About 15 girls of high school age hold hands and, following the directions of an instructor, mirror one other. They press and pull without releasing their grip. The instructor then asks the girls for words that describe a location. They tell her "around, over, under and through." The participants watch as the instructor demonstrates each preposition by moving her body. The instructor is as graceful as a ballet dancer, and so are the girls.
Related video: Sisters of the Circle
The participants are part of Sisters of the Circle -- an after-school community theater program, produced in part by Roanoke's Jefferson Center that teaches 14- to 18-year-old girls from other countries language skills and promotes cultural awareness.
Theatre arts and women's studies professor Ann Kilkelly helped found Sisters of the Circle three years ago after the former artistic director of the Jefferson Center started a similar program in Maine.
"I think performance really has the capacity ... to allow young women to say important things that they have to say about their lives to other people," Kilkelly said.
Sisters of the Circle meets weekly for two-hour rehearsal sessions that offer workshops in varieties of dance, from Caribbean and West African rhythms to hip-hop and community singing. The girls also perform a variety of performance exercises, including story circles where each member of the group tells a portion of a sequential tale. Facilitators of the program take excerpts from the stories and other performance pieces and put them into a script. After months of rehearsals, the girls' work is showcased in a final performance.
The girls attend Roanoke City Public Schools but hail from Haiti, Honduras, Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya and Liberia (where most of the girls are from). Some of the participants are African American and a few are Roanoke natives. There were about 35 girls at the first meeting in January.
Sisters of the Circle encourages conversation among its members.
"Many things come up, (like) war, torture, rape. All kinds of experiences of women. But also they're teenagers and they love to sing and dance and they can be extremely silly and they're extremely energetic. And tend toward the wild a little bit, just behaviorally. They're amazing. They're vibrant," Kilkelly said.
Kilkelly recalled issues the girls brought up last year. The girls spoke of seeing various family members killed and of walking from Somalia to Kenya.
Kilkelly said that though the stories were upsetting, the girls wanted to share their experiences and used dance as a medium to express themselves.
Asha Mricle, a native of Ethiopia and an 11th grader, has been a part of Sisters of the Circle for two years and said sometimes they've discussed Ethiopian people's struggles, which include not having food or water and fighting.
While many of the issues the girls have experience are very serious, there are lighter cultural issues that come up in their meetings.
One day last year during a break in rehearsal, the girls got into an argument about food preparation.
The Liberian girls and Haitian girls were arguing with the African American girls about preparation of chicken.
The Haitian girls said that chickens knew Sunday was the day they were going to be killed, so if you wanted to eat chicken, it couldn't be on Sunday.
Kilkely said the Americans were shocked that one of the Liberian girls said she killed chicken herself.
"It was very funny, the Liberian essentially started teasing, 'oh, we love to eat the lips of the chicken and the best part is the feet,'" Kilkelly said.
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