Latest Interactive Theater Project performance brings body image issues to the forefront
The Dennis Small Cultural Center brought the Interactive Theatre Project to stage on Thursday. ITP’s performance, “Up to Scale: His Weight. Her Issue?” is about body image from both the male and female perspectives.
The play focuses on the relationship between two characters, Karen and Dave. Jessica Levin, a sophomore theater major plays Karen, and Hasan Badwan, a 5th-year senior linguistics major, plays Dave. Karen and Dave find their relationship conflicted when Karen criticizes Dave’s weight.
After a short dialogue between Karen and Dave, the audience becomes a part of the performance and is encouraged to interact with the characters about body and weight images.
“(The performance) really developed and opened up communication about gender and weight issues,” Levin said.
Dawn Stanley, the assistant director of ITP and a sociology graduate student, wrote the play. Stanley said the script was influenced by her personal experiences, including what it was like growing up with an overweight father.
Weight and body image are just two of the many topics ITP bases its performances on. Previous performances encompassed topics of racism, sexism, homophobia and sexual assault.
“The ITP chooses to perform issues that we’re seeing and dealing with all the time, but have never been talked about,” said cast member Benjamin Whitehair, a 5th-year senior theater and political science major.
ITP started in the spring of 1999 to make conversation about topics affecting the community. Rebecca Brown Adelman and Trent Norman started the group.
“The Interactive Theatre Project uses theater as a means to get people to talk about community issues,” Norman said. “It provides an easy way to talk about a difficult topic.”
Whitehair said ITP is an easy place to express socially difficult opinions.
“It provides a safe place to communicate issues you necessarily couldn’t anywhere else,” Whitehair said. “I think that (ITP) is the most powerful venue for social change we have here on campus.”
Norman said ITP’s goal is to not only create communication within the performance, but to have this communication occur afterwards as a result of the performance.
“I want (the audience) to take the conversation outside of this room,” Norman said.
ITP eventually hopes to expand their message even further across campus.
“We’re here to support the mission of the university,” Norman said. “That is, to educate.”
For more information about the Interactive Theatre Project or how to request a performance, visit their Web site.
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Sara Fossum at sara.fossum@thecampuspress.com.
