Menstrual Care Charter

Premiered live at Reading Assembly 2021, Menstrual Care Charter is Performing Women’s Health’s inaugural event. The performance will be followed by an interdisciplinary Q&A with leading menstruation experts. Before the event, during the event and beyond the event, we ask Reading Assembly’s participants and audiences or anyone interested in the topic to contribute with their menstrual care demands, votes on demands and comments on Menstrual Care Charter’s Padlet

Menstrual Care Charter is co-directed by Dr Verónica Rodríguez Morales (Teaching Fellow in Theatre and Performance at the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, UoR) and Gemma Colclough (Postgraduate Researcher at the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, UoR). Menstrual Care Charter’s performers are students of the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading.  

Menstrual Care Charter was created in three stages. In the first stage, a survey was created and completed by over thirty menstruants, who told us about their menstrual care rituals and perceptions of their period. In the second stage, a workshop that experimented with the survey responses and the idea of a menstrual care charter was delivered. In the third stage, Menstrual Care Charter was fully devised as a five-minute performance piece. Please, watch our trailer, recorded during our first workshop, in this website.    

At the live Reading Assembly session on 28th May 3-4pm, following the performance of Menstrual Care Charter, the co-directors and one of the show’s performers will be joined by prominent specialists in the field of menstruation, Professor Bettina Bildhauer, gynecologist Vassilios Kontopoulos and educator Chella Quint to explore the narratives and issues raised in the co-created live charter and the performance itself. The project acknowledges Chella Quint’s Period Positive Pledge as a precedent to Menstrual Care Charter.  

Menstrual Care Charter wants to raise awareness about the omissions, interconnections and overlappings of care and about menstrual health as well as menstrual-related illnesses. As part of Menstrual Care Charter’s legacy, an edited version of the co-created charter (by the performers and the event participants) will be published. We envision the co-created resulting menstrual care charter as a tool for advocacy and change and therefore better co-care. 

End the reign of pain normality! Saying to someone “pain is normal” is bad care and we hope we are here to help change that. Repeat with us: “pain is not normal”. 

Please, write your demands on Menstrual Care Charter’s Padlet

Contributors

Dr Verónica Rodríguez Morales (Teaching Fellow in Theatre and Performance) and Gemma Colclough (Postgraduate Researcher at FTT), Department of Film, Theatre and Television, University of Reading.

Clarisse Ageorges, Matilda Brunelli, Jameilia Gardener, Emily Heighton, Jodie-May Roach

Guest speakers: Professor Bettina Bildhauer, Chella Quint, Dr Vassilios Kontopoulos

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