“A fantastic storyteller, a captivating performer” - Montreal Rampage
“It’s hard to take against Nisha Coleman’s one-woman show, Self-Exile. She’s immensely appealing and exudes a vulnerability that makes you fervently hope her autobiographical story — from damaged upbringing with hippy parents to lonely days busking in Paris — will have a happy ending. Most of the audience rose for an ecstatic standing ovation.” - Montreal Gazette
Nisha Coleman is a writer, storyteller, and musician based in Montreal. Self-Exile won the 2016 Centaur Award and was featured at the 2017 Wildside Festival. Coleman’s memoir BUSKER: Stories from the Streets of Paris recounts the years she spent street performing in Paris and was published in 2015. In the same year she collaborated with the Banff Centre for the Arts to create a multimedia interactive website based on the memoir: www.buskerparis.com. Coleman has performed at events such as Yarn, Confabulation, Raconteurs, Ladyfest, and ZooFest and her work has been featured on CBC, PBS, MAtv, Risk! and No More Radio. She is an artist fellow at The Hermitage Artist Retreat for 2017-18.
Visit Nisha's website.
Thursday, September 28th at 8pm
Arts Court Theatre (2 Daly Ave #240, Ottawa ON)
Tickets are $20
Is it better to be loved for who you are not, than rejected for you are?
Born on a swamp to hippie parents, Nisha Coleman had an unusual upbringing. Her solo storytelling show, Self-Exile, transports the audience through key life events, from trauma to triumph, toddler to young adult, from a swamp in Northern Ontario to the streets of Paris.
“Don’t be yourself,” Coleman’s troubled father tells her when she is five years old, triggering a conscious separation from the self. She becomes a shapeshifter: a teacher’s pet, a troublemaker, a clown, a recluse. Geographic isolation and social anxiety lead to a period of selective mutism in adolescence, but through the violin, Coleman reconnects with humans and ultimately to herself. Self-Exile is a celebration of our complicated selves and what it really means to “be yourself.”