Art, in all forms, has the ability to encourage, enlighten, and empower. Senior dancer Brooke Miller experienced this when she choreographed a dance featured in the Paint Phoenix Purple youth dance contest to help raise awareness for worldwide domestic violence.

Founded by The City of Phoenix Domestic Violence Campaign, Paint Phoenix Purple’s “main goal is just to spread awareness about domestic violence,” Miller explains, and the contest is one way to get the community involved.

Miller choreographed a contemporary dance entitled “Escaping the Control” that would be performed by dance teacher Farah Sadler’s improv class. Sadler introduced Miller to the contest and encouraged her to choreograph a dance.

Miller was intrigued about this particular contest because “[the campaign] wanted to spread awareness through dance.”

Junior Erinn Salewski, one of the 14 dancers to perform “Escaping Control,”really appreciated the significance of the event and “getting to dance to something with such a meaning.”

“It was a really cool experience and the environment was uplifting. I’ve never done something like that and it was good to share our [dance] with others,” Salewski says.

This winning piece took time to construct. Miller began choreographing the routine towards the end of August and the group rehearsed repeatedly in class for a month. The dancers performed the finished piece on Oct.15 at Phoenix City Hall.

“Even though [the event] was really small and there weren’t very many people there, it was still just cool how we could just represent our school and help spread domestic violence awareness,” Miller says.

“Escaping Control” was choreographed to mirror domestically violent relationships.

“We basically have partnerships,” Miller describes. “In the beginning there’s the honeymoon phase and they start out and they’re very happy but then one thing will happen so they’ll push them or they’ll hit them but then everything will be back to normal.”

She explains that the relationship “progressively gets worse and worse…until the very end where the victims stand up for themselves.” In the dance, the “victims” make a hard decision but ultimately leave the toxic relationship, which is an uplifting lesson that everyone can take away.