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  Photo by Lydia Giangregorio  Marjorie Morgan has had an extraordinarily varied career in the arts. After receiving a BA in Dance from Oberlin College, she spent over 25 years dancing professionally and creating dances and performance art to be performed by herself and others. When a serious injury compromised her ability to dance, she shifted her focus to the visual arts, where she’s found joy and acclaim as a painter and printmaker. For the past few years, she’s been captivated by the process of making her own inks and pigments from natural materials that she finds near her home in Western Massachusetts. In this conversation, Marjorie discusses how painting saved her after her devastating injury, how unconscious impulses have guided her artistic journey, and how a voice heard in a dream prompted her to cross oceans to visit the site that inspired a series of her paintings. If you enjoyed this interview, you might also enjoy my conversations with painter Mia Risberg, titled The Viewer Makes the Narrative and with visual and performance artist Gwynneth Van Laven, titled Am I Allowed to Laugh at This?You can also see other podcast episodes here, or check out my blog over here. Music by Coma-Media from Pixabay   Artwork by Marjorie Morgan  Podcast RSS      

Holly Near has had a legendary performing career spanning over 50 years, that has taken her from Hollywood to Broadway to marches and rallies and concert halls all over the world. One of the most powerful, consistent, and outspoken singers and songwriters of our time, her music elevates spirits and inspires activism. Some of the topics touched on in this lively and wide-ranging interview are her childhood on a California ranch, her life-changing experience on the Free The Army Tour during the Vietnam War, her songwriting process, her collaborations with artists such as Ronnie Gilbert and Emma’s Revolution, what it means to her to be an elder, and what she’s been up to during the pandemic. The interview is interwoven with snippets of Holly’s music from the seventies to the present.

   Two decades ago, Shruti Tewari left a career as an investment banker to raise her children and pursue a life in the arts. Since then she has acted in projects ranging from independent films to Bollywood Blockbusters, as well as becoming a playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker, committed to writing and developing authentic stories about the Indian American diaspora. In this episode, she talks with host Tanya Shaffer about the challenges of moving from the finance world to the arts, her passion for elevating women’s voices, and her personal mantra, “think amorphous.”   Shruti Tewari acting in the film “Where We Go From Here” Podcast RSS   

In this episode, I talk with Carol Lloyd, author of the ground-breaking book Creating a Life Worth Living: Career Counseling for the Creatively Inclined, which came out in 1997 and is still going strong. We reflect on the book’s insights and lessons, what Carol gleaned from her conversations with creators from a wide range of art forms, and how her ideas have evolved in the time since the book came out. Currently, Carol is the VP and editorial director for Great Schools, a national non-profit focused on parenting and education, and host of the podcast Like a Sponge. Before that, she was an award-winning real estate columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle for ten years and edited the education section of Salon.com. Her work has been widely published and anthologized, including in the NY Times Magazine and on the radio show This American Life, and featured on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, PRI’s The World and KQED’s Forum and To the Best of Our Knowledge.  She’s also a mom of two. Podcast RSS

   Tonya Amos is the founder of Grown Women Dance Collective, a company made up of internationally renowned dancers in their forties and fifties who have retired from full-time positions in the nation’s finest professional dance ensembles. Tonya combines her exuberant spirit, her passion for arts and community-building, and her expertise in dance, health, and wellness to celebrate Black history; build cross-cultural, cross-racial, and cross-class bridges; and bring arts and wellness services to economically disenfranchised communities all over the San Francisco Bay Area. In this podcast, she talks with host Tanya Shaffer about her extraordinary journey as a dancer, beginning in childhood where she trained in competitive gymnastics with Russian coaches and faced extreme discrimination in the San Francisco Bay Area dance scene in the 70’s and 80’s (She was told that Blacks were not allowed onstage at the San Francisco Ballet) and eventually leading her to New York and to dance on full scholarship at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. They also discuss Tonya’s work with Grown Women Dance Collective; how she became a choreographer by default; her passion for breaking down class, race, and generational barriers; and her plans to train a new generation of health and wellness experts to bring Pilates, dance, and life skills practices into communities that have previously had little to no access.  Subscribe in a readerClick on the image below to visit Grown Women Dance Collective’s website.   

  Photo by Chloe Jackman  Singer-songwriter Noe Venable has been called “a homegrown, full-blown musical visionary” (Puremusic.com). Her gorgeously layered songs, rich in myth and poetry, speak to the wilderness in each of our souls. Although she’s still young, she’s already had a rich and varied career, releasing the first of her eight albums when she was just twenty years old. In this conversation, intercut with excerpts from Noe’s diverse musical catalog, host Tanya Shaffer talks with Noe about the mysterious give and take of the creative process, the ways the stages of her life have impacted the evolution of her musical style, why she left a thriving musical career to attend divinity school, and what brought her back to the creative life.  If you enjoyed this interview, you might also enjoy my conversations with singer-songwriter Vienna Teng, titled Following A Spirit’s Whisper, in which we write a song together during the interview, and my interview with Holly Near, titled I Am Open, and I Am Willing in which she reflects on fifty-plus years of singing for social justice. You can also see other podcast episodes here, or check out my blog over here.  Subscribe in a readerClick on the image below to visit Noe’s website.  Photo by Patrick Roddie  

Herbert Sigüenza is a founding member of brilliant, hilarious, and politically incisive group Culture Clash, the most produced Latino performance troupe in the country. He’s also the playwright-in-residence at the San Diego Repertory Theatre and has appeared as an actor in theatre, tv and film. He served as a cultural consultant and the voice of the lead character’s two deceased uncles in the Academy-Award-winning film Coco. In today’s episode, he chats with host Tanya Shaffer about a range of topics, including Culture Clash’s beginnings in San Francisco in the ‘80’s, how they create hit shows, his ongoing commitment to progressive politics, and how he remains engaged and excited about his art 35-plus years into a long career. He also shares a delightful monologue from his solo show A Weekend With Pablo Picasso and a thought-provoking soliloquy based on an interview with a Black preacher in Washington, DC.

Athena Kashyap is the author of two exquisite books of poetry, Crossing Black Waters and Sita’s Choice. In this episode, host Tanya Shaffer talks with her about her writing process and the mysteries of courting the muse. They also discuss some of the themes Athena explores in her books, including immigration, feeling torn between freedom and responsibility, and women’s particular challenges and joys, in India and beyond. Athena also reads three of her poems.

   Multidisciplinary artist Gwynneth VanLaven uses photography, installation, performance, writing, and social engagement to challenge stigma, which she says “takes the real experience of real people and squashes it flat into stereotypes and presumptions.” Through work that is both playful and dark, layered with irony and mystery, she seeks to break down the binary thinking that separates “the well” from “the sick” and “the disabled” from “the non-disabled.” In this wide-ranging discussion, host Tanya Shaffer talks with Gwynneth about her improvisational photographic process, her interactive public experiments, and the humor and awkwardness of being fully embodied in art and life.  Subscribe in a reader Click on the image below to visit Gwynneth’s website.

In this episode, host Tanya Shaffer and singer-songwriter-activist-new mom Vienna Teng don’t just talk about creativity, they dive into it when Tanya asks Vienna to play around with setting a poem created by one of her writing workshops to music.   Photo by Karen Shih  Poems featured in this interview were collectively created by the following participants in Tanya’s Wednesday and Thursday Off-Leash Writing Workshops. Wednesday: Barb Cherem, Janice Fialka, Sara Freeland, Gwynneth Van Laven, Helen Weingarten, Sandra Sorini-Elser, Jennifer Sousae. Thursday: Dori Appel, Aishe Berger, Wendy Buffett, William Buffett, Elise Muffitt, Jean Schiffman, Sharon Waller.  Subscribe in a readerClick on the image below to visit Vienna’s website.  Photo by Karen Shih.  

Michael Gene Sullivan is a man of many hats. In this episode of Off-Leash Arts, the prolific playwright-blogger-actor-director-teacher-rabble rouser talks with host Tanya Shaffer about his unusual writing process, his work with the Tony Award-Winning San Francisco Mime Troupe (“always outspoken; never silent”), the concept of the tragic farce, and why you should never shoot for compromise.  Subscribe in a readerClick on the image below to visit Michael’s website.  Michael Gene Sullivan in “Leaving the Blues,” at New Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco.  

Ann Arbor, Michigan-based visual artist Mia Risberg talks with Off-Leash Arts host Tanya Shaffer about her creative process, her series “Lost Child,” the abstract seascapes she made after 9/11, and her current series-in-progress of 100 small paintings.  Subscribe in a readerClick on the image below to visit Mia’s website. Lost Child 1 (16” x 20”, Mixed Media on Paper 2018)