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!
We’re back in action this 2024 with a fabulous guest, Ursa Miles!
Ursa is a performer and author from the Ozarks currently based out of Chicago. Her work has appeared on stage at the International Storytelling Center (through Jonesborough Storytellers Guild), The Mountain Makins Festival, Big Muddy New Play Festival, and This Much is True. Her book Passive Aggressive Fables for Adults is available wherever books are sold. Ursa is also a survivor of proxy supraventricular tachycardia who lives with neurocardiogenic syncope, hypoglycemia, and hypermobility disorder. She loves cheesecake.
Ursa tells stories about maintaining relationships with her passions for the outdoors and the arts while navigating her life as a heart and neurological patient.
Wild animals such as deer, bears, and raccoons make appearances. Oh my! You’ll be captivated the entire show.
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!
Avesha recently returned to her hometown of Chicago, where she has developed a passion for storytelling and the community surrounding it. During her twenty-two years in Los Angeles, she quickly ditched a legal career to put her whole heart and soul into arts and crafts. She spent ten years as a professional photographer before taking a risk to turn her childhood passion into a new career: ceramics. She founded a pottery studio and humbly and gratefully ran it full-time for eight years, crafting housewares and, more recently, whimsical gnomes. Now, she is counting the days until she can escape the city and start a small homestead, complete with chickens and goats.
She is deeply committed to speaking truth to story and bringing awareness to mental health and trauma-informed, shared human experiences. To her, connection is everything, to be human is to have trauma, and to heal, we first need to learn how to feel. She holds an MA in Spiritual Psychology, is trained in many healing arts, and was certified recently as a Breathwork Facilitator and Reiki Master.
Avesha will take us on a journey into the complex love between her and her father. She’ll tell of the time when her dad selflessly traveled to care for her when she was bedridden with meningitis. Years later, she found out that he had unexpectedly died alone, estranged from his relationships. She’ll tell the story of caring for the aftereffects of his life and continuing the journey of a relationship that still grows and heals through forgiveness, writing, music, and the love of nature he instilled in her.
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.
