Flash mob dancers rocked DVC for V-Day’s global call to action to end violence against women and girls.

Costumed in eye-popping pink, red and black, dancers performed “Break the Chain,” a song written and choreographed especially for V-Day’s 2013 One Billion Rising events.

Flash mob dancer Christina Stevenson, a 27-year-old technical theatre and dance major at DVC, said, “I come from a background of rape and abuse, I was raped and my sister and I were abused as children, it’s always had a really strong impact on me.”

Kimberly Valmore, a veteran DVC dance instructor and flash mob organizer, shared, “I’m really just getting tired and sad with everything I hear in the news and I know that it’s only a small portion of the violence happening against women both here and internationally, and it just gets so frustrating because you don’t know what to say or what to do.”

This year Valmore took the pledge to turn apathy into action and organized her dance students to flash mob at the DVC campus on Feb. 14.

A posse of female dancers descended on the quad about 12:10 p.m., while a squad of male students, plastered in One Billion Rising stickers and carrying signs of support, accompanied the dancers and stood guard in an unbreakable band of protection behind them.

A bustling swarm of students, photographers and videographers quickly gathered as the flash mob struck their opening pose. A clique of dancers sat silently on the ground encircled by their sister dancers.

As the rhythmic music began dancers rose to their feet and in unison stomped, shook, shimmied and twirled; reaching out their arms to embrace all female survivors of violence and rape, while kneeing and kicking to obliterate the chains of abuse and silence that have bound and marginalized womankind for a millennia.

Flash mob dancers glistened, enveloped in love and support and the unusually bright February sun – a perfect Valentine’s gift from Mother Nature.

Kyle Sayer, a V-Day supporter and DVC dance major, said, “I absolutely love women, and the fact that they get treated as they do, it shouldn’t be like that, it’s ladies first.”

Following the eight minute flash mob, Stevenson added, “I never realized that 1 billion women went through the same thing as I went through,” referring to the United Nations statistic that 1 in 3 women, or one billion women worldwide, will be raped or violently assaulted in her lifetime.

Organizers estimated 207 countries participated in this year’s V-Day “Strike Dance Rise” campaign to shake the world into a new consciousness.

Valmore continued, “The thing that I’ve gotten out of this is that everybody needs to talk about it, we can’t just leave it under the radar, we have to keep talking about it…we have to keep saying enough is enough, we’ve had enough of this.”

Stevenson agreed, “The only way this is ever going to end is if whoever has been hurt or affected by it stands up and says something…if you don’t say anything about it nothing will be done.”