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.

NOTE: I'm in the process of revising this fundraiser after my life took an utterly unexpected turn this spring... updates forthcoming!

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.

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.

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

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...