Emotional Creature

 

Emotional Creature, Eve Ensler’s latest play, had its Asia Premiere at the ThiNK Festival in Goa on November 7, 2013, and its Mumbai Premiere at the Times of India Literature Festival on December 6, 2013.

 

Emotional Creature consists of original monologues about and for girls from around the world that will ignite their fierceness through storytelling, the unveiling of their secrets, and the explosion of taboos.  It is meant to inspire them to take agency over their minds, bodies, hearts, and curiosities.

 

The play includes monologues on: a girl struggling with peer pressure from cliques in Mumbai’s elite schools; a girl in Kenya who refuses to be cut (genitally mutilated) and goes to school instead; a sex trafficked girl in Bulgaria who only has thirty five minutes before her pimp comes looking for her; a very young labourer in China creating Barbie Dolls under slavery-like conditions; a pregnant teenager who is having a baby so someone will love her; a girl who feels she has to have sex or she will not be popular; a young Indian girl who is tired of the pressures placed upon her by her parents and our society and decides to teach them all a lesson. These are just a few.

 

Eve went to over 25 countries where she has conducted interviews with teenage girls in all those places. The piece will also include group monologues about topics as far ranging as: dancing; friendship; mothers and fathers; boyfriends/girlfriends; sports; poetry; piercings; clothes; food; empathy; running away from violence and pain; being good vs. being great.

 

The play uses dance, music, song and projections to create a one-of-a-kind theatrical experience. Emotional Creature is choreographed by the inimitable LONGINUS (of Slumdog Millionaire and Guzaarish fame.)

 

This theatrical piece will eventually be a vehicle for young girls all across India to participate in the V-Day movement through a new V-Girls program, in the same way The Vagina Monologues has built a movement on college campuses and in communities around the world.  The goal of V-Girls will be to engage young women in our “empowerment philanthropy” model, igniting their activism towards a better, safer India and world for them.

 

Given what is happening to young girls and women across India (and the world), there is no play or piece of entertainment that is more relevant to these times or more necessary towards dismantling the old and ushering in the change.