
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 the Quadra Community Centre 7:30 in on Saturday, May 18, 2024.
“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 1600s. It’s a Scottish folk song. It was originally sung in Scots’ Gaelic. I talk a lot about longing in the show: longing for connection; longing for belonging; longing for love; longing for adventure. 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. It’s not that the audience is not involved, they are very much a participant in the experience. 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.”
“I really believe that is what has been missing, and what we yearn for in this modern age where we’re disconnected from each other. 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 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.”
“They 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.”
“That’s 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 if there’s a place we can do 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.”
“So far with this show, I’m experiencing that with my audiences every time. By the end, I want to give back, give everyone a big hug. 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?
Bronwyn Claire Asha: “Another one that’s quite beautiful is called ‘Fear a’ Bhàta,’ which is in Scots Gaelic. The chorus is in Scots Gaelic and it’s a song very much connected with the Scottish Islands. They think it came from a woman on the Isle of Lewis. So there’s a lot of looking out at the sea and wondering what’s going to happen, which I feel is very much a thing we do here: stare out at the ocean. Especially when you live on an island like Cortes. I imagine there’s a lot of looking out at the horizon.”
(Fear a’ Bhàta inserted 7:52-13:07 in the podcast)

Cortes Currents: Youy bio says you started training at the age of 4, do you come from a musical family?
Bronwyn Claire Asha: “My family has always had music playing and my mom would often play and sing good music in the other room (away from us), but violin was a thing that I came to very much on my own. We had a family friend who was much older than me. I think she was a teenager at the time, and she played violin. As soon as I saw her I just thought she was so cool! I wanted to be just like her and I wanted to play the violin. I saw her playing and I was like, ‘that’s the instrument that I need to play.’”
“I was 4 when I started and I just got really obsessed with it really quickly. That was my main instrument for a long time, until I was a teenager. Then I started to learn guitar, started singing and accompanying my voice and playing around with that whole aspect of things.”
“I was very immersed in the classical music world, in orchestras and going to music camp every summer. It was pretty serious. Classical music is a hard one because it’s very important to learn the technique and it’s important to get the basics and the foundation, but it’s not the most creative style of music to play. So I was very much in the world of thinking music had to be perfect, thinking I had to do it exactly this way.”
“I only changed through singing and through experimenting a little bit with different styles of music. Eventually I joined a Celtic folk band and was playing Irish fiddle and saying, ‘Oh, wow, people really enjoy this. They’re up on their feet! They’re dancing!’ This is a completely different experience than playing in an orchestra, where everybody’s got to be upright and very proper and every single bow has to be in the exact same way as everyone else. It’s a very different world.” (Laughs)

Cortes Currents: How long have you been performing?
Bronwyn Claire Asha: “I would say I’ve been performing my whole life. I have been doing recitals and all of this since I was 4 or 5, but I was also involved in theatre since the age of around 11.”
“When I moved to Bowen Island, I joined the Tir-na-nOg Theatre School, which is run by Jack and Julie Headley, these amazing, inspiring human beings on Bowen Island running a theatre school, and really cultivating imagination and young people in a beautiful way. It’s a lot of collaboration theatre, It’s not just ‘read the script, learn the lines, do the thing.’ We built it together.”
“They inspired me a lot in the work that I do today because I’m weaving music and theatre and storytelling into my work, and finding that it’s not just music. It’s also the idea of creating a world, creating an experience for people where you don’t know what to expect, (laughs) and the performers are the ones creating the world for you. My show is very much using the imagination and getting the audience into the world, to go with me on this journey.”
“I’ve always really loved the idea of creating a world in which you can immerse your audience. Music is a beautiful medium for immersion, but I think if you can create the whole experience, then it’s so much more. You can transport people to another place and time, which is what I intend to do in my show.”
Cortes Currents: When did you move to Portugal?
Bronwyn Claire Asha: “I moved there a little over a year ago. I was touring and performing in other parts of Europe, before I decided to base myself in Portugal.”

Cortes Currents: What’s it like coming back to the West Coast?
Bronwyn Claire Asha: “It was interesting because I’d never been away before. It had been over a year since I’d been back to the West Coast. One part of it that I just love and it feels irreplaceable, is my connection with nature here with the arbutus trees, and the beautiful rocky shores, and just how much I was influenced by the landscape of this place growing up. It is unlike anywhere else.”
“I remember coming here when I was 11 years old, from Northern Ontario. I remember that feeling of smelling the ocean air and feeling like everything is shining and clean. The mountains, the ocean: there’s no place like it in the world and every day I’m very much appreciating it. I get out and go for hikes with my dog. This place has got a really special connection with the land, and how people live with the land here as well. We’re very much part of it.”

Cortes Currents: Tell us about the song that you’re going to be closing with.
Bronwyn Claire Asha: “The third song is sung in Shahnoosh style, but it’s acapella. There’s no musical instrumental accompaniment and it’s called ‘Lowlands.’ It is a song that I incorporate into the show after telling the myth of Orpheus. You wouldn’t think that they were connected, but they are. It’s also a Scottish folk song, but it has ties with a lot of the sea shanties that were sung and there’re many versions of it that you also can find in the Americas as well. So it’s made its way all over the world and has different versions, which is what’s so amazing about these traditional folk songs. They have done that. They’ve traveled of their own accord and changed and morphed over time.”
(The podcast ends with Lowlands 18:20-21:04)
All images courtesy Bronwyn Claire Asher.
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