FGCU student turns stories about rape into theater

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Their stories have been kept secret, told in whispers to only the most trusted of confidants or through tears to a police officer.

They are graphic, raw, emotional and violent.

They are about rape, molestation, victim blaming and surviving.

Megan Shindler is giving life to these kinds of stories. She is the creator of  "S(he) Will Fade", a theatrical ethnography that tells the stories of survivors of sexual violence.

"I think the one thing that I can say is doing this defines my identity, and that's not something I am afraid to say," said Shindler, 22, of Cincinnati, Ohio. "Most people would say, 'Oh gosh, what a terrible thing to define your whole existence."

But Shindler has turned a vision she had as a teenager into a small movement on the Florida Gulf Coast University campus that is part performance, art and social activism.

Shindler meets survivors of sexual assaults — not all are in college —  in private, records their stories and transcribes them. The stories are retold in performances through the voices of college-aged women. The women dress in black when they perform, and they retell the transcribed stories unedited.

"This is a courageous topic to be talking about," said Nicola Foote, who has taught Megan at FGCU and served as an adviser. "People don't want to hear about it because it is uncomfortable. And the way her group presents this, it really turns the typical narrative around... and lets you see the experience of having lived through this."

For Shindler, "S(he) Will Fade" is personal. She understands what survivors go through — the solitude, the insecurities, the fear of telling their story.

"The summer before I entered high school, it was the summer of 2009, I had survived an attack," she said. "And I had stayed silent about it for a very long time. In fact, up to this day in many areas of my life, I am still very silent about it. In fact, my whole family doesn't quite know the story."

Shindler's attack is part of what inspires and drives her. She has traveled to collect stories and sometimes spent all night transcribing a recording

"The experience of taking these stories and of looking someone in the eyes and saying ..., 'You will never be alone,' ... is truly the closest thing I think I have ever had to transcendentalism," Shindler said. "I think it's almost spiritual."

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Shindler is a senior honors student studying political science and theater. She graduates this month — a semester early — and plans to pursue a master's degree in fine arts.

She is outspoken and strong willed. She speaks about sexual assault with the passion and authority of a veteran sexual assault advocate.

"The tapes that were released with Donald Trump saying things to the effect of, 'I don't even have to wait. I just grab them by the p----,' the accounts of women being violently grabbed, touched, kissed, coerced are ... deplorable, and they are unignorable," Shindler said.

To equate violent language, sexually violent and oppressive language to locker room talk, and to develop a facade around these words you have said, that the whole nation has heard as, 'Oh, they are just locker room talk', that is the biggest example of rape culture I think I have ever seen."

The idea to try to bring attention to sexual assault came to Shindler when she was 15 years old. Back then, her idea didn't have a name or performers.

When Shindler was in high school, she used Tumblr, a social media platform, to post poetry, read poetry written by others and to connect with other poets who wrote about political topics and social justice issues.

One night before bed, when Shindler was a high school senior, she posted on Tumblr about how she wanted to empower sexual violence survivors, by collecting their stories and then turning them into documentary theater pieces.

Shindler said when she woke to get ready for school the next day, she had hundreds of messages in her inbox.

Shindler recorded her first story June 15, 2013, using a 1990s-style box recorder that belonged to her father as she and a 23-year-old woman spoke via Skype. The woman was 17 years old when she was attacked.

"It was a story that really got to the very heart of the issue," she said. "It spoke about the community. It spoke about the silencing effect. It spoke about her experiences with victim blaming and what it was like to be denounced and blamed as a victim by her own parents.

It was a story that was just too important, too urgent and too sensitive to let go of."

Shindler titled the story "Three Generations." Three generation of women in the woman's family had survived rapes.

When Shindler arrived at college in August 2013, she was still collecting stories but had not figured out what to do with them.

Shindler asked Foote, one of her honors course professors, what to do. Shindler explained what she was doing, the stories she was collecting.

"The look on her face was like, 'Oh, no. You don't need to see me. You need to see a counselor,'" Shindler remembered.

Shindler was not deterred. She continued explaining to Foote how she had thought about turning what she was collecting into an anthology of stories or a script for the stage.

"It was very important to me that it be alive and at the very core of the vision that I was trying to articulate to her was this urgency for these stories to come to life," Shindler said.

Foote encouraged Shindler to see her vision through.

The name for Shindler's project came about while she was working on another project. For roughly three weeks, Shindler slept for only a few hours each night and then would wake and write the first things that came to mind.

She ended up with a 25-page jumbled and discombobulated script. She noticed she wrote the phrase "S(he) Will Fade," just as it appears now as the name of her project, about 25 times.

Shindler said the name of her project has come to mean several things to her, including being symbolic of what happens to survivors and their stories in a 24-hour news cycle.

"It literally fades from the view of the world and that person fades with it," she said.

Shindler recruited five other FGCU students — all women  — to help her carry out her vision for "S(he) Will Fade."

They have performed mostly at FGCU in large classrooms and on the campus pavilion. Last weekend, they performed at the FGCU Theatre Lab.

Natoya Lambert, 19, of Tampa, a junior theater major, is one of the women that Shindler asked to be a part of "S(he) Will Fade."

"I am big on social change in general and then when we talked about it, she just had so much passion for it," said Lambert, who plans to move to California and pursue acting after she graduates. "It touched me really a lot, and I knew that it was something I wanted to be part of because it was an amazing cause."

Lambert and other women involved in "S(he) Will Fade" showed up at FGCU's Civic Engagement Day earlier this year dressed in black and with white tape over their mouths.

Their message: Rape survivors feel like they are being silenced, she said.

As word about "S(he) Will Fade" has spread across campus, other students have gotten involved.

The Florida Gulf Coast University Dance Company recently performed choreographed dances inspired by the words from Shindler's transcribed recordings.

Shannon Lucey, who wants to be a pianist, created music inspired by the words.

Caitlin Rosolen, an art student, created an abstract painting as Shindler stood in front of a microphone and a video camera and read "Nothing but the Blood," a story of a college student's rape. Rosolen used clothing similar to what the victim wore when she was attacked  — a pair of black shorts and a striped shirt — to create the painting.

Shindler has asked Victoria Blair, 21, a junior at FGCU, to keep the "S(he) Will Fade" movement going at FGCU after she graduates.

"Emotionally that's going to be a lot, but I believe that it's important," said Blair, who is majoring in psychology and minoring in biology and French. "It's worth it."

Blair first heard about Shindler's project in a civic engagement class they took during the 2016 spring semester.

"She's pitching how she is going to artistically represent this topic," Blair said. "It really kind of drew everyone's attention, and it was powerful. That's what initially drew me to it. I remember getting chills when she talked about it."

Blair said she remembered thinking as Shindler talked about her project that she could pick a project that would have a minimal risk or give Shinder's project a try.

She joined Shindler's team and what started out as just a class project for Blair has turned into a much longer commitment.

"This is what I want to use my voice for ... to make some impact while I can," Blair said.