Comedian Toni Nagy and performance artist Sarah Buckner have been touring their show “Grape Culture” – a comedic take on the disturbing cultural norms that constitute ‘rape culture’ – since June. They will be in Waitsfield this weekend.
Beginning in Los Angeles, California, they’ve worked their way through Edinburgh, Scotland, and are now coming to Waitsfield. On Saturday, October 12, the two will perform at Fire Folk Arts, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
“Grape Culture” is a tragicomedy that utilizes sketch comedy, dance, movement, and film to explore how acts and experiences of sexual assault are censored, minimized, and ultimately allowed in American culture.
The term for this, “rape culture,” was first used in the 1971 book “Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women,” following a conference about rape in New York City. The notion of a culture in which sexual assault is pervasive and normalized, however, was developed throughout the 1960s by second-wave feminists.
The show’s title is a nod to the fact that online platforms like Instagram and TikTok commonly remove or require censorship of content containing the word “rape.”
This kind of digital censorship isn’t a new phenomenon. In 2011, a writer for The Huffington Post blogged that her U.S. cellphone provider was censoring the word to appear as “r***” in text messages on her smartphone.
Nagy and Buckner, who are based in New Hampshire and upstate New York, respectively, said they want to normalize talking about traumatic experiences of assault – especially through comedy and other aspects of performance.
“We’re playing with the emotional complexity of trauma in a way that isn’t so heavy,” Nagy said. “The language I speak with is comedy, and I use that language because it disarms people and opens their hearts.”
In addition to performing stand-up and sketch comedy in online videos and in venues across the U.S., Nagy has also acted and directed in films, written screenplays and founded an independent media company called Cavelight Productions.
The idea for “Grape Culture” came about a year ago when Nagy learned about work that Buckner was doing for her master’s degree in documentary arts at Duke University. Buckner documented herself processing trauma from past experiences of sexual assault and even filmed herself quitting a job in a workplace where she’d been sexually harassed by her boss. “I was just kind of blown away by that intimate footage,” Nagy said. She knew immediately that she wanted to perform with Buckner.
Buckner said the collaboration was critical for her work, as “I was just unsure about how to present this work to the world, standing on my own two feet, by myself,” she said.
Nagy and Buckner have also teamed up in other ways. They said that while touring “Grape Culture,” it was apparent how much people wanted to talk about their own experiences of trauma. Both being dance teachers, they started offering a somatic movement workshop called CLAIM YOURSELF in which participants utilize breath and movement to access parts of the self that have been cut away due to the dissociation, guilt, shame, self-judgment, and censorship surrounding their trauma.
The workshop, which will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. on October 12, is another iteration of processing the effects of ‘rape culture.’ “The reality is,” Nagy said, “we’re just not going to heal if we only discuss these difficult topics infrequently.”
Tickets for “Grape Culture” (ages 17-plus) and the somatic workshop (ages 13-plus) can be purchased at firefolkarts.com.
