Collective Sex aims to end silence and evolve human consciousness

New York-based actress Poppy Liu has spent a lot of time discussing her abortion on college campuses recently. Actually, she lets her voiceover do most of the talking as she stands to the side of dark auditoriums, the film she produced projected on-screen for crowds of students to watch.

Liu has been using โ€œNames of Woman,โ€ a thirteen-minute short film based on her own abortion story, as a way to start conversations about reproductive rights and justice as she tours it through college campuses across the Northeast. The first major film project produced by Collective Sexโ€”a production company Liu founded in 2015โ€”has even been screened at a few Planned Parenthood fundraisers.

But at the same time, โ€œNames of Womenโ€ is not politically charged; in fact, if you were not familiar with Liu and her work, youโ€™d be hard-pressed to assign her a side to the on-going abortion debate. Instead, the film assigns a face to the overly-politicized procedure, thus showing the humanity of the situation. After she found out she was pregnant in September of 2015, Liu was overcome with lonelinessโ€”abortion is such a highly stigmatized topic that she felt, at first, that she didnโ€™t have anyone to share it with.

โ€œEveryone has an opinion about it, but I didnโ€™t know what it was like as a human beingโ€”and not just a political ideaโ€”to be going through this,โ€ she says. โ€œWhen we talk so much about concepts or ideologies, sometimes whatโ€™s left out of the conversation is that weโ€™re still human bodies going through all of this.โ€

The official “Names of Women” poster.

โ€œNames of Women,โ€ released in January 2017, began as a story Liu shared at one of Collective Sexโ€™s live storytelling events. She had no plans to turn it into a film at the time, but after receiving very positive feedback, she began to see how advantageous itโ€™d be to create something with an important message she could easily share with larger audiences.

โ€œAfter I shared it, a lot of people came out of nowhere and shared their stories with me privately,โ€ Liu remembers. โ€œWhen you share a story so personal, what happens is that you create permission or space for other people to share theirs.โ€

After crowdfunding $20,000 for the film in August 2015, she and an all-female production team shot, edited and released โ€œNames of Women.โ€ Liu toured the film on eight college campuses over the past three months; she plans to continue the next leg of the tour in the fall. Most recently, โ€œNames of Women,โ€ directed by Liu and Amanda Madden, was added as an official selection at the Brooklyn Womenโ€™s Film Festival.

โ€œWhatโ€™s really cool about film is that itโ€™s really accessible and youโ€™re able to have conversations with many more people and reach other communities that you normally wouldnโ€™t be able to,โ€ Liu tells ivoh.

Liu has gotten positive feedback while touring โ€œNames of Womenโ€ through the Northeast. โ€œItโ€™s incredible what happens afterwards,โ€ she says. โ€œIโ€™ve had students personally share their stories with me after this.โ€

She explains that, while a majority of the schools were left-leaning, a few were conservative; rather than balking at their ideological differences, she was more than happy to talk with students who didnโ€™t hold the same beliefs.

โ€œItโ€™s really important to talk to groups of people that arenโ€™t just reaffirming what we were already thinking, otherwise youโ€™re talking in a vacuum,โ€ she explains. โ€œItโ€™s eye opening when you do engage with people who have very different views from you. You realize that theyโ€™re not bad people, and they see that youโ€™re not bad people.โ€

Liu, a self-described โ€œold soul,โ€ has always been wise beyond her years. At 24, she founded Collective Sex to destigmatize stories related to sex, body, intimacy and identity by infusing those stories with vulnerability, personal narrative and authenticity. Intrinsically, she knew storytelling could have healing qualitiesโ€”and as โ€œNames of Womenโ€ gains traction, she was proven right. But before she was at the helm of a burgeoning production company, she was once a college student with an ambitious senior thesis.

The seeds for Collective Sex were scattered in 2012 when Liu, then a senior at Colgate University, wrote and directed โ€œThis Is Not A Play About Sex,โ€ a play based on her interviews with 26 students about their relationship with millennial hookup culture. By including students whose backgrounds spanned across gender, sexuality and identity, Liu sparked interest on campus by inviting all voices to the conversation.

She says that โ€œThis Is Not A Play About Sexโ€ resonated wildly on Colgateโ€™s campus. โ€œIt was meant to start a dialogue with people who wouldnโ€™t normally find themselves in a room together,โ€ Liu says.

The play, which she produced as her senior thesis, was such a success that Liu held an encore production two months after its premiere, leading the university to license the rights from Liu. A production of โ€œThis Is Not A Play About Sexโ€ is put on every year during freshman orientation, and Liu regularly attends.

It was through this project that Liu began to understand the power of using storytelling as a way to start conversations. Once Liu graduated and moved to New York City, she used the inspiration from โ€œThis Is Not A Play About Sexโ€ to found Creative Sex.

โ€œIt was a hella experimental phase where I was like โ€˜Okay, thereโ€™s something about vulnerability and storytelling and talking specifically about body, identity and sex, and somehow, this triangle of stuff can connect,โ€™โ€ she says. โ€œI started hosting people out my living roomโ€“ weโ€™d meet once a week for four hours and weโ€™d do acting training, meditation, movement work, writing, reenactmentsโ€ฆโ€

These experimental workshops quickly lead to live, monthly storytelling events. Soon, Liu was filling spaces in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with 40 to 50 people for these performances. โ€œA grassroots community started building from there, and more people started telling stories,โ€ she says with a smile on her face. โ€œIt was this really organic growth process.โ€

โ€œOur two-word mission is decolonizing storytelling. What that means for us is focusing on what stories we tell, how they are told and who is telling them,โ€ Liu says. โ€œWe believe very firmly in allowing folks to share their own stories and to have a space where people can tell their own stories, in their own words, the way that they want to be heard.โ€

Collective Sex became an opportunity for people to share their stories in a non-judgmental environment. Liu feels that the creative process should be healing, joyful and collaborative; because of this, there is no stage at a Creative Sex storytelling event. Instead, storytellers sit among audience membersโ€”โ€œand the stories would just emerge,โ€ Liu says. โ€œI thought about it as โ€˜living room theater.โ€™โ€

One of Collective Sex’s live storytelling events from April 2016. The theme was “What was your shortest most meaningful relationship?”

Now, Collective Sexโ€™s live events are held seasonally and their structure has changed slightly. The events now revolve loosely around a themeโ€”for instance, January was reproductive rightsโ€”and personal storytelling is followed by panel discussions. Storytellers share their experiences with the topic, while panelists share ways to get involved with the cause. This new structure combines the healing aspect of storytelling with the social activism that Liu had in mind when founding the company.

Other than preparing for the fall tour of โ€œNames of Women,โ€ Liu and her creative team at Collective Sex are in the beginning stages of an upcoming web series project titled โ€œMercy Mistress.โ€ The autobiographical series will follow the personal experiences of a New York City-based Chinese-American professional dominatrix.

โ€œThis story is about destigmatizing the sex work industry, examining the intersections within the kink community and reclaiming the sexual agency of the bodies of women of color,โ€ Collective Sex said in a statement on its Facebook page. An upcoming Collective Sex storytelling event will be held on Saturday, July 22 at Euripides Gallery to raise money for forthcoming web series. Tickets are $35 at the door; all proceeds go towards the fundraiser.

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