Solo Arts Heal

Performance excerpts, talkbacks and Q&A with special guests
providing health and healing education and advocacy.

Click to Watch on Zoom

Click to Watch on YouTube 

Wednesdays at 7:30pm PST

 

September 27

Performance Description:

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 after effects 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.

Artist Biography:

Avesha Michael 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 (https://www.etsy.com/shop/aveshamichael). Now, she is counting the days until she can escape the city and start a small homestead, complete with chickens and goats.

Avesha 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. Avesha holds an MA in Spiritual Psychology, is trained in many healing arts, and was certified recently as a Breathwork Facilitator and Reiki Master.

Social Media Tag
IG: @avesha33

October 11

Performance Description:

The Red Light Zones is an autobiographical solo show that follows a naively innocent girl from an overly protective Italian Catholic family through various losses in her life. A devastating diagnosis in her adult life forces her to let go of her sheltered upbringing and face risk head on.

Artist Biography:

Anne D’Innocenzio is a national business writer for one of the world’s largest news organizations. When not reporting, Anne loves playing piano and going to museums and theater in this magical city. She performed on and off at the New Talent Shows at Carolines on Broadway before the pandemic, riffing about her overprotective Italian Catholic mother and her family. The premise of “The Red Light Zones” was first workshopped in early 2017 at Go Solo Workshop in Manhattan with instructor Christine R. Miller. But a serious health diagnosis forced her to pull out of the workshop soon after. A year later, she started up again, recasting and expanding her show. And in October 2022, she performed her full length 60 minute show at the TheaterLab, which is dedicated to innovative theater in Manhattan. This is her first performance for Solo Art Heals

About the Program & Hosts

Solo Arts Heal, a weekly MarshStream Public Broadcast Platform program, presents empowering performances about healing and resilience. Through hosted interviews, talkbacks and audience Q&A, the Solo Arts Heal program provides transformative experiences, education, community outreach and advocacy through stories that celebrate the healing power of the arts.

AnCan, hosted by Rick Davis, is about people helping people, peer to peer. Collectively and individually, AnCan provides answers, support, and navigation to empower people living with serious and chronic conditions to address their worlds. Production Manager, John Ivory.

Stephanie Weisman founded and has been the Artistic/Executive Director of The Marsh since its inception in 1989. Under her leadership, The Marsh has grown from a one-night-a-week performance series to producing 600-700 shows annually on its four stages. In addition to its developing work performance series, The Marsh’s programs include: artist-in-residencies, after-school and summer workshops for youth both onsite and in 5 SFUSD, and performance development classes, workshops and Performance Initiatives. In 1996 Stephanie spearheaded the drive to successfully buy their 12,000 sq ft facility on Valencia Street in San Francisco. This increased The Marsh’s programs four-fold as well as provided for a stable Bay Area arts organization. In 2010, The Marsh added a second venue in Berkeley. In 2020, Stephanie initiated MarshStream. She is currently at work developing her opera, Aphrodisia, with dancer, Wei Wang

Gail Schickele champions arts & sciences as a writer, speaker, consultant, and producer. In January 2020 she convened an artist collective to assist solo artists whose unique stories of physical and mental challenges manifest the healing power of The Arts. COVID inspired Stephanie Weisman to create SOLO ARTS HEAL on The MarshStream to share these outstanding stories of resilience, dramatic and comedic, for the entertainment and benefit of communities everywhere. Gail’s work in marketing, management, and production has served various theaters, festivals and events nationwide. Trained as a journalist in New York and Colorado, she has covered Colorado state politics and the environmental landscape of the Rockies. Environmental educational and advocacy work in California includes the League of Women Voters and The Climate Reality Project. Gail is honored to curate and host SOLO ARTS HEAL where artists powerful stories offer audiences great performance and ‘informance’ on issues related to health and the environment, inexorably linked.

Rick Davis, is a serial social entrepreneur with a background in finance and real estate. He was diagnosed with locally advanced prostate cancer in 2007; it was readily apparent there was inadequate support for men placed on medium and long term hormone therapy, and Rick started to remedy that. He also participated in prostate cancer support groups and recognized not only their value, but also that availability was geographically, physically and socially constrained. Virtual support groups appeared to resolve many of those constraints.

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