Women Can’t Wait

New York’s prize winning slam poetry diva,
playwright, stage- and screen-actress Sarah Jones opens this year’s festival
with a very special event.
Women Can’t Wait is a unique fusion of performance
and conference, theatre and spoken word, art and activism. Her show is as much
a draw for New York City’s clubby downtown crowds, as it is for international
representatives at meetings on women’s policy.
Sarah Jones first performed her
solo on the global “stage” of the United Nations at the International
Conference on Women’s Rights in June last year. If it were not for Gwyneth
Paltrow’s brief introduction, the world’s delegates might have believed that
this was a genuine conference-intervention (and NOT an actress performing).
“Documentary Theatre” or “Fake-conference” might be appropriate terms to
describe Women Can’t Wait, but unfortunately there is nothing fake about the
harrowing statements Jones interprets with such stunning conviction. She voices
the testimonies of eight women from different corners of the world (India, Japan,
USA, Uruguay, Kenya, Israel, Jordan, France) all living under laws and
conditions that violate their basic human rights. There is Praveen from India,
who suffers years of marital rape. Bonita from the US, who killed her husband
in self-defence, after he had nearly beaten her to death. Anna from Kenya, who
would rather have a ‘sweet sixteen’ than be the victim of female genital
mutilation. Jones’ accents are so impeccable, her body-language so precise, the
personalities so accurately drawn, that she needs only one prop to make the
transformation from one character’s story to the next: a scarf becomes a sash,
a head wrap, a doll…While dealing with the gravest of subjects, the actress
still throws in jokes, perfectly balancing on the thin line between humour and
seriousness. Women Can’t Wait, commissioned by the international women’s rights
organisation Equality Now, is a moving and urgent plea for justice. Jones’
magnificent appearance and interpretation was applauded and praised by the
press (from the New York Times and the Village Voice up to Variety and Elle) as
well as by audiences across the country.
After entering the first poetry slams
in New York, Sarah Jones gained attention and a growing crowd of fans with her
monologue Your Revolution, a sharp commentary on hip-hop’s rampant sexism, as
well as a hip-hop celebration that allowed women to enjoy it without having to
be a “bitch” or a “ho”. In 1997 she won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s Grand Slam
Championship for the monologue. Surface Transit, which she premiered in 1998,
is an incisively funny and poignant portrait of eight New Yorkers in a subway
car. This piece - in which she impersonates characters as different as a white
supremacist, a rapper in recovery, a Jewish grandma, and a homophobe white policeman
- won her the Best One Person Show Award at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival.
Praised for her finely nuanced way of acting, her amazing ear for the spoken
word, her sharp and abrupt rhythms, as well as for her complex portrayal of the
multicultural condition of contemporary society, she has become a true star in
the American booming spoken word scene and beyond. Performing and publishing
widely she also appears in TV productions and recently appeared in Spike Lee’s
new film Bamboozled. ”I’m mainly inspired by the way we’ve been ‘hoodwinked and
bamboozled’ as Malcom X would say – as a society and, frankly, globally – by
the images out there, the stereotypes, the ridiculous notions of who’s who,”
says Jones, who grew up in a family of mixed parentage herself. Writing and
performing her own texts, she mostly refers to experience: ”What is politically
correct for some people is living life for me.... Diversity is not just some
buzzword, it’s all of our lives.”
Sarah Jones presents Women Can’t Wait
exclusively as  a benefit performance,
meaning there is free audience admittance, and she is donating a share of her
performance fee directly to the non-governmental organisation Equality Now.

Women Can’t Wait by: Sarah Jones
introduced by Mandy Sullivan - Equality Now

in cooperation with Cankarjev
dom
with the support of the The
United States Embassy Ljubljana