Election
Year
A Festival of Optimistic Voices
Illuminating
Talk, Enlightening Theater
Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe
Theater artist Nina Wise and activist Randy Hayes, founder of the Rainforest Action Network, have teamed up with Bob Martin of the Lensic Performing Arts Center to present Election Year: A Festival of Optimistic Voices. This series of four inspiring evenings brings together some of the world’s leading visionaries to present solutions and paradigm-shifting perspectives on the most critical issues of our time. Following the talk, Nina Wise will weave the themes of the evening into one of her signature performances, transforming the conceptual issues into complex, funny, and deeply moving narratives that move our understanding from the mental realm into the heart.
There is growing concern amongst many of us that we are headed towards unprecedented disaster. So why optimistic voices? Because despite the vast challenges we are facing, there are viable, affordable, solutions available to us right now. People will leave the theater more than informed; they will leave inspired.
May 25, 2008
Women Transforming the World
Election
Year
A Festival of Optimistic Voices
Illuminating
Talk, Enlightening Theater
Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe
Five powerful women come together for the final evening of Voices. Around the world, women are playing key roles in the transformation of social systems from models of domination and violence to models of cooperation and respect for all life. These five women are important visionaries in their respective fields who integrate deep spiritual understanding with their notions of politics, democracy and our relationship to this earth. This promises to be a rowdy, moving, and inspiring evening.
Jane
Hirshfield
is an award-winning poet. She was born in New York
City and received her bachelor's degree from Princeton University in
the school's first graduating class to include women. Her books of poetry
include After, Given Sugar, Given Salt (which was a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award), The Lives of the Heart, The October
Palace, Of Gravity & Angels, and Alaya. She is the author of Nine
Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. About her work, the poet Rosanna
Warren has said: "Hirshfield has elaborated a sensuously philosophical
art that imposes a pause in our fast-forward habits of mind.”
Her honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the
Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, Columbia University's Translation
Center Award, the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, and
the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the
70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The
Academy of American Poets. She is currently on the faculty of the Bennington
MFA Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic
Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of
The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.
Susan
Griffin
is a poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter.
She was born in Los Angeles California in 1943, in the midst of the
Second World War and the holocaust, and these events had a lasting effect
on her thinking. The time she spent as a child in the High Sierras and
along the coast of the Pacific Ocean also shaped her awareness. Her
work moves beyond the boundaries of form and perception, as she draws
connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women
and racism, and traces the causes of war to denial in both private and
public life. She is known for her innovative style. Her groundbreaking
book Woman and Nature is an extended prose-poem. A Chorus of Stones,
the Private Life of War, blends history and memoir as does Wrestling
with Angel of democracy, the Autobiography of an American Citizen, a
work in progress (to be published by Trumpeter books in the Spring of
2008) that explores the state of mind that engenders and sustains democracy.
Wendy
Johnson
is a lay Dharma teacher ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh.
Wendy has lived and practiced at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern
California since 1975. Practicing engaged Buddhism, Wendy combines her
30-year training in organic agriculture with a commitment to teaching
meditation engaged with the life of the world. Her Buddhist philosophy
is the inspirational force behind her work leading walks, practicing
organic gardening and teaching. She has been involved for many years
in establishing gardening programs in Bay Area schools. She is completing
a book on Zen practice and gardening to be published by Bantam Press.
Joan
Halifax
is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist,
and author. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center,
a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has worked in the
area of death and dying for over thirty years and is Director of the
Project on Being with Dying. For the past twenty-five years, she has
been active in environmental work. A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker
Order, her work and practice for more than three decades has focused
on engaged Buddhism. In May, 2005 she became a Spiritual Director, in
Training with Roshis Bernie Glassman and Pat Enkyo O'Hara, of the Zen
Peacemakers. She is Founder and Director of the Upaya Prison Project
that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. She is founder of
the Ojai Foundation, was an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University,
and has taught in many universities, monasteries, and medical centers
around the world.
Natalie
Goldberg
an author and teacher of creative writing. She is
the author of Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within, which
broke open the world of creativity and started a revolution in the way
we practice writing in this country. The book has sold over one million
copies and been translated into fourteen languages. Since then she has
written nine other books, including the novel Banana Rose. Living Color:
A Writer Paints Her World, is about painting as a second art form. Her
lively watercolors are exhibited at Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa
Fe, New Mexico.
Natalie has been teaching seminars in writing as a practice for the
last thirty years. People from around the world attend her life-changing
workshops and she has a reputation as a great teacher. The Oprah Winfrey
Show sent a film crew to spend the day with Natalie for a segment on
Spirituality that covered her writing, teaching, painting, and walking
meditation. She currently lives in Northern New Mexico.
Leap Year
The Center
for Remembering & Sharing Presents
An Evening of Physical Theatre Improvisation
Nina Wise with Annie Kunjappy
Friday
& Saturday, June 20–21, 2008
8 PM
General Admission $20
Students/Seniors/CRS Members $15
In Leap Year, award-winning SF artist Nina Wise and long-time collaborator Annie Kunjappy attempt to ride the surging crest of the precarious present, fueled and beleaguered by memories of the past, seduced and inspired by the imagination of the future. In this work, narrative emerges from a robust physicality. It's dance, it's word jazz. It is accessible, exciting, unpredictable, and miraculously relevant to the issues of the moment. Leap Year will feature both solo and duet work.
Tickets: www.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/249/1209684600000
Info: www.crsny.org/drupal/en/node/4366
"You leave a Nina Wise performance uplifted, as if you've seen something fresh, moving and above all deeply human."— Ashland Tribune
"Simply being in the same room with this consummate improviser for a couple of hours is to watch the unknown unfold before your eyes... I was deeply moved and entertained... Wise distilled something of the complexity of living in today's world into something bizarre, brave and beautiful."— SF Weekly
"Annie Kunjappy is freaking marvelous..."— The Well Nourished Moon, San Francisco
