Ensler among honorees at King event

Ringing of the bells for peace. Monday, throughout the day, Organizations and individuals around the world are encouraged to incorporate ringing of bells as part of their observance of the King holiday. www.thekingcenter.org/.

The MLK Jr. Day of Service. Monday. Sponsored by Hands on Atlanta. An opportunity for citizens to join community service projects, conducted throughout the day and around the metro area. Hands on Atlanta, 404-979-2800, www.handsonatlanta.org.

The King Week Holiday March & Rally. 1:45-4 p.m. Monday. The march begins at Peachtree Street and Baker Street. The rally will be held on Auburn Avenue in the King National Park area. 404-614-3233, www.thekingcenter.org/.

Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, various events through the week. 450 Auburn Ave. N.E. 404-331-5190, www.nps.gov/malu/.

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The irrepressible writer Eve Ensler has traveled a curious path. In 1996, she was a subversive playwright. On Saturday, she will be honored at the King Center as a worthy successor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Once an off-off-Broadway performer workshopping a provocative script called “The Vagina Monologues,” she is now the face of an international movement called “One Billion Rising.”

Dedicated to fighting the forces that strip women and girls of their humanity, last Valentine’s Day the One Billion Rising movement sparked demonstrations in many countries around the world, including events in Atlanta that drew 7,000 activists.

Among those Atlanta participants was Bernice A. King, CEO of the King Center. Addressing a group gathered at the state Capitol, King sparked cheers when she said, “In the words of my father, today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is between nonviolence and nonexistence.”

And then, to her surprise, she danced. “Just a little,” she said recently, with a chuckle. “I’m not much of a dancer. Sometimes my rhythm is a little bit off.”

But dance she did, along with millions of women around the globe, in flash mobs in front of the Georgia Capitol, in the Congo and New Delhi, in Trafalgar Square and Manila.

King saw and felt the logic in such a celebration. “It’s about knowing you can move in a space uninhibited. It is so freeing.”

On Saturday, Ensler, who has exhorted women around the globe to rise up and dance for justice, will be among three individuals honored at the Salute to Greatness dinner hosted by the King Center. She will be honored as the embodiment of the center’s vision, along with heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and the young Pakistani activist Khalida Brohi.

Choosing Ensler and her organization for the prize was a “no-brainer,” King said. “It is very consistent with the work we’re doing,” she said. “It is universal, it is powerful, and the global essence of it is critically important. It gives hope to the individual who may have felt alone.”

It also turns the focus of the King Center to the issues of rape and violence against women, and confirms that women’s rights and civil rights are one and the same.

Like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Ensler has made a practice of speaking such uncomfortable truths.

In 1996, when she began performing “The Vagina Monologues,” a play about the travails and joys of women’s sexuality, news outlets and television shows were reluctant to repeat the title of the show. It just wasn’t done in polite company.

To Ensler, this reaction was the kind of insanity that denies the existence of an organ possessed by half the human race. “People go bonkers. What does that tell us?” she said, speaking from her offices in New York City. “It is amazing to me that this is the most feared and reviled word in many languages.”

Raped and abused as a child, Ensler used the play to attack violence against women. Though it was a one-woman show at first, subsequent presentations brought celebrities onstage to deliver each of the short chapters, and Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Cyndi Lauper, Sandra Oh and Oprah Winfrey were among the cast members in various productions.

It has been translated into 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries. While Ensler continued to write plays, books and poems, she leveraged the success of “The Vagina Monologues” to create a fundraising engine that supported women’s issues around the world, helping schoolgirls in Afghanistan and rape victims in Bosnia.

Her work also supported “V-Day,” a yearly event that redirected attention on Valentine’s Day from romantic love to the issue of violence against women. Last year, V-Day grew into “One Billion Rising.” The figure comes from the U.N. estimate that one in three women, or a billion, will be beaten or raped in her lifetime.

Ensler, 60, encouraged her colleagues to fight back joyously by dancing during their demonstrations. Lynn Hesse of Stone Mountain, a retired police officer and participant in several dance groups, was one of the dancers that day, and she understands the power of that action.

“I can’t express the feeling that would come over me,” Hesse said. “As a police officer, a lot of my calls were around domestic violence. … To see women coming together being joyful, it says, ‘We can do this, we can overcome this, we can be joyful together.’”

Ensler discovered that abuse of women is especially widespread in areas where they become pawns in conflict over political power or natural resources. Seven years ago, she began working with Congolese women who had suffered unspeakable tortures by soldiers fighting in the civil war over lucrative mining operations there.

In response, she established “City of Joy,” where Congolese women are offered surgery to repair the disabling injuries from sexual attacks, and are given training and the ability to start a business.

“You can throw up your hands and say it’s too difficult,” she says, “or you can begin.”

Of the success of her one-woman show, she is still incredulous: “It taught me that when you say what you’re not supposed to say, and do what you’re not supposed to do, when we do bold things that our heart is pushing for, when it keeps burning through you, that’s where change happens.”