AnCan and The Marsh (well renown, long-established theater company with a large following in the Bay Area and venues in San Francisco and Oakland) collaborateevery 4th Wednesday of the month for Solo Arts Heal!
March’s guest was fantastic, meet Hal Walker!
Hal is a writer, musician and social media sensation from Kent, Ohio (2.3 million TikTok followers). Now mostly housebound and bed-based, over the last two years he has experienced the onset of moderately severe ME/CFS (Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome). Hal also produces the weekly Substack publication, Living in a Body. You can learn more about him here.
Hal performed original music on musical instruments from around the world, and discussed using creativity as a survival tool for long haul illness.
AnCan and The Marsh (well renown, long-established theater company with a large following in the Bay Area and venues in San Francisco and Oakland) collaborateevery 4th Wednesday of the month for Solo Arts Heal!
You’re gonna love February’s show, featuring Sasha Soreff!
Sasha is a New York City-based choreographer, empathy/movement facilitator, and certified transformational coach.
She is currently offering online workshops to support embodying, expressing, and empathizing with grief. Sasha weaves somatic movement, relational neuroscience, and transformational principles together. Through this, workshop participants experience compassionate self-connection and soulful, embodied expression.
As Artistic Director of Sasha Soreff Dance Theater (SSDT), she has been creating and sharing multigenerational, interactive work for two decades, including her signature piece, “The Dancer Who Wore Sneakers and Other Tales,” created in response to a chronic foot condition that reshaped her creative life. Her work has been seen on stages, sidewalks, and community spaces from the Ailey Citigroup Theater to the Queens Museum of Art.
Sasha has taught modern dance and student performance workshops for close to three decades. She is on faculty at NYC’s Gibney Dance and The International Partner Dance Intensive, and recently guest taught at NYU Langone’s Initiative for Women with Disabilities. She has served as a teaching assistant to kinesthetic anatomist Irene Dowd and was a founding company member of Isabel Gotzkowsky and Friends dance company. A Maine native, she graduated from high school at North Carolina School of the Arts with a concentration in modern dance and received a BA from Barnard College.
Sasha shared excerpts from the four eras of her dancing career, which was transformed by her experiences with painful neuropathy and cancer. As artistic director of Sasha Soreff Dance Theater, she created her signature piece, “The Dancer Who Wore Sneakers and Other Tales,” in response to a chronic foot condition that reshaped her creative life. Long-term experiences with neuropathy in her feet, as well as a cancer journey, have inspired her artistry and invigorated her commitment to creating communal spaces for deep empathy, embodiment, and healing.
Alexa, John, and Briaunna even joined in the fun with a dance that you can do too!
AnCan and The Marsh (well renown, long-established theater company with a large following in the Bay Area and venues in San Francisco and Oakland) collaborateevery 4th Wednesday of the month for Solo Arts Heal!
Claire is a poet who has published five volumes of poetry since 1998, most recently Ismene’s Survivable Resistance in 2021. (If you remember the Greek tragedy of Antigone, Ismene is the sister who was left behind to remember the trauma of it all). Claire has been a creative writing teacher and mentor for more than 30 years. She teaches not only at the university level but also dedicates herself to helping students at community centers to use writing to process trauma. In addition, she collaborated on an innovative research project, “Left / Write // Hook,” that uses writing and non-contact boxing to process trauma and led to her co-editing an anthology of participants’ writings. Claire’s work is rooted in her own trauma, which began in childhood, and experiences with physical ailments, which include “keyhole” surgery to mend a broken heart.
Claire read her poetry, which provides her with a survival tool to both navigate and move past experiences of abuse and disempowerment. It explored how survivors’ voices can enter public discourse and instigate lasting social and cultural change. People who have been traumatized may not have a linear narrative. Poetry is a means to integration through the placement of fragments, allusion, association and evocation. Poetry can hold what is too intense to keep internalized.
AnCan and The Marsh (well renown, long-established theater company with a large following in the Bay Area and venues in San Francisco and Oakland) collaborateevery 4th Wednesday of the month for Solo Arts Heal!
Our special October guest was fabulous Kelle Jolly!
Kelle, “The Tennessee Ukulele Lady”, is an accomplished music entertainer and educator. She shares musical stories and songs from the South. Her repertoire includes traditional African American music of blues, jazz, spirituals, and folk. Kelle is a graduate of South Carolina State University, where she studied Music Education with Concentrations in Voice. Kelle is the 2011 Mountain Soul Vocal competition winner and the Knoxville Community Shares 2013 Artist of the Year.
Kelle Jolly is the host of Jazz Jam, Knoxville’s only vocal jazz radio show, on WUOT 91.9FM. She is the founder of the Women in Jazz Jam Festival and Ukesphere of Knoxville. Kelle and her saxophonist husband, Will Boyd, have served as ambassadors of jazz from Tennessee to Japan. They are Knoxville MLK Commission Artist Award recipients. In 2021, the City of Knoxville proclaimed July 21st, “Kelle Jolly and Will Boyd” Day in Knoxville, TN. Kelle Jolly is currently a graduate student in the Communication and Storytelling Studies program at East Tennessee State University, pursuing her Master of Arts degree.
Kelle told personal stories of loss and self-care. Loss: A baby story normally ends with a baby. But what happens when it doesn’t? “Losing a baby changes the story you tell about yourself as a woman. I saw myself as a sad failure. Not only did I lose a baby, I lost the ability to ever be pregnant again. My pregnancy loss left me feeling hopeless until l I was asked to conceive something else.” Self-care: Every year, the Women in Jazz Jam Festival has a theme. “I can’t always tell if the theme is a result of the festival planning experience or if the festival planning is shaped by the theme. But the year of the ‘Hearts’ theme was too relevant and real.”
AnCan and The Marsh (well renown, long-established theater company with a large following in the Bay Area and venues in San Francisco and Oakland) collaborateevery 4th Wednesday of the month for Solo Arts Heal!
Our guest for September was one of our very own – Hannah Garrison!
Hannah, who lives with multiple sclerosis (MS), took a blank canvas and created a piece of visual art throughout the show as she is interviewed by Rick Davis, with questions from the audience.
San Antonio, Texas-based artist Hannah received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2014. Undiagnosed symptoms of MS started creeping into her life, resulting in a few tumultuous years. Her symptoms accelerated in severity in the spring of 2017; that summer she received her diagnosis. An identity crisis ensued, and she found that using the arts as meditation and therapy helped her to not only heal but also to become a better caregiver.
Being honest about her diagnosis to complete strangers was not only effective medicine for her but for them as well. She now teaches visual arts to those who are chronically ill—to those living with cancer, MS, and more. Inside hospitals, she creates large window paintings for patients at their bedside and has witnessed the life-changing effects of art combined with an empathetic ear. She teaches AnCan’s virtual arts classes and has been virtually teaching the arts through various other organizations since 2020, during the height of the pandemic.
Watch here:
To SIGN UP for any of our AnCan Virtual Support group reminders, visit our Contact Us page.
AnCan and The Marsh (well renown, long-established theater company with a large following in the Bay Area and venues in San Francisco and Oakland) collaborateevery 4th Wednesday of the month for Solo Arts Heal!
Our guest for August was William Wonders III.
William grew up in Brooklyn, NY. He attended Nyack College from 1998-2001. William secretly began writing and shooting video during this time. It all came to a head in 2009 when William decided to enroll at New York Film Academy in Manhattan, NY. He did this after starting an afterschool program to teach film and video to at risk youth. William has directed a number of short films.
His short film, “Fear Itself”, premiered in Florida, California, Mexico, Atlanta and New Jersey film festivals. William owns his own production company, so he can write and produce films, inspiring everyone that sees them. William’s latest project “Fixing Grandma” has been picked up by Amazon Prime. William is currently working on documentary about the current state of health of Black Men in America.
William presented an original piece about the paradigm shift he went through to produce content that addresses the disparities in the health of the black community.
Watch here:
Special thanks to John Ivory for filling in for Rick Davis. We appreciate you!
To SIGN UP for any of our AnCan Virtual Support group reminders, visit our Contact Us page.
