Development Education Centre South Yorkshire

One Billion Rising TOGETHER against Violence Against Women, Poetry Workshop by Ann

Hamblen for DECSY’s Gender Respect Project

If you and your class create a group performance piece TOGETHER, they may understand better WHY we’re dancing on February 14th, 2015, in Sheffield and all over the world.

Preparing students to take part in Sheffield’s One Billion Rising 2015 event is a real challenge. Learning the dance that demonstrators all over the world will be dancing can be quite a challenge in itself – helping children/young people to understand why everyone is dancing is an even greater challenge.

Initial Preparation: I suggest that you may like to share with your group, in a way which you know will help them best to grasp the big picture without over-facing them, some of the content of extract B What is One Billion Rising? Eve Ensler Explains.

ACTIVITY

1. Images Search Google One Billion Rising images for crowd scenes – spread over the globe. (There are plenty taken in 2013 at OBR risings.) Choose 6 clear and powerful images to share with your students; talk briefly about each place and what is happening. Give a copy of the Senses Sheet to each student.

2. Show the images again, stopping for a while on each, and asking students to: a. Choose a person in the image with whom to identifyb. Use the SENSES SHEET (https://genderrespect2013.wordpress.com/teaching-

ideas/one-billion-rising/ )and complete the sentence “I can see …” (eye icon box – no need to write the three words – the icon does this for you). Change image – change sense – until each student has a collection of 4/5 vivid sense impressions. Coach for tighter, more evocative expression as you go. Be flexible. (Short, simple responses from younger students, collected straight onto a flipchart by an adult can work brilliantly.)

c. Each student could also choose one of the demonstrators and give that person a brief voice, completing the sentence, “I feel…” or “I know …” or …

https://genderrespect2013.wordpress.com/teaching-ideas/one-billion-rising/ 1

3. Extra Material: Some data/world figures/fact sheet statements can be interspersed as well:

See the PowerPoint made by our Gender Respect Project teachers https://genderrespect2013.wordpress.com/teaching-ideas/one-billion-rising/

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/sites/default/files/lesson_2_3.pdf This set of activities is full of good stuff but is aimed at 11-18-yeay-olds, it says, so choose carefully for your children/young people. I suggest using some of the factual statements from: Activity 1: Information Sheet, p. 6, and some of the freedoms from: Activity 6: Information Sheet, p. 17, interspersed with your students’ sense impressions. (See example below of how this might emerge, but your students should have editing/organising powers …)

4. Together, choose a group structure/order for performance (consider pattern, variety, repetition, contrast – of sound, ideas, etc.) Allocate voices – a line or lines might be read by one voice or several. Project the images you worked from behind the performers as they read the lines in their chosen order. Enjoy. You can make this as simple or as theatrical as you choose … just within your class or in assembly. I suggest keeping it simple – let the words and the images do the work – it’ll be deeply moving!

https://genderrespect2013.wordpress.com/teaching-ideas/one-billion-rising/

I suggest that you, personally, read the two poems by Esther Morgan, Activity 3: Information Sheet, p.9, and reflect that her painfully truthful writing is poetry written in/about the pain of isolation; what we want our children to feel, as they create/ perform their piece, together, is a sense of strength in community.

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Sample draft

One Billion Rising!

Flickering of candle flames all round us in the darkPink streamers flying, cameras clickingBright patterns of all my friends’ saris, close,

shoulder to shoulder, touchingArms raised, voices raised, fingers pointing to the skyDancing, clapping together as snow falls.

In Northern Ireland one woman a day is seriously assaulted by her male partner.

In the USA one woman is battered every 15 seconds, usually by her partner.

In Pakistan over 1,000 women a year are murdered in the name of “honour”.

When the violence stops, women and girls will be:

Eating ice cream in Afghanistan

Walking in the park at night in the United States

Wearing trousers in Swaziland and blue jeans in Italy

Swimming in Iran

Allowed to be born in China, India and Korea …

 

https://genderrespect2013.wordpress.com/teaching-ideas/one-billion-rising/

4 children’s sense impressions, sorted/ combined into a preferred draft order. These might stay together, with others, or be interspersed with factual or other lines …

Examples from Amnesty Activity 1: Inf. Sheet, p. 6

See link above.

Examples from Amnesty Activity 6: Inf. Sheet, p. 17

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B 14/02/2013 Guardian

What is One Billion Rising? Founder Eve Ensler explainsPlaywright and activist Eve Ensler explains One Billion Rising, a global day of action – and dancing – in protest against violence against women

… Every city, town, village, person would determine what they were rising for - to end FGM, to remember their daughter's rape, to stop sex slavery, to educate young boys and girls about non-violence sexual relations.During this year horrific stories of sexual violence broke through the news clutter with headlines reporting Malala Yousafzai shot for demanding girls to be educated in Afghanistan, the death and gang rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi, the gang rape in Steubenville, Ohio.All these stories have built the outrage and ignited a fire burning through the world.One Billion Rising is happening big time, full scale, one Billion size. It is happening in 205 countries. It is happening where women will risk their lives to dance and where women have never danced before. It is happening in all 7,000 islands of the Philippines and in over 50 cities in Turkey. There are 100 risings in Italy, 135 risings in UK and thousands in North America. We are expecting 25 million to rise in Bangladesh, and it's hard to imagine the numbers in India but they will be massive.The diversity of the risings is beyond anything we could have imagined: the carnival queen in Rio de Janeiro, the queen mother of Bhutan, prime ministers of Australia and Croatia, members of the European parliament, lamas, nuns, unions leaders, avatars in Second Life, zumba dancers, classical dancers in Karachi, cast members of Wicked and The Lion King on Broadway, women in the Andes, 200 women in a parking lots in Kamloops, British Columbia, Iranian teenagers in their bedrooms, thousands of Afghani women dressed in OBR scarves, Filipino domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, people on bridges, in buses, prisons, squares, in stadiums, in churches, theatres ...

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