CoHo Presents
SHE’S HERE: A ONE WOMAN SHOW
Written & Performed by Andrea Parson
With Direction from Susan Banyas
January 16 – 18, 2020 (8:00pm)
$20 in advance, $25 at the door
A story of a movement, “magick” and myth. A Sicilian grandmother guides one woman’s quest to uncover her spiritual roots through dance and storytelling.
She’s Here: A One Woman Show investigates the spiritual roots of one woman through dance and storytelling. Stemming from a story of her Sicilian great-great-grandmother, choreographer/performer Andrea Parson weaves personal stories, oral history, and myth to unlock the doors of her Sicilian lineage of spirituality, magic, and witchery. Reflections on a recent research trip to Sicily imbue the stories with the spirit of the old world of her ancestors. She’s Here includes the voice of Parson’s grandmother Lucy Scholerman, as well as a surprise special guest, in an evening-length dance and storytelling performance.
Run time approximately 45 minutes
ABOUT ANDREA PARSON
Andrea Parson studied dance performance at Loyola Marymount University, where she received a BA in dance in 2009. She now lives in Portland, OR, where she currently performs and teaches dance nationally and internationally with the Northwest Dance Project. In 2010 she received the Princess Grace Award for dance. Andrea has choreographed original works for NW Dance Project’s company and NW Dance Project’s Summer Dance Intensive. Since 2014 she has collaborated with costume designer and filmmaker Fuchsia Lin, choreographing and performing a solo work for Ten Tiny Dances (2016) and two dance films: Crystals of Transformation and Future Cosmos Flo. In 2018, she produced and co-directed Finding Soul: A Constellation of Stories in collaboration with Susan Banyas and presented at CoHo Summerfest. Within that project she created and performed her first solo work, Amore, inspired by the stories of her Sicilian grandmother Lucy.
ABOUT SUSAN BANYAS
Susan Banyas has worked extensively as a dancer, writer, and performance artist since 1976, when she co-founded SO&SO&SO&SO and began to develop Soul Stories and Everyday Dancing, forms that integrate movement, image, and language into physical poetry. The Hillsboro Story and No Strangers Here Today are multi-voiced investigations that illuminate the role her Ohio hometown played in American civil rights history and the journey to encounter that history directly. Both theatre pieces toured nationally and are expanded into a non-fiction book, The Hillsboro Story/a kaleidoscope history of an integration battle in my hometown, (Spuyten Duyvil Press, NYC, 2019). Outtakes is a multi-media performance form, featuring excerpts and outtakes from the book, performed as solo monologues, lecture-performance, and ensemble theatre. She co-directed, with choreographer Andrea Parson, Finding Soul: A Constellation of Stories, for CoHo Theatre’s Summerfest in Portland, Oregon. Forest Visions (2018 and on) is an interdisciplinary project in Astoria, Oregon, designed to stimulate conversation, education, and action related to climate change and big timber. Kundalini History/Voices from the Great Serpent is a multi-media work-in-progress centered on the ancient earthworks in Southern Ohio.
