Local artist hosting event for Int’l Women’s Day that challenges our relationships with self
By Samantha Johnson Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on February 23, 2023.
reporter@medicinehatnews.com Hatters can honour International Women’s Day on Mar. 8 with Dana Wylie, who will be hosting a workshop in the afternoon and performing a theatrical song cycle, Makings of a Voice, in the evening. “The idea is when I created this show,” said Wylie, “I did it out of a need to come to grips with my relationship to my roots and my feeling of rootlessness, which I think many people have in the contemporary world.” Woven throughout the show are original songs by Wylie, which will provide moments of pause and reflection for the storytelling. The show is about the drive to make sense of one’s story and engage with it, only to discover it’s messy, complicated and doesn’t follow classic narrative lines in the way you might hope it would. “That’s what the show is about and the workshop comes directly out of that,” stated Wylie. While Wylie was undertaking graduate work, she game across some scholarly writing which argued people can only understand themselves as a story and must have it reflected back to us by the people in our lives. “That way of thinking about identity stands counter to the idea that we can be some monolithic person living out a prescribed narrative. It’s the idea that identities are relational and that we as humans are fragmented, complicated, messy.” The workshop, Finding and Telling Your Story: Some Whys, Whats, and Hows, will be an exploratory journey, and the basis of it will come out of how Wylie interrogated and investigated her deepest discomforts when writing her one-woman show. Both the workshop, which runs from 1-3:30 p.m. and performance, starting at 7:30 p.m., are pay what you will, and tickets can be reserved from the Esplanade website. 11-10
