Ashley Latham & Amelia Baier

The student body gathered on the Syufy Court in a sea of red, pink and black today to record a flash mob-like dance during Elective Period to support equal rights for women around the world.

Convent teamed up with Eve Ensler, creator of the “Vagina Monologues,” and her team at One Billion Rising in a dance that was performed by women’s groups around the world to globalize support for women, especially those in developing nations.

“As part of our efforts to explore ‘Half the Sky,’ women’s studies class has been doing extra research into other women and other organizations that fight women oppression,” senior MaryKatherine Michiels-Kibler said.

Michiels-Kibler showed a video of girls dancing as a part of the One Billion Rising movement during the annual assembly put on by Women’s Studies.

Coinciding with Valentines Day, V-Day is a global movement bringing attention to antiviolence organizations throughout the world as well as to rape, battery, incest, female genital cutting and sex slavery throughout the world, according to Michiels-Kibler.

“The one and only goal of V-Day is to end violence against women and girls,” Michiels- Kibler said. “As an all-girls school, I think it is incredibly important to show that we support the rise to end violence against women.”

V-Day’s four core values, include the power that art has to transform thinking and inspire people to act, social and cultural changes are spread through ordinary people doing extraordinary things, local women becoming unstoppable leaders, and looking at the intersection of race, class and gender to understand violence against women, according to One Billion Rising’s website.

In preparation for the event, some teachers took class timeto teach the students the dance choreography.

“I think all of us are doing it, but not in every class,” said theology teacher Kate McMichael. “Since Mary Katherine is in my senior class, we’ve been learning or practicing it for a part of every class period.”

“For us at CSH, having read and seen ‘Half the Sky,’ it seems utterly fitting that we are doing this — both because we’ve been made physically and emotionally sick by what we’ve learned about how women are treated in other parts of the world, and because ‘social awareness should impel us to action’ (Goal 3), especially on behalf of the world community of women,” McMichael said. “It’s such a creative, full-bodied, heart-filled way to say no to something hurtful.”