TREASURE BEACH, St. Elizabeth- Producer and performer, Sharon Martini will put on a benefit performance in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth tonight through a dramatisation of the play The Vagina Monologues.

The Vagina Monologues production at the South Coast’s Frenchman’s Reef Restaurant & Bar is part of what is called the ‘V-Day Community Campaign’.

In St Elizabeth for the second time, this Production joins a global effort to stop violence against women and girls. It aims to create awareness about different types of abuse against women and girls, in addition to raising funds for education, training and advocacy programs.

The 2012 cast features “The Ladies Who Dare.” Martini said that the group is made up of “everyday, extraordinary women- farmers, grandmothers, mothers, professors, domestic workers, social workers, festival princesses.”

The selection includes women from the Treasure Beach Community and other communities in St Elizabeth. However, women in the wider Jamaican society will be involved.

Namely, Dr Glenda Simms, former Executive Director of the Bureau of Women’s Affairs, Sharon Martini, organiser of the event, Odile Blake, First Runner up in the Miss Manchester Festival Queen 2012 and Marie Sparkes, Director of Pure Potential, a privately-operated Jamaican Therapy company dealing with abuse on individual, group and organizational levels.

The “award-winning” Vagina Monologues was first performed “off- Broadway.”  It “dives into the mystery, humour, pain, power, wisdom, outrage and excitement buried in women’s experiences.” The play for more than twelve years is said to have given voice to experiences and feelings of women that were not previously exposed in public.

V-day was established on Valentine’s Day in 1998 by the playwright of The Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler and a group of women in New York City.

Ensler, who is also a women’s activist saw the potential for greater impact when women would approach her after seeing the play to share their own “stories of survival.”

The mission of V-day is that the performances serve as a mechanism to end violence against women and girls.

To this end, every year the playwright allows groups around the world to produce a performance of the play, as well as other works created for the V-day Community Campaign and use the proceeds for local individual projects.   V-day is between February 14- April 30 each year. However, permission is sometimes given for performances to take place outside of these dates. Ten per cent of the proceeds from all the performances around the world are contributed to the “spotlight” project which is the main activity of the global V-day organization. The rest of the income is used to further the work of a local project geared towards empowering women in the respective places that V-day activities are held.

The V-day 2012 Spotlight Campaign is on the “The Women and Girls of Haiti.”

The Spotlight Campaign will highlight the high levels of violence against women and girls in Haiti. According to Martini the focus will be on the increased rates of sexual violence since the “devastating” earthquake in January 2010. All funds raised through the Spotlight Campaign will be used to support a “revolutionary” national program in Haiti lead by a coalition of women activists that will address sexual violence through “art, advocacy, safe shelter and legal services.”

The group “St Elizabeth Women” founded in Malvern by Dr Glenda Simms will be the local beneficiary of this year’s event in Jamaica.

– Alicia Sutherland