Rosario Dawson Celebrates V-Day

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It may be April, but that didn’t stop Rosario Dawson from celebrating V-Day — albeit it was a very different kind of V-Day.

The actress was one of the many stars present at V To The Tenth in New Orleans over the weekend, an event founded by Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler aimed at celebrating V-Day’s 10 years of ending violence against women and girls and to honor the women of New Orleans and the Gulf South.

“I think it’s really important to show what people never want to talk about, that there are tremendous atrocities happening in our own backyard,” Rosario tells OK! of the significance of the event. “In three years, so many people forget about what happened [with Hurricane Katrina]. Just even traveling around the Ninth Ward and then going to the French Quarter, people are going, ‘Where’s the problem, I don’t see it.’ Unless you get in a car and drive, you can’t see it.

Stars, including Kerry Washington, Ali Larter, Jennifer Beals and Amber Tamblyn, performed skits and monologues empowering women and shedding light on past cruelties. Rosario performed a moving piece about a Bosnian refugee who was repeatedly raped by soldiers, reducing the crowd to tears.

“I was blown away,” Ali tells OK! “I thought Rosario was incredible.” The performance was the least lighthearted out of all of the skits, ranging from feigned orgasms (Jennifer) to accepting how a vagina looks (Kerry).

“That piece is a really difficult piece,” Rosario says. “It’s such a heavy piece that there is no getting around it. Everyone always calls it the most difficult piece out of all of them. It’s very heavy, there’s no jokes in it, no laughs, there’s no relief. It just keeps getting stronger and harder until the end where it’s just hopeless. I was just glad that we got that out there and people came up and said it really touched them."