Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - Bronwyn Claire Asha is bringing her one woman theatre, Celtic folk music and storytelling show to Cortes and Quadra Islands this weekend. She’ll be playing in Mansons Hall at 7 PM on Friday, and 7:30 in the Quadra Community Centre on Saturday.“I am very excited to come to Cortes. I feel like Cortes and Quadra are both small communities that have a real heart to them and a real community connection,” she explained.

Cortes Currents: You’ve also brought some songs for us today.  Tell us about the first one.Bronwyn Claire Asha: “So the first one is ‘Bridget O’Malley,' which is  a song of lamentation from the 16 hundreds. It's a Scottish folk song. It's originally sung in Scots' Gallic. I talk a lot about longing in the show: longing for connection; longing for belonging; longing for love; longing for adventure. And it's a really beautiful song that I think encapsulates that even just through the melody, but it's also a lot about  imagery and nature that connects you with the beauty of the world. It's a very sad love song as well.” (Bridget O’Malley inserted 1:28-4:53 in the podcast)

Bronwyn Claire Asha: “My music and my performance is about connecting people, community building. And it's not that the audience is not involved. They are very much a participant in the experience. I call upon them to do things. I call upon them to sing with me, to interact with each other so that by the end, we're not separate and we are not individuals sitting in that audience.”“We're actually a community that have co created this experience together. So I really believe that what has been missing and What we yearn for in this modern age where we're disconnected from each other where we're experiencing The energy of each other through a screen as opposed to in real life when we capitalize on being in the same space together beautiful things can happen and that can happen through listening to really ancient Music and listening to stories that we would have listened to sitting around the campfire thousands of years ago that can help us return to that place where we worked as a community together.”
“We existed very much together, and  we helped each other to survive through joining our voices together in song through sharing stories together and my mission With this performance, with the work that I do, with this character, the bardess, who's the narrator and the guide along the way.”“It's all about helping us remember what was important and experiencing it again in our own bodies, embodying that feeling to remember that part of us is still there and we're still yearning for connection with each other. And if there's A place we can do that, that's safe, that's a container for us to be together, to go on a journey.”
“We don't know what the destination is, but we know that we're safe and we know that we have each other.  The possibilities are endless and really beautiful. And so far, with this show, I'm experiencing that with my audiences every time. It's like we're, by the end, it's just like I want to give back. Give everyone a big hug  and we're all in it together. It feels very heartwarming at the very end, we sing this final song together that I wrote, but everyone picks up on it so quickly.” 

“It's really beautiful to have these experiences where we remember that we're actually all the same, wherever we came from, our ancestors are the same far enough back.  We yearn for the connection with each other and also with the earth. The earth is a big character in this performance as well.”  Cortes Currents: What’s your second song?