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 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!
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(Editor’s note: This is a ‘master’ list of books related to death, dying, and grief. We hope you will find this to be a helpful resource in your journey, no matter what it is. If you would like to share a book that has helped you, please email alexa at rickd13.sg-host.com. Amazon links here for your convenience and ease of purchasing the book. Remember, you can help AnCan with absolutely no cost to you by purchasing through AmazonSmile. Read how to here. Special thanks to Dr. John Antonucci.)
“We face fears of death and dying, and at times turn to authors who have thought deeply and written about the topic. I offer here a short bibliography on the topic. Ideally it would be an organic list, onto which readers could add suggestions or comments.” – Dr. John Antonucci
