HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF
BY LILIANA PADILLA

"Your Body is a Weapon"

 

Winner of the Yale Drama Prize and a finalist for the 2019 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, How to Defend Yourself is a startlingly honest play about self-defence, desire, and healing.

 

Seven college students gather for a DIY self-defence workshop after a sorority sister is sexually assaulted. They learn to use their bodies as weapons. The wrestle with their desires. They learn “not to be a victim.” Learning self- defence becomes a channel for the students’ rage, anxiety, confusion, trauma and desire. Lots of desire.

 

How to Defend Yourself explores what it means to live in a culture saturated with violence and what it means to heal. With sharp humour and brutal honesty, the play examines what we want, how to ask for it, and the violator and violated inside us all.

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After their acclaimed production of Dry Land, Outhouse and director, Claudia Barrie, are thrilled to team up again with a cast of some of Sydney’s most exciting emerging talent.

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11 August- 3 September at The Old Fitz Theatre