10 Apr April 11-12 Marks the One-Year Anniversary of V TO THE TENTH! Watch the Video
One year ago – April 11 and 12, 2008, we celebrated V-Day’s ten-year anniversary, V TO THE TENTH, at the New Orleans Arena and Louisiana Superdome. To commemorate this incredible event, V-Day has created a short video taken during the weekend’s festivities.
The women of New Orleans and the Gulf South – Katrina Warriors – have
survived the fall out of global warming, failure of public structures, racism, economic hardship, and domestic abuse. All of these are pieces of the story of violence that continues to impact women here in this country and around the world.
To honor these women, their strength and resilience, V-Day chose the City of New Orleans to host V-Day’s largest event to date and to celebrate ten years of ending violence against women and girls.
Over 30,000 people attended the two-day celebration. The Coastal Women Coming Home Project brought 1200 women displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita home for the weekend with support from V-Day. Thousands more traveled from out of state and country for events that featured over 125 speakers, over 40 stars, a choir of 200, and over 800 volunteers providing their services free of charge.
V-Day transformed the Superdome into SUPERLOVE – a place to heal, gather, celebrate and activate. Made possible by hundreds of volunteers from local New Orleans groups and throughout the country, SUPERLOVE featured numerous caring lounges, available free of charge to thousands of women from the Gulf South and included restorative yoga, massage, medical testing, healing circles, makeovers, and more.
Over 75 speakers, performers, and artists participated from New Orleans and the Gulf South along with speakers traveling to New Orleans from over all over the world. The weekend was ripe with parades, parties, performance and more.
The Superdome was the stage for the premiere staged reading of Swimming Upstream, a play which tells the raw, lyrical, soulful stories of women who have lived through the flood with grace, rage, humor and great resiliency. The piece, which has since debuted in Atlanta, Georgia to great acclaim, was written by a group of 16 local New Orleanian artists in partnership with the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, V-Day and Eve Ensler.
The anniversary celebrations ended with a star-studded, sold out performance of The Vagina Monologues at the New Orleans Arena, featuring actors Jennifer Beals, Rosario Dawson, Jane Fonda, Ali Larter, Liz Mikel, Kerry Washington and singers Faith Hill, Jennifer Hudson, Charmaine Neville, the Voices of New Orleans Gospel Choir, and many more.
The events brought international attention to the region, and raised over $700,000 for groups in the region working to end violence against women and girls. Though the celebrations are over, the work to end violence against women in New Orleans and the Gulf South is ongoing. V-Day will continue to work with women on the ground until the violence stops.
V TO THE TENTH celebrated V-Day’s victories and ushered in the next ten years where together we will raise the stakes, go further, go deeper, increase the power and CHANGE THE STORY OF WOMEN.
We’re thrilled so many of you were there with us – enjoy the video!
Many thanks to the V-Day staff and the hundreds of V-Day volunteers who worked tirelessly leading up to and throughout the weekend.
A special V-thanks to Barbara Kopple and her team for documenting the weekend so brilliantly, to Tony Melchior and Kevin Sanford and their amazing teams for making sure everything went off without a hitch, finally a big thank you to our editor Madeleine Gavin for creating this incredible video memory!