a girl and I'm much more than I seem. I'm a girl, we defend what we believe.' It's so moving," says Marinaccio.
Hopefully, those messages can help raise the status of women worldwide.
For more information, visit http://projectgirlperformancecollective.org.