A Room Big Enough to Leave
A Case Study of Acting Like Women (2026)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“The artists in Acting Like Women do not simply create new images of women. They keep rebuilding the conditions around those images until body, room, audience, institution, media, and archive all become part of the work.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanisms behind why they work.
Content notice: This essay contains full spoilers and discusses sexual violence, police violence, artistic nudity, homophobia, religious conflict, the AIDS crisis, and censorship.
Version Note: This essay is based on the 90-minute festival presentation of Acting Like Women, Cheri Gaulke’s feature directorial debut, co-written with Anne Gauldin. The film premiered at the Bentonville Film Festival on June 17, 2026, followed by a screening at Frameline in San Francisco on June 21 and a public program at the Getty Center on July 26. Because the film intentionally layers contemporary interviews, archival audio, public broadcasts, performance documentation, selective reconstruction, and animation, brief archival statements are paraphrased below where exact wording or speaker identification could not be independently confirmed.
In an isolated black-box theater, Cheri Gaulke makes a small bed. Her movements are exact. The film cuts between her performance and older images of women displaying themselves while completing domestic tasks. A mop is not merely a tool. A kitchen floor is not merely a place to clean. The woman using them has been taught to pose while she works, as though an unseen audience were continually judging whether she is convincing in the role.
Gaulke remembers making her childhood bed with that same imagined scrutiny. She pictured the boy she might someday marry watching her, having already learned from television and magazines that femininity was not only something a girl was expected to possess. It was something she had to demonstrate. “We’re on stage every moment of our lives, acting like women,” she says.
That opening contains the documentary’s governing reversal. Performance art does not introduce performance into these women’s lives. It reveals that performance was already there.
The artists Gaulke gathers were raised amid instructions about posture, beauty, work, desire, marriage, motherhood, race, class, and sexuality. Their bodies had already been made into public surfaces. Their behavior had already been rehearsed. Their value had already been tied to how successfully they could inhabit roles written by someone else.
Feminist performance art does more than replace those roles with more flattering ones. Again and again, the women in Acting Like Women change the conditions under which a body can be seen and understood. They determine who directs the action, who enters the room, what the audience is asked to do, which institution houses the work, how mass media will transmit it, and what must be preserved after the original performance disappears.
A new image inside an old context can still be governed by the old rules.
Gaulke’s documentary therefore becomes more than a history of the Woman’s Building and the artists who passed through it. It follows a struggle over context: first the body, then the room, then the institution, then the audience, then the media frame, and finally the archive itself. The finished film performs the same operation on the surviving history, surrounding fugitive fragments with enough names, memories, contradictions, and living voices that they can act upon an audience again.
The Role Before the Stage
Gaulke’s first feminist realization arrives through another performance space. Her father is a Lutheran minister. As a child, she watches him prepare the sacrament, put on his robes and clerical collar, and stand before a congregation. What captivates her is not only belief. It is ritual: costume, preparation, symbolic action, public address. At four years old, she learns that she cannot grow up to occupy that role because she is a girl. The first institution she admires teaches her that its performance belongs to a male body.
The documentary then disperses the phrase “acting like a woman” across an ensemble. One person remembers being told to keep quiet and behave. Another describes learning her place within a patriarchal structure. Maren Hassinger recalls beauty being tied to behavior. May Sun remembers seeing women with bound feet in Hong Kong. Miriam Cutler was discouraged from playing cello because of the posture it required. Judy Baca remembers being told to sit like a lady. Jerri Allyn distinguishes middle-class expectations of marriage and motherhood from working-class forms of feminine service, while Senga Nengudi insists that acting like a woman was not the same as acting like a Black woman. Sheree Rose’s family expectations carry the history of the Holocaust and an obligation to marry and produce a particular family.
The rapid editing does not let one testimony settle into a universal definition. Femininity is imposed through many rules, and the rules change according to the body receiving them. Race, class, religion, occupation, sexuality, migration, and family history do not decorate a shared experience after the fact. They shape what the required performance is.
Johanna Went gives the montage its counter-action. She does not want to behave like other women. She wants to explode onstage.
Gaulke’s route toward that explosion begins with exclusion from another artistic technology. In 1973, she travels to Scotland intending to work in video. The male artists take control of the available equipment and prevent the women from using it. She encounters Jacky Lansley and Sally Potter making performance art instead, discovering a form so new that her teachers back home do not yet know how to teach it.
The exclusion has an unintended consequence. A camera can be monopolized. Gaulke’s own body cannot be withheld from her in the same way. She realizes that her experience, movement, history, and physical presence can become artistic material.
That discovery is liberating, but Acting Like Women does not pretend that using one’s body automatically creates freedom. Women’s bodies were already being used throughout advertising, domestic labor, religion, service work, entertainment, and art history. The feminist intervention is not simply the appearance of a woman’s body within the work.
It is the transfer of authorship over the conditions of appearance.
Build the Context
The existing art world supplies little space for that transfer. Women may fill art-school classrooms while nearly disappearing from professional exhibitions. Museums and galleries contain few women. Artists are warned that openly identifying their work with feminism or female experience may prevent them from being taken seriously. Judy Chicago’s response is not merely to argue for better inclusion within the same curriculum. She begins constructing another educational context, first through the feminist art program at Fresno State and then at CalArts.
Womanhouse turns an actual house into both material and argument. Domestic space becomes collaborative installation, performance site, public attraction, and trap. Rooms reproduce the suffocation, waiting, beauty rituals, and media pressure attached to women’s lives. Faith Wilding describes the collective writing behind Waiting, while archival performance footage accumulates all the things a woman is expected to wait for: beauty, wisdom, permission, deterioration, recognition, and the arrival of a life continually deferred.
The house matters because audiences enter it. A private structure becomes a public encounter. Yet it remains temporary, and the program remains attached to institutions that have not changed enough to hold what the artists are trying to build.
Arlene Raven, Judy Chicago, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville respond by creating an independent feminist institution. The immediate motivation is practical. They need a place for the Feminist Studio Workshop. The Woman’s Building begins not as an abstract monument but as a solution to the absence of usable space: somewhere women can study, produce work, gather, and address the culture without requiring approval from the institutions that have already restricted them.
When Gaulke arrives, the invitation is almost comically direct. She writes Suzanne Lacy a heartfelt letter explaining that her teachers do not understand performance art and that her attempts to organize women artists are failing. Lacy sends back a postcard saying she is too busy to write and telling Gaulke simply to come. Gaulke enters a room of roughly fifty women and a faculty that includes Lacy, Raven, de Bretteville, Ruth Iskin, and Deena Metzger.
The Spring Street building, however, is not ready to receive them. Its floors are splintered, its ceilings peel, and its walls are dirty. Students who have arrived to become artists are expected to participate in renovating the structure. Raven’s reasoning is that constructing a physical space creates real ownership of that space.
Many of the women are about twenty-one and have no construction experience. Anne Gauldin remembers being asked whether she knew how to hang sheetrock. She did not, but she learned and could stand back afterward before a wall she had actually built. Hundreds of women scrub, sand, frame, mud, and paint. Some resent being assigned construction when they came to make art. Gaulke embraces the work as a collective experience, remembering the dust, scaffolding, singing, and bodies laboring together.
The documentary does not use “building” only as an easy metaphor. The walls have to go up.
The labor teaches a difficult lesson about artistic autonomy. A movement cannot sustain itself through images and ideas alone. It needs floors, wiring, administration, archives, education, maintenance, fundraising, childcare, publicity, and bodies willing to perform work that may not resemble the glamorous idea of being an artist.
Sheila Ruth invokes Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own, then extends it. Through the effort of many women, they have created an entire building. Judy Baca remembers seeing more women gathered in one place than she had ever encountered before. Maren Hassinger describes women discovering that they existed in multitudes.
The room changes what can be perceived. The women do not merely feel less isolated; they acquire visual proof that isolation was never the full truth.
When The Dark Bob later asks why there is no men’s building, Gaulke’s answer lands because the film has already shown the labor necessary to create an alternative:
“Because every building was a man’s building.”
The Body Changes Authors
The physical room creates the conditions for another structure: the consciousness-raising circle. Participants discuss money, power, race, class, work, sexuality, and experiences they may never have spoken aloud. Phranc remembers the process as foundational and excruciating. Sitting in a circle and baring private experience does not automatically feel liberating simply because the setting is feminist. The discomfort is part of the method.
Gaulke describes consciousness raising as the means by which private shame becomes recognizable as collective experience. A woman speaks, another hears something similar, and what had seemed personal or singular acquires social context. The phrase “the personal is political” is not treated as a slogan pasted onto the work. The documentary shows the mechanism that produces it. Language changes what can be known.
Suzanne Lacy recalls how little public language surrounded rape in the early 1970s. Experiences went unnamed or were restricted to the most visibly violent incidents reported by newspapers. In the consciousness-raising circle, women begin describing what has happened to them. Lacy takes those accounts toward performance. In Ablutions, bodies, clay, blood imagery, binding, repeated testimony, and the relentless account of helplessness confront an audience with sexual violence from an intimate female perspective. The response is bodily; one viewer becomes physically ill.
The film then returns the process to Gaulke. Working with Lacy and hearing women speak allows her to recognize that an experience in college was rape. She had not previously called it that because the conceptual language later associated with date rape was not available to her in the same way.
Art is not only representing an already understood event. The collective context helps produce the language through which the person who lived it can understand it.
That movement—from lived experience to speech, from speech to pattern, from pattern to form, and from form to public witness—runs beneath much of Acting Like Women. The body becomes artistic material, but the work surrounding it determines whether that body is again being consumed or whether it can exercise agency.
Barbara T. Smith’s Feed Me gives the distinction a particularly clear physical structure. Smith sits naked as visitors, mostly men, enter one at a time. The room contains food, drink, books, body oils, and a recorded request to be fed. Visitors eventually understand that they can offer something, but Smith retains the ability to accept or refuse. Nudity produces confrontation, but the work is not organized around unrestricted access to her body. It is organized around the act of offering and her right to answer.
The surrounding art culture retells the piece as sexual availability. Smith’s careful construction of choice is reduced to a rumor that she was sleeping with everyone.
The misreading demonstrates why context is not a secondary concern. Smith can author the action, room, audience size, objects, and terms of exchange. The culture outside the performance can still seize the image and place it back inside an older story about a naked woman.
Susan Mogul, Laurel Klick, and Smith describe nudity within the feminist cohort as a way of reclaiming bodies historically positioned for display. The body appears within a context the women create, allowing it to perform an authored action rather than remain a passive object projected by someone else.
The intervention is not nakedness. It is jurisdiction.
A Room With Rules
An institution created to remove one set of restrictions does not become neutral merely because its founders have experienced exclusion. Acting Like Women begins complicating the Woman’s Building almost as soon as it establishes its power. The building can be school, sanctuary, gallery, political center, performance venue, and public institution at once. Those functions do not always require the same boundaries.
Marguerite Elliot and Cheryl Swannack recount being pushed inside the Woman’s Building by police officers and beaten where no one could see. Elliot carries shame afterward, feeling that she had stepped outside her assigned place by being unruly. The women respond by creating a performance intended to break the pattern of victimization. Once again, an imposed experience is brought back into a context they can author.
The building itself cannot fully protect them from the world surrounding it. It can, however, give them collaborators, language, and space through which the injury can be converted into action.
Inside, lesbian presence produces both refuge and fear. Phranc distinguishes the Woman’s Building as a feminist institution rather than an exclusively lesbian one, while acknowledging the automatic assumption that women gathering independently must be lesbians. Gaulke remembers heterosexual women, including herself, being intimidated. Senga Nengudi describes a lesbian core that did not always feel welcoming to her.
Motherhood exposes another institutional blind spot. Latina participants often arrive with children, but childcare has not been integrated into the structure. A vote permits dogs in the Feminist Studio Workshop while excluding children. Women artists who are mothers respond by forming Mother Art and building a playground. They later take performance into laundromats, working within the duration of wash-and-dry cycles and creating art in the spaces where domestic labor has already placed their audience.
The contradiction is not a minor historical embarrassment added to provide balance. It emerges directly from the documentary’s governing mechanism. Once a group constructs its own context, it becomes responsible for the rules of that context. The experience of having been excluded does not guarantee an instinctive understanding of every life the new institution must hold.
The film also reveals how collective authorship sits uneasily within the economic structure of art. Groups such as Mother Art, Feminist Art Workers, The Waitresses, Sisters of Survival, and Ariadne resist the romantic image of the solitary male genius projecting an individual identity into a saleable object. Collaboration is harder to commodify; performance art compounds the problem because it may leave no conventional object to sell.
Gaulke’s class on collaborative performance is titled One Plus One Equals Three. The phrase describes an artwork generated by the relationship rather than divided between two separate signatures. Feminist Art Workers enact the idea through a parable involving long forks: misery comes when everyone attempts to feed themselves, while mutual care becomes possible when each person feeds someone across the table. The group then carries its educational performances into communities that cannot come to the Woman’s Building. The room is no longer useful if the method cannot leave it.
Make the Audience Part of the Work
The Waitresses show how a preexisting social performance can be made visible by performing it deliberately. Their work begins in consciousness raising. Participants compare years spent serving food and identify the same expectations: be pleasant, maternal, subservient, visually agreeable, and sufficiently cheerful to earn a better tip. The waitress is already acting for an audience, but the role is treated as natural service rather than performance.
The group returns to restaurants as artists. Members march with trays, stop, freeze, and hold exaggerated smiles. The establishments know performances will occur, but patrons do not necessarily understand what they are watching. One customer’s comment that the waitresses appear to be revolting contains the work’s double meaning: rebellion becomes legible through the body of service.
Humor keeps the work from sinking beneath the weight of harassment, low pay, and indignity. The group explains that laughter makes the material survivable and helps audiences receive it. The joke is not an escape from the subject. It is a delivery system.
Suzanne Lacy pushes the audience question much further. She initially imagines marking the locations of reported rapes inside a gallery. Sheila de Bretteville challenges the choice of venue. The audience for that information is not the gallery alone. It is the public and the mass media.
Three Weeks in May expands performance from a discrete action into a conceptual structure distributed across time and city space. Maps register reported rapes with large red marks, then surround each with additional ghost marks representing unreported assaults. Another map identifies rape-crisis centers that are difficult to locate through ordinary public information systems. The performance is no longer only a body presented before a seated audience. It is a designed sequence of activities, information, sites, collaborations, and encounters.
The context becomes the medium.
That development reaches one of its clearest forms in In Mourning and in Rage. Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus respond to the Hillside Strangler murders and to press images that repeatedly display women’s bodies in ways that intensify fear. Within roughly two weeks, collaborators design a procession beginning at the Woman’s Building and moving toward City Hall. Tall women emerge from a hearse. Mourning becomes collective, monumental, and publicly directed rather than privately consumed.
The artists study how television news functions: how long a segment lasts, where reporters stand, what shots are likely to be selected, and which images can communicate even if the reporter places a predictable narration over them. The hearse, elevated bodies, black clothing, repeated declarations, and Greek-chorus formation are not merely theatrical choices. They are engineered to survive mediation.
They cannot control the station’s edit. They can understand the next frame well enough to construct an image whose meaning is difficult to remove.
The strategy turns mass media from an outside observer into another performance site. Glenn Phillips describes the artists as entering the media’s bloodstream, while archival news footage confirms that the action carries statistics, demands, and rape-prevention resources beyond the original gathering.
This is one of the documentary’s most transferable filmmaking lessons. An image intended to circulate through another institution must be designed for the pressures of that institution. Composition, scale, repetition, location, duration, and verbal structure determine whether the meaning survives transfer into a frame the artist does not own.
Acting Like Women applies a related discipline to its own dense archive. Susan Metzger’s edit moves from contemporary testimony into old videotape, still photography, recorded performance, public-access footage, news reports, and present-day conversation without making the transitions feel arbitrary. An archival speaker can finish an idea begun by a contemporary interview. A recollection can hand the film to the original object or action. Sound often bridges the change before the image arrives, allowing history to continue across materials that were never produced to match. The sources retain their age, but the documentary refuses to treat age as disconnection.
The Frame Leaves Someone Outside
The film’s strongest self-critique arrives when artists begin applying the movement’s methods to the movement itself. The Lesbian Art Project, founded by Arlene Raven with Terry Wolverton, creates a context in which lesbian creativity can become visible and historically legible. An Oral Herstory of Lesbianism, directed by Wolverton and collaboratively written by Gaulke and others, uses an enclosed pink performance environment and an all-women audience. Jerri Allyn recalls being unable to enter the stage on opening night because of the emotional force of the material.
Documentation creates another threshold. High Performance magazine wants to publish explicit images associated with the project, but the printer refuses. The magazine locates another printer willing to reproduce the pages. The art requires not only a creator and audience but a publication system capable of letting the work remain intact.
Gaulke’s own work increasingly turns inherited religious and sexual contexts against themselves. Her long engagement with red high heels begins as an exploration of women’s feet and eventually reveals a deeper association with female desire, shame, and the Christian story in which Eve’s desire is made responsible for humanity’s fall. She begins searching for spiritual forms that can affirm the female body rather than identify it as the source of corruption.
In This Is My Body, she takes on Eve, the serpent, persecuted witches, crucifixion, and Christ. The performance is dangerous to her not only because she must climb and balance high above the floor, but because the act violates the religious frame that shaped her childhood. Suzanne Lacy remembers the work’s force in relation to that background. Gaulke’s parents never see the performance art through which she is renegotiating the symbols they gave her.
The body does not escape history. It embodies the history, rearranges its symbols, and passes through them before an audience.
The Sisters of Survival then expand artistic context beyond the personal and local. Responding to the nuclear threat, performers use brightly colored habits, semaphore flags, and pictographic symbols designed to communicate across languages and public spaces in North America and Western Europe. Gaulke frames the challenge directly: the Woman’s Building has created a community, but the artists must decide how that community’s methods can address global issues.
Expansion does not resolve the exclusions closer to home. Senga Nengudi describes Maren Hassinger being invited into a Woman’s Building exhibition as its only Black woman. Visibility without meaningful participation feels insulting. Nengudi and Hassinger respond through a performance based on The Spook Who Sat by the Door, placing sheet-covered figures and racist commercial symbols around the entrance so visitors must physically pass through the people the exhibition has failed to bring fully into its dialogue.
Judy Baca names the limitation without dismissing the work the institution did: the Woman’s Building addressed race, but it did not go far enough. That distinction protects the documentary from a false choice between celebration and indictment. A counterinstitution can change lives and still reproduce exclusions. A room can make some people visible while leaving others at its threshold. An image of inclusion can still preserve a hierarchy between being seen and being heard.
The same struggle over framing intensifies during the Reagan era. Arts funding contracts, the AIDS crisis devastates communities, queer artists face pressure to remain closeted, and public officials target work they characterize as obscene. Gaulke and Sue Maberry build a family they cannot yet formalize through marriage, while Gaulke uses pregnancy, the Virgin Mary, religious iconography, nudity, and the flag inside work that draws scrutiny from Senator Jesse Helms.
The political attack is also an attempt to control context. Art is renamed as filth. Public funding is reframed as forced endorsement. Queer and feminist artists are presented not as participants in cultural debate but as contaminants within it.
Gaulke’s response is not retreat. She performs naked in a church, burns the flag before television cameras, and addresses Helms through the very media frame being used against her. Yet her contemporary reflection preserves the fear beneath the defiance: whether she would receive grants again, whether she could lose her teaching job, and how closely that climate resembles renewed contemporary pressure against artists and queer people.
The support community cannot make the attack harmless. It gives the artist somewhere to return with an understanding of what the work is and why it was made.
The Archive Needs a Living Room
The Woman’s Building closes in 1991.
The film does not attribute the end to one cause. Funding, political hostility, internal conflict, cultural change, and generational rejection accumulate. Feminism becomes a word younger artists may feel compelled to resist. Performance art recedes from discussion so completely that participants describe the history as though it had never happened.
The disappearance becomes physical. Glenn Phillips recalls that the Woman’s Building video archive was thrown into the street and rescued before entering the Getty Research Institute’s collection.
The tapes survive, but survival is not the same as understanding.
A performance document may preserve bodies, gestures, sound, or duration while losing the room’s emotional conditions. It may omit what happened immediately before the camera started. It may record the performer without the consciousness-raising process that generated the work, the political event that prompted it, or the audience whose response completed it. Even a person who attended the original action could not see every angle or retain every sensation. Glenn Phillips describes performance as a fugitive medium partly because it exceeds any one witness even while it is occurring.
Gaulke’s own account of why she made this film at all is direct. Two of her mentors, Arlene Raven and Rachel Rosenthal, had already died by the time she began. “I’m not going to let any more of these women die on my watch,” she has said—not a metaphor about legacy, but a description of an actual production deadline measured against actual mortality.
Gaulke’s feature therefore cannot function as a compilation of surviving clips. It has to rebuild the context around them.
The production gathered more than fifty interviews, many conducted in Gaulke’s colorful living room. Gaulke has described the sessions as something close to a reunion, artists from the Woman’s Building crossing paths again on their way in and out of the same chair.
Gaulke originally wanted an ensemble history and resisted making herself its central onscreen route. A producer friend, who works in documentary television, argued that an audience needed an individual capable of carrying it through such an expansive collective story—that viewers can’t identify with a group, only with a person. Gaulke accepted the role while remaining uneasy about it, joking that even the word she reached for to describe her function, shepherd, embarrassed her a little.
That tension remains visible in the finished film, and it is productive. Gaulke supplies chronology, emotional access, objects, family history, and personal consequence. Other women repeatedly complicate her memory, expand the category under discussion, identify exclusions she did not initially perceive, and redirect attention toward work she did not create.
She is the route through the building, not its only room.
The visual construction supports that balance. Director of photography Kristy Tully rarely treats the contemporary interview frame as a completed object waiting passively for content. Even when a composition has the stability of a supported camera, it remains subtly responsive. Small reframings follow a speaker’s movement or emotional change. The image feels attended rather than mechanically fixed.
That responsiveness matters in a film about bodies used as artistic material. The witnesses are not pinned inside static evidentiary frames. The camera appears to listen.
The sound performs an equally difficult act of continuity. Under post sound supervisor and re-recording mixer Jeremy Grody, contemporary interviews, decades-old tapes, news broadcasts, phone recordings, and performance audio pass through a remarkably coherent mix. Source changes remain perceptible, but dialogue rarely feels torn out of the documentary’s shared listening space. Miriam Cutler’s score enters sparingly, supporting transitions and emotional movement without competing against a film whose primary dramatic instrument is the human voice.
Gaulke, who often edits her own work, deliberately did not edit this one—her presence as a principal subject made that control feel inappropriate, she has said, “too weird.” She and co-writer Anne Gauldin built an outline; editor Susan Metzger, recommended by Kate Amend after the two had worked together on Gaulke’s earlier short Inside the Beauty Bubble, developed sequences from the interviews and archive. Editing ran from February 2023 to September 2025, inside a production that Gaulke describes as spanning seven years in total.
The scale of the undertaking produces a real cost. Names, artworks, organizations, archival voices, and political events arrive rapidly. Some speakers appear only briefly. Audio can continue across images of people who are not producing the voice being heard. Exact attribution can become difficult even when the historical movement remains clear.
That density is not simply a flaw to be removed. A smoother, more selective film could make every participant easier to remember by allowing far fewer participants to become part of the record. Acting Like Women chooses breadth and collective pressure, accepting that viewers may occasionally lose an individual name rather than reduce the movement to a few canonical representatives.
Absence creates the film’s hardest craft problem. Some performances have little or no usable visual documentation at all. Gaulke has explained that the finished film handles this differently depending on what actually survived. For Ablutions, Lacy’s early performance about rape, there was no usable archival footage, so the crew shot new contemporary imagery instead—Gaulke’s own daughter in the bathtub, smearing herself with eggs, standing in for a scene her mother’s generation had performed decades earlier. For other gaps, there was no image to reshoot at all. No photograph exists of Gaulke as a teenager at the St. Louis Art Museum, so animator C. Lily Ericsson built the scene from nothing but Gaulke’s old high school pictures. No photograph exists of Nengudi and Hassinger’s threshold performance either, so Ericsson animated that from description alone—a job Gaulke has called frightening, specifically because the team was constructing someone else’s performance rather than her own, with no image to check it against. The two artists’ approval, once they saw it, was what let her trust the result.
Three different gaps. Three different solutions: a body standing in for another body, a memory built from adjacent photographs, an action reconstructed from testimony with nothing visual behind it at all. None of it is presented as an untouched artifact. The film uses different tools because its archive contains different degrees of survival, and it says so rather than smoothing the difference away.
The documentary preserves performance by refusing to preserve it as dead evidence.
The Shoes Still Fit
After the Woman’s Building closes, Gaulke carries its method into teaching, family, and queer advocacy. Pregnancy and motherhood push her toward creating safer contexts for young people. She comes out publicly at her school because gay and lesbian students need an adult willing to be visible. The film later gathers Gaulke, Maberry, and their children into a crowded frame, allowing legal marriage and family memory to enter the same history that began with a girl learning she could not become a minister.
Gaulke describes the journey as a movement from learning how to act like a woman toward becoming her authentic self. The film does not let “authentic” harden into a new fixed performance. Her children describe feminism as expansive and not limited solely to women or gender. Contemporary artists broaden the inheritance toward gender-diverse practice, while Cassils links rigid gender distinctions to the externalization of power and identifies early feminist artists as part of the freedom to push against those boundaries.
The progression is not that one prescribed definition of womanhood has finally been replaced by the correct definition. Authorship expands until people can question why the category was required to govern the body in the first place.
During the closing credits, Rachel Rosenthal reflects that the Woman’s Building gave women a place to become history. Other voices describe learning about art, life, community, and themselves there. The film adds death dates to several of the women it has allowed to speak again, quietly clarifying the urgency behind Gaulke’s decision to record as many of them as possible.
Yet the final image does not belong to a tape placed safely in an archive. Early in the film, Gaulke brings out approximately fifty pairs of red high heels from an old performance. Nick Lieberman, who first participated as a teenager, remembers being asked to cross mud, sand, and salt flats in shoes he had never learned to wear. The surviving object allows the body to recover details that a general account of the performance could not: instability, effort, terrain, and discomfort.
At the end, Nick tries to walk in the heels once more as Gaulke watches. She does not tell him that he now understands women. She does not turn brief discomfort into equivalent experience or pronounce the performance successfully reconstructed. She offers only a small recognition:
“You are brave.”
At the beginning, the heels are evidence that an artwork once occurred. At the end, another body enters them. The object becomes active, the memory acquires movement, the former teacher watches her student, and the camera creates a new document without pretending it is the old performance.
That is how Acting Like Women preserves an art made to disappear. It does not freeze the work behind glass. It rebuilds enough of the room for somebody else to step into the shoes.
A Note on Sourcing: This essay is grounded primarily in direct viewing of the 90-minute festival presentation of Acting Like Women, including its onscreen identifications of artists, works, archival sources, and contemporary speakers, and its closing memorial cards for Arlene Raven (1944–2006), Rachel Rosenthal (1926–2015), and Cheryl Swannack (1946–2020). Scene description, structural analysis, and the reading of the film’s own archival and reconstructed sequences as an extension of its subject’s method are Atlantis’s own, unless otherwise attributed below.
Premiere and festival details—the film’s world premiere at the Bentonville Film Festival on June 17, 2026, its Frameline screening on June 21, and its public program at the Getty Center on July 26, alongside Getty Research Institute chief curator Glenn Phillips—are drawn from the festivals’ own listings and the film’s official site.
Cast and crew identifications beyond the film’s primary interview subjects, including director of photography Kristy Tully, editor Susan Metzger, composer Miriam Cutler, post sound supervisor and re-recording mixer Jeremy Grody, animator C. Lily Ericsson, archival producer Isabella D’Agnenica, and story consultant Nick Lieberman, are drawn from the film’s official credits page at actinglikewomen.com/filmmakers.
Gaulke’s own account of the film’s production—the seven-year production timeline and the February 2023–September 2025 edit period; her reasoning for not editing the film herself; the producer’s advice that led her to include her own story; the specific handling of Ablutions through contemporary reenactment, of her own teenage museum visit through animation built from still photographs, and of Nengudi and Hassinger’s threshold performance through animation built from testimony alone; her description of that last reconstruction as frightening; and her stated motivation for making the film following the deaths of Arlene Raven and Rachel Rosenthal—is drawn from Rebecca Martin, “Bentonville 2026: Cheri Gaulke on ‘Acting Like Women’ and the Legacy of Feminist Performance Art,” Cinema Femme, June 16, 2026.
Biographical identifications for figures named on camera, including Arlene Raven’s founding role at the Feminist Studio Workshop and the Woman’s Building alongside Judy Chicago and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, her co-founding of the Lesbian Art Project with Terry Wolverton, Leslie Labowitz-Starus’s authorship of In Mourning and in Rage with Suzanne Lacy, Linda Frye Burnham’s founding editorship of High Performance magazine, Jacky Lansley’s collaboration with Sally Potter in London, and the membership of Mother Art (Deborah Krall, Suzanne Siegel, and Laura Silagi), were independently verified against public biographical and archival sources to confirm names and roles only; the words and recollections attributed to each are drawn from their own on-camera statements in the film.