Professor emeritus Leslie Jacobson returned from her annual trip to Morocco with a refreshed sense of ideas in the works: writing plays with community liaison about local hardships like homelessness.
With the help of a professor at Al Akhawayn University – located among the Middle Atlas Mountains in the city of Ifrane – teaching Gender and Media, she used student-conducted interviews in the course to write and adapt the critical human rights themes into performances for any students, anonymously, to act out in a 45-minute stage production.
This year, the students focused on the sensitive-but-prevalent topic of sexual assault and violence, mainly against women, to speak about the country's unnerving truth of women being frequent victims of violence and assault from simply walking freely with friends, by themselves or wearing Western clothing.
Although some people understand that these instances of aggression occur, the class helps take young people, who are in the midst of setting their values, to the next level of disrupting the cycle of abuse and oppression.
"Even if we know this goes on, that's not enough," Jacobson said. "We have to do something to stop it going on."
She said theater is a tool set up to tell stories, ushering in a "safe environment" to experience emotions along with the actors. One of her clarifications to students is differentiating sympathy and empathy: with sympathy, you feel for the other person through a boundary of separation whereas with empathy the audience is completely in tune with the actor's feelings.
"The stories help me to actually feel what it might be like to have these experiences," she said.
Formerly serving as GW's chair of the Department of Theater and Dance for 13 years, Jacobson communicated to her students the pertinence of storytelling from her expansive knowledge and talked through tough issues with the discussions she administered post-production.
"Talking to the committed, talking to the people who know this, is reinforcing, but really what we are trying to do is change the way other people might look at this," Jacobson said.
Jacobson said she would like to gather GW students to do the same project and act it out, and from there, send the play script to Morocco for their students to act out the American version and vice versa. Telling these stories brings Jacobson, her students and those that have shared their traumas to a more hopeful tone about altering social norms and the gender dynamics going on in every part of the world.
"I think it makes you feel as if, 'Well this was an awful thing that I couldn't stop at the time but maybe sharing this story will save somebody else,'" she said. "I think it is empowering to tell stories and to see somebody else telling that story."
Jacobson continued her efforts right here in D.C. as she put on a performance with the help of Street Sense Media about ending homelessness and addressing the crisis, at the Church of the Epiphany on Feb. 5, 2023.
