At Home
A solo performance by Nina Wise
Saturday, March 14, 8pm
Studio 64
64 Lousie Street, San Rafael
Tickets $25
Doors open at 7:30. Come early to choose your seat, browse our art studio and enjoy some refreshments.
Living locally is a way we can reduce our negative impact on the environment. It’s also a way to strengthen our bonds to our place and our community. To celebrate where we are and those we are with.
Nina will give a performance at Studio 64, a small artists’ co-op very close to her home. This intimate, salon-like performance is in part a celebration of the artists in our midst.
Seating is very limited.
Part of the proceeds will go to Airlift, a local non profit that supports grassroots voter registration efforts across the country.
" Loving kindness abounds in her work. She makes art as fresh as the days headlines."— Village Voice.
“Nina Wise is something else again. She shapes theater pieces that are thoroughly grounded in intellectual commitment and emotional depth.” —SF Chronicle
“A metaphysical vaudevillian for the new millennium”—Bob Morris, N.Y. Times columnist
“Nina Wise is part of a vanishing breed . . . artists who feel that emotional content and intellectual stimulation are not foreign ingredients to performance art.” –Artweek
Nina Wise’s At Home is an improvisational performance work based on personal and political events which have transpired over the previous twenty-four hours. Wise’s autobiographical performances, known for their warmth and compassion, weave irony, physicality and insight into complex, spontaneous narratives. Her work, which has been compared to a cross between Lily Tomlin, the Dalai Lama and Jules Feiffer, is at once full of humor and poignancy. Audiences repeatedly report that they have never seen anything quite like Wise before and that they are at one instant laughing so hard they are falling off their seats and the next moment moved to tears.
Wise has performed What Just Happened to sold out crowds at The Marsh in San Francisco and Berkeley, Highways, LA, the Solo Festival in Ashland, TEDxSF, Playground Solo Festival, SF, Bowery Poetry Club, NY, New York Open Center, NY; at Esalen Institute, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and at a number of conferences around the country.
Originally a performer with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Wise soon set out on her own to create art that incorporated language as well as movement. In 1990, she developed Motion Theatre®, a unique improvisational form that replaces the bells and whistles of staging and technology with the raw elements available to an actor: body, voice, and insight. The technique draws on the performer’s skills as a writer, storyteller, dancer and intellectual. As described by Chloe Veltman in the SF Weekly: “Wise moves and speaks like a veteran jazz musician; there's structure and poise to her every riff. . . . Simply being in the same room as this consummate improviser for a couple of hours is to watch the unknown unfold before your eyes. Yet to reduce Wise's work to a mere curiosity, like a sideshow at a traveling fair, is to do it a great disservice. For I was . . . deeply moved and entertained by Wise's eccentric take [on her life as she] distilled something of the complexity of living in today's world . . . into something bizarre, beautiful, and brave.”
Wise is known for her scripted as well as her improvised works and finds no venue or subject out of bounds. Her audiences have included think tanks, medical institutions, international conferences and spiritual centers while her subjects range from the environment, death and dying, healing, Jewish identity and Buddhism to…even…golf. Recently, she developed The Kepler Story in collaboration with California Academy of Sciences Morrison Planetarium, an immersive theater piece designed for planetarium domes about 17th Century astronomer Johannes Kepler. The Kepler Story played to sold out audiences in San Francisco and Boulder and will be produced in the Prague Planetarium in 2020. Wise’s performances have garnered seven Bay Area Theatre Critics’ Circle Awards and she has received four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and four from the Marin Arts Council. Her stories and articles have appeared widely and her book, A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life: Self Expression and Spiritual Practice for Those Who Have Time for Neither, was published in 2002 by Broadway Books. In addition to performing, Wiseteaches and lectures. She has been on the faculty at JFK University, UC Santa Cruz and SF State University and been a guest lecturer at the University of Southern California, Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin. Wise has a devoted following of private students across the country, and regularly offers courses on both coasts. She is currently on the faculty of HB Studio in New York. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, she is a teaching affiliate of Spirit Rock Meditation Center.
For more information, visit her website at www.ninawise.com