Help Bring My Solo Show to Life!

Dear friends, community, and fellow artists,

For years, there’s been a show brewing in me. It’s a solo show, drawn mostly from a long, strange, transformative era of life when I spent years living unexpectedly nomadically, on the road and in my tent, in national forests and deserts. Among many other things, it’s a show about navigating profound uncertainty, conjuring bone-deep resilience, and what it means to live as the Earth.

It’s a show I hope will bring much-needed medicine to this moment of the world.

Though I've tried to create this show on my own, I've also realized I need mentorship, structure, and dedicated time and space to actually birth it. Then, last month, I was accepted into a Solo Performance Intensive at Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California—a rare two-week opportunity this March to learn from a brilliant teacher, develop my show, receive personal guidance, and work alongside other artists.

This is the perfect next step in bringing this show to life... but I need help for it to happen!

How you can support:

✨ Donate directly here (every bit helps!)

✨ Pre-register for a workshop (in person and online offerings coming this spring)

✨ Book a creative coaching session (writing, storytelling, any creative project)

✨ Come to a storytelling (local to Olympic Peninsula)

Why This Matters

Ever since childhood, I’ve been passionate about theatre—about creating and embodying worlds of imagination and possible realities. What could be better, I thought growing up, than to spend my life making that magic?

Then, for almost two decades, I lived within the underworlds of disabling chronic illness. Theatre and dance had once been my life, but in my early 30s, no longer able to keep my balance or memorize lines, I had to stop doing most theatre besides simple non-speaking roles. That’s it, I thought. That dream is over.

As my health kept spiraling down, my world turned inside out—literally. No longer able to live indoors and needing to heal, I began an utterly unplanned life as a nomad—sometimes subletting friends' places for a few days or weeks, but otherwise living entirely on the road and outside, immersed in the land, relearning everything. And through all of it, I was still creating—building puppets, writing and recording music, moving and singing with the land and water and other-than-human worlds, concocting bits of script I didn’t know if I’d ever use.

Well… as it turns out… the dream’s not over. After years of healing, I’m amazed and grateful to once again be able to hurl myself around onstage and memorize pages of text. Since re-landing in Port Townsend this past year, I’ve been thrilled to be performing and storytelling professionally again. And the solo show that’s been in me, whispering about those nomad years… it’s still there.

Participating in this intensive is an immense opportunity to immerse myself fully in the work, develop this show with mentorship in a focused container, and take a huge step forward in my creative career. It’s also a wholehearted commitment to what I love and am here to do.

While I'm there, I intend to learn, practice, and create as fully and deeply as I can—and then return to my communities and the world with an overflowing basket of strengthened skills, creative material, and focused devotion to this show and my work as an artist.

May it be nourishing, healing, beautiful, provoking, inspiring, and life-giving for all who experience it.

The Show

I don’t yet know what form the show will take. It will likely involve many of the ways and practices I've trained and worked and played in, including physical theatre, ritual theatre, vaudeville, mythology, psychomagic, butoh, clown, puppetry, handmade costumes and sets, a nice long script/libretto, and music. It will (hopefully) be profound and absurd, raw and surreal. I'll be able to perform it anywhere, from stages to streets, to forests and fields.

It will be about many things, including navigating the unknown, adapting and creating when life turns upside down, collaborating with the unseen and other-than-human worlds, and finding power and peace in the in-between.

It’s also a story about learning to live as the Earth—about how, through years of nomadic life, I came to know in every cell that the Earth is my home, my body is my home, and I am always home.

This show—and the process of creating it—will alchemize survival into art, isolation into connection, and old stories into new... and is yet another journey into the mystery. What strange wonders will emerge?

Why I Need Support

For years, I was mostly in solitude, navigating survival without a reliable income or savings, and rarely asking for help. Believing I had to brave it alone, I also never created a crowdfunding campaign.

Now, as I rebuild my life, creative career, and income, I’m finally reaching out for support. It feels vulnerable, terrifying, and full of possibility.

While I’ve already put down deposits, I still need to cover the rest of tuition, lodging, and travel (I’ll be driving my very efficient Prius there and back). That totals $2000.

I have until the end of February to raise the funds. And I fully trust it will happen.

(Anything beyond that is heartily welcome, of course! It all goes towards building this and a few other shows as I build my new life.)

If you’re able, I’d be deeply grateful for any contribution. If not, sharing this would be wondrously supportive as well!

Gratitude

While I welcome donations with no expectation of exchange, I'd also love to offer in gratitude:

✨ I'll respond to each donation with a personal thank-you, and will ask you in that message if you'd like one of the above gifts! ✨

This intensive is a huge step in bringing this show to life and sharing it with the world, and in my own path as an artist. Thank you for believing in me and this work.

may your steps be blessed and your worlds be beautiful,

with love and gratitude,

Kirsten

✨

You can explore my website right here

And here are a few never-before-seen photos from some of those nomad seasons:

This last one is a combination of photos from a desert highway sometime around 2022, and my backyard yesterday afternoon. May these times and worlds weave in surprising and healing ways...