Photos by Alexandra Scoville
“Because I took off all my clothes?” … “Because I let you in?” … “Because I said ‘yes’ to you once?” … “Or a thousand times?” … “Consent once is not consent always.”
This series of five signs hangs next to a bed with pillows bristling with the sharp ends of nails and sheets adorned with dozens of metal whistles.
On the bed, a woman lays on her back, hands pressed to her forehead. She rolls onto her side and halfheartedly pulls at a whistle with her teeth as she lifts herself up.
The woman is Chelsea Pace, the creator and sole actress in “Asking for It: The Consent Project,” which opened on Third Friday and will be playing on Fridays and Saturdays at Roosevelt Row gallery Modified Arts through April 12. The project is Pace’s thesis for her Masters of Fine Arts degree at ASU.
Pace, a theater student and teacher, is a fight choreographer who works staging intimacy and sexual violence. “The Consent Project” was born out of her desire to explore the topic of consent and date and acquaintance rape, as well as to spur a conversation about sexual consent.
“Consent is universal,” Pace said. “If this can spark at least one conversation about consent between two people, or a group of people, that may not have had it before, then I’m happy.”
The show, which Pace has avoided calling a “performance,” is meant to be displayed in more of a gallery format, she said. That means audience members can move around as they like and look at what they want, when they want. Pace circles through the space in 10-15 minute rotations, repeating the same behaviors each time.
Pace said she wanted to do the show in Modified Arts because she liked the architecture of the space. An added bonus, Pace said, is that the gallery is directed by Kimber Lanning, who is a woman and a business owner.
“I love this space,” Pace said. “It’s very ‘Phoenix’ to me, with the exposed duct work. And I felt that it was a neutral space, but it was a neutral space that had enough existing architecture that it could inform and help shape the piece.”
The architecture of Modified Arts is strongly incorporated with “The Consent Project.” There are four distinct locations: a room filled with televisions and trees made of alcohol bottle trunks and red Solo cup foliage; an area with thin poles netted with plastic zip ties; a room with a counter and lingerie hung from the ceiling; and the bedroom, which is strewn with metal whistles. Each area boasts signs on the wall with messages about consent.
Each location represents an area of research Pace completed. She put herself in different situations to do research for the project, including walking down Mill Avenue in Tempe and recording things that were said to her, such as “you’re too sexy to be walking alone like that,” and also getting drunk.
Pace found five criteria people use to support the idea that someone was “asking for it,” creating what she called “a culture of victim-blaming, frequently a culture of slut-shaming.”
The reasons include: a woman being out by herself, how much she has had to drink, what she is wearing, that she brought someone into her room and her past behavior.
The rooms themselves tie in to each argument. For example, the room full of alcohol-container trees correlates with the concept of people using how much a person has had to drink as a reason to assault them. The area full of zip ties indicates an unsafe space — a person cannot move through it without being touched — which connects to the idea that a person’s location means they were “asking for it.”
Jake Pinholster, director of the ASU School of Film, Dance and Theatre at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, helped fund the show and consulted on Pace’s project. He said the piece was successful in involving the audience in the problem.
“Chelsea’s done an excellent job of developing something that’s not preachy or in-your-face, but that does an excellent job of putting us inside the experience and telling us what the experience is,” Pinholster said.
Shannon Phelps, a theater sophomore, attended the show on Friday and said she connected with Pace’s work.
“The way it’s formatted allows you to put yourself in that situation, and when you’re going on this journey with her, it allows you to feel what she feels,” she said.
Even though Pace’s character has no dialogue, visitors said they still felt like they understood what she was going through. Lynn Smith, who also attended Friday’s show, said the most powerful moment in the piece was when Pace was lying on the bed.
“As you go through the performance piece of the installation, you read all the comments and you see all the visuals,” Smith said. “You know that she’s going onto the bed against her will.”
“Asking for It: The Consent Project” will be playing at Modified Arts Fridays from 6-9 p.m. and Saturdays from 7-10 p.m. through Saturday, April 12. The show is free, but donations are accepted.
Contact the reporter at mbilker@asu.edu
