One Billion Rising - Toulouse

On February 14th, 2013, ONE BILLION RISING caught on fire all over the globe.  My Nana and Papa rose up in Pincher Creek, Alberta, walking in a march organized by the town's women's shelter.  My Mum and Mackenzie and Logan rose in a Champagne and Chocolate event in Seattle, Washington, with my Mum playing MC to a host of non-profit organizations, documentary film directors, and dance instructors throughout the evening.  My Dad rose up (literally) on the airplane while on a business trip, and I think generated more Facebook "like"s than half of Toulouse.  And I rose up here, in Toulouse, with over a hundred dancers behind me, in a Flash-Mob way bigger than I ever imagined.  

These first pictures are from the Saint-Aubin market, the Sunday before where we staged a mini "dance-in" rehearsal in the square in front of the church, me on a microphone with a speaker in front of a group of dancers learning the steps to the flash-mob, with a whole crowd of vegetable-shoppers gathered round.  

 We had spent one dreary Sunday afternoon in January with a warm veggie tart and bread and cheese and other munchies with limbs, paper and paint spread out all over my floor, making posters to hang up around town.  There are some at Ô3C, the café where Julian works on Mondays, whose owners are a lovely family that allowed us to stage a lot of our meetings around their big tables and kept my brain fueled with Apricot-Lemon scones.  Je me lève contre les violences faites aux femmes! is the French translation of the OBR catch phrase, I am rising against violence against women!  The large red poster is another one of my favorites, which says: Across the globe, 1 out of 5 women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape in the course of her lifetime.  You know this woman!  Fight for her on the 14th of February!  ONE BILLION RISING

And then there's this one, with a little wink and nod at the lovely old Saint-Valentine, which is the one poster that somehow I ended saving after all the chaos of the flash-mob: Love does not equal violence. I think it's going to have to end up on a wall somewhere.  The rehearsals for the flash-mob were so incredibly fun, and even while I was doing all this work outside of my "day job" and away from classical ballet, the concept of the whole world dancing together in the face of all of this violence reinforced my love of dance.  Out of all the organizing roles that I took on throughout this process (social media presence, governmental liaison, email coordinator, café-débat discussion leader, poster-making artist-in-chief, interested-association coordinator, photographer, instructional choreography video actor/camerawoman/director/laughingstock, press contact, etc), the dancing parts were the only ones where I felt I was even remotely close to qualified.  Everywhere else, I was making it up (in French) as we went along, and somehow everything worked out.  Dancing in front of hundreds of people, directing complete novices through a 4 minute dance routine, making sure everyone is facing the right direction? Psh, that part I can handle. 

 And yet here, dancing was about more than just the steps, more than just being clear about what happens when, more than my sometimes-there ability to mirror my dancers (saying Right while using my left hand, oh boy), more than my abysmal ability to count to 16 while doing the Cha-Cha.

When you read all the cold statistics -- 1 in 3 women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, 1 in 5 the victim of rape or attempted rape, 1 woman dies every 3 days in France from domestic violence, 75,000 women are raped each year in France, Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be assaulted in the United States than other women, more than 140 MILLION women are living with the consequences of female genital mutilation, an estimated 50 MILLION females have been aborted or abandoned in India over the past three generations, and we are nowhere near a world where women are valued on par with men in almost any field or country -- the vastness of the issue can be overwhelming.  We can't assume that "we" white, upper-middle-class, educated, Western women can speak for all women of all races, nor ignore the privileges we have with regard to other domains of oppression.  At the same time we need to break some of the stereotypical images and stories that we tell ourselves about violence and what it looks like, (i.e. rape = a stranger with a dirty knife in a dark alley, when in reality around 80% of rape victims know their rapist) so that each of our stories is recognized as legitimate and important and part of the larger system of oppression as well as possessing its own set of unique horrors. 

These men are physically maiming our bodies, the media is objectifying our bodies, religions are trying to control our bodies, the US Congress is trying to legislate what we can and cannot do with our bodies.... So it is with our bodies that we must RISE.  Dancing becomes an avenue to create joy in the face of all of these horrors, to reclaim control of our bodies for ourselves and our movements, to fully inhabit the body that society tells us is inadequate 12 times before breakfast, and to love that body and its power.  Take any team-sports player, any protestor, any band-member, any soldier; they will all tell you there is strength that resides in belonging to something bigger than yourself, that together we multiply our power rather than add it, that being able to abandon yourself for your cause is a whole new form of freedom, and that moving, crying, singing, sweating, laughing, and dancing together seals that bond better than anything else. This is the community we created, one that is connected by music and dance and love, that embraces the incredibly vast differences across the entire globe and unites us all in a common goal: ending gendered violence.  Through a combination of this global sense of empowerment and belonging with the call to action at the local level echoed in hundreds of different languages in every small corner of the globe, we participated in the largest global day of action against violence against women in the history of the world. And we did it dancing.

If we can counter discrimination with empathy and education, if we can counter patriarchy with equality and empowerment, if we can counter violence with dance, if we can counter fear with joy, then in the long run, how can we fail?   Join us, as we figure out what pieces to take on next.