By Kieran Guilbert
LONDON, Dec 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Grabbed, groped and thrown to the ground, the young woman adopts the foetal position as the four female attackers loom over her.
Dragged, kicked and strangled, the woman goes limp, drawing gasps from the audience as she lies lifeless on the stage.
For the victim and her abusers are in fact performers, using theatre and dance to shock their spectators and throw a spotlight on modern slavery in Britain, while also helping survivors to regain their confidence through dancing.
“Art is a very powerful way of speaking out about the issue,” Erena Bordon Sanchez, founding director of The Natashas Project, a modern dance and theatre company set up in 2013, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation after a recent show in London.
While modern slavery is increasingly capturing the attention of the media worldwide, few in Britain have grasped the scale of a crime estimated to trap at least 13,000 people in the country in forced labour, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude.
One in five people in Britain have never heard of modern-day slavery, and more than half say they wouldn’t know what to do, or who to talk to, if they suspected that someone was a victim, according to a poll in October by British supermarket Co-op.
“Our aim is to connect with the public, by portraying through dance what people might experience during slavery,” said Sanchez, whose company also visits schools and youth groups to talk to young people about the drivers and signs of slavery.
