Naked Poets Celebrate International Women’s Day

Women in the Raw performers bare it all for PEERS and International Women’s Day

VICTORIA, CANADA – A group of women made a statement about body image and femininity Sunday night, March 1, by reading poetry — and taking their clothes off.

Women in the Raw, an event which showcased a group of six nude performers, took place at the Victoria Event Centre as part of the LoudSpeaker festival, a two-week-long celebration honouring International Women’s Day.

The performance wowed an all-women and trans audience of almost 100 people, as six beautiful bodies performed monologues, poems, songs and conversations on stage in the nude.

Kristy Westendorp, one of the performers and lead organizer of Women in the Raw, said the performance went better than she could have ever hoped.

“I had women coming up to me in tears following the performance and telling me how emotional it was for them,” Westendorp said. “People laughed, cried and I think ultimately were touched by our vulnerability.”

Westendorp developed the idea of an all-women event after performing nude for last year’s co-ed event, Poetry in the Raw.

“After Poetry in the Raw, I was contacted by a teacher from one of the high schools in Victoria who insisted that every girl in her school needed to hear the poem I had performed about body image (Thin is In),” she said.

Last year’s event had been 18-and-up because of the co-ed nudity, but Westendorp wanted to create an avenue for women of all ages to see what different bodies look like naked — so only women and transgendered individuals were allowed. Then she received an offer to make it part of the LoudSpeaker festival. Westendorp was overjoyed when LoudSpeaker organizer Andrea Routley offered her the night and the venue to do the show, and she immediately put together a team of women with “strong voices and powerful words.” From there, Westendorp said the direction of the show became largely group driven.

“Everyone who performed in the show had a say in how it came together, and I think that collaboration is what made it such an amazing performance,” she said, emphasizing that the purpose was to highlight a cross-section of women.

While Westendorp said Women in the Raw didn’t start as a fundraiser, the group was excited to raise money for Prostitutes Empowerment and Education Resource Society (PEERS) after joining LoudSpeaker.

“The show was very much about ‘de-stigmatizing’ nudity and sexuality,” Westendorp said. “The more we are able to talk about these things and not think of them as dirty or secretive [the quicker] we will see the world become a safer place for sex-trade workers who live in so much shame and don’t know where or how to get help because of this.”

PEERS Sex Worker Integration Co-ordinator Tracie Fawkes was in attendance Sunday night. Fawkes said she was touched by the sincerity of the performances, and the generosity of the event.

“I think it’s fantastic, the choice to showcase raw women,” said Fawkes. “It’s the perfect way to talk about bodies and to take back ownership of them — to show that women everywhere have the intelligence to make those choices.”

Kelly Dunning, a UVic visual arts grad and a longstanding member of the Victoria poetry community, said the night was an astounding experience.

Dunning attended last year’s Poetry in the Raw, but said the all-women experience was vastly different.

“It’s nothing we don’t witness every day getting dressed, but when the only bodies you see naked are your own and the ones in magazines or on TV, you compare yourself to them,” Dunning said. “You don’t often get the chance to see real bodies — the woman sitting next to you on the bus, or the one who serves you coffee. This makes you feel more real, even more idolized, without trying to live up to the airbrushed image.”

Yet Dunning said the true intimacy of the evening came from the poetry.

“The poems the performers are reading are already so raw, but now neither the poem [nor the] poet has anything left to hide behind. That doubles the vulnerability, so the work is even more powerful,” she said.

Missie Peters, one of the night’s performers who helped stage-manage the event, said that while this is the third time she’s performed “in the raw,” she (and many of the other six performers) were doing things on stage they never had before — like talking openly and honestly, improvising and singing.

“When you perform nude several things happen,” said Peters. “First, there is no barrier between you and the audience; everything you say is a direct hit. You are bare, raw. It makes for an incredibly powerful performance. Second, the themes explored in the show, of body image, of what it means to be a women, of life experiences, are all amplified for the audience by experiencing women reveling in their bodies, not hiding them. [Finally], while every single performer had a different shape and held her body differently, it was easy to see that each was beautiful.”

All the performers were amazed by how quickly they were comfortable being naked around each other, said Peters, who emphasized that she was honoured to work with such a talented group of women. Despite the nudity, Peters said what scared her most was the refrain, “Hymn to Our Bodies,” that the group sang at the end.

“I’m a poet; I don’t sing. So I was fine with being naked for the whole show, but singing in front of people — that was a real challenge,” Peters said.

Westendorp said that while the entire show was “a whirlwind of unbelievable,” the most powerful moment for her actually came when the group sang. The refrain repeated: “Get it out of your head babe, you’re more than just your body. But your body has brought you so far, so far. But your body has brought you so far.” Westendorp believes this became the theme of the evening.

“Our bodies get us where we need to go and we need to love and respect them,” she said. “So often all we have for our bodies is judgment, critique and hatred.”

Peters’ hope is that the audience left the performance with a greater sense of self and community.

“I hope the women in the audience [realized] that the issues they struggle with in their own heads are the same ones every other woman goes through, and none of us have the answers,” said Peters. “Certainly, when we were exploring the issues as part of our practicing, we kept coming back to the fact that being a woman is a journey, a process, with no end point. So I hope our show was a bright point in people’s own personal journeys.”

Westendorp emphasized that while the show proved that parts of every woman’s experiences overlap, it’s important to note that each one is on her own special path.

“[As performers] we’re not special; we’re women just like the women in the audience,” she said. “We’ve just given ourselves permission to share our voices and our words — and that strength is within every woman.”

Courtesy Martlet