Health Leadership Apprentice Program coordinator Landon A. Hackley authored the following post.
Ananya Roy is a rising fourth-year neuroscience and Plan II student who joined the Health Leadership Apprentice Program (HLA) in fall 2018. A native of Sunnyvale, California, her passion for theater and promoting sex education, along with her involvement in HLA, led her to create “Get Sexy, Get Consent,” a performance-based way to teach consent and sex education — and it’s already made an impact.
“Get Sexy, Get Consent” teaches sex education and consent in an interactive manner that Roy said “is not just a passive viewing experience.”
“The audience will feel urgency and be able to take away some of the language used by the characters in the show for future use,” she said. Roy explained that she isn’t looking to give cookie-cutter, fill-in-the-blank responses for people to use. Rather, she wants to show people “how to spark the dialogue between couples” so they can get mutual consent “without faltering over the ambiguities of language.”
Roy said she started thinking about a new way to teach consent after seeing a similar show that was cut-and-dry. She said she felt it didn’t show the nuances of realistic scenarios nor did it give people the opportunity to practice.
“I wanted to focus on what actual language people would use and how we could portray these interactions in a way that is realistic and useful in real life,” she said. “The ‘just say no’ model is not an effective way to go about this because life is a lot more complicated than that.”
Roy’s passion for her work sparked before her time in HLA, but she said the program helped her move her idea forward. She said the mentorship from program director Steve Steffensen, M.D., played a crucial role in the organization and foundation of her project. “He connected me with people who were already using theater as an educative model and helped me develop it as a way to teach health in a new sort of interdisciplinary program,” she said.
“That fall semester I joined HLA is when we completely reworked the entire performance,” she said. “We really began looking at: What do we want people to take away from this? What dialogue do we want to use? How can we be more intentional with what we portray?”
After a lot of work, revision and feedback, “Get Sexy, Get Consent” successfully debuted in January. Since then, Roy has put on more than 16 shows and plans to keep going.
“I really hope to expand to high schools to make an impact at as early an age as possible,” Roy said. “Starting this conversation at the college level is too late. Starting young is important, and while the show would need to be adjusted to fit the audience, it shouldn’t prevent education at an early level.”
Ten years from now, she hopes to use this interactive theater model to teach other health topics, such as how to navigate boundaries in healthy relationships.
When Roy isn’t working on “Get Sexy, Get Consent,” she works for The Broccoli Project, a student-run theater organization that puts on two to three shows per year. She is also an interpersonal violence peer supporter, who gives free one-on-one counseling to students, and the volunteer coordinator for Plan II pre-med, for which she organizes volunteer activities at Austin State Hospital. Roy loves film photography, vintage thrift shopping and watching all of the Oscar-nominated movies each year.
If you are interested in learning more about Roy’s work, reach out to an HLA program coordinator.