This show is part of the 2022 Asheville Fringe Arts Festival.

The Top-Ten Superpowers of All Time is an exploration — in poetry, music, and performance art — of heroic ability.

Humanbeings are miraculous and flawed. Being human is an exercise in bold imagining and dashed hopes. We long for grace, dexterity, and bravery to get us out of jams and elevate us above our mundane experience. At the same time, we often feel invisible, small, and tapped out. In this collaborative production, Alli Marshall (spoken word) and Ryan Glass (piano) hope to find the spaces where our weaknesses become our greatest strengths.

Thursday, March 24 & Saturday, March 26, 9pm at LEAF Global Arts. Tickets at https://www.ashevillefringe.org/

The Fantastic Ekphrastic Writing Workshop

Instructor: Alli Marshall
March 22-April 19, Tuesday evenings 6:00-8:30

Ekphrastic art is work made in response to another piece of artwork. It can be a poem jump-started by a painting, a song inspired by a sculpture or — to paraphrase a cliche — a dance about architecture. In this class, we’ll focus on fiction as our medium of expression.

We’ll begin with a discussion of ekphrastic art and examples of it from our own bodies of work (it’s likely we’ve all made ekphrastic art, even if unintentionally). We’ll also talk about ekphrastic art as a means of collaboration with a knowing or unknowing fellow artist. And we’ll work on outlining and/or writing flash fiction pieces in response to several artistic works of various mediums.

From there, we’ll move on to creating short fiction pieces that build off our ekphrastic explorations. Through in-class writing prompts, group writing exercises, and critiques, we’ll develop our ekphrastic works into completed stories.

We’ll also compile a collection of resources for future ekphrastic practice, such as Pinterest, playlists, and museum exhibitions that are available online for free, virtual tours.

GOALS: To find inspiration in unexpected places, and to trigger ideas for plot and character development. Open to writers of all experience levels.

Register at Great Smokies Writing Program.

This spoken word/theater piece is inspired by the 2009-2011 collection titled Geometry of Stardust by Black Mountain College alumna Dorothea Rockburne. Dorothea is an abstract painter whose work explores mathematics and astronomy, but is also evocative (through titles, shapes, materials, textures, etc.) of narrative. Spoken word artist Alli Marshall and playwright / musician Ryan Glass will team up to present a series of vignettes — presented mostly as monologues but sometimes in tandem or in dialogue — influenced by Dorothea’s paintings.

Performed at The {RE}HAPPENING, Saturday, April 2. Info and tickets at rehappening.com.

Alli Marshall was named “Artist whose work pushed the boundaries of storytelling” for her multimedia project MER/made at the 2021 Asheville Fringe Arts Festival.

MER/made, by spoken word artist Alli Marshall, is a multimedia exploration of sinking and swimming, and water as metaphor for change. The nonlinear narrative is presented through a series of videos that incorporate imagery, spoken word, music, and fantastical characters.

The 16-minute film will be presented as part of a triple bill at the 2021 online edition of the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival. It screens on Thursday, Jan. 21 and Saturday, Jan. 23, at 7 p.m. Buy tickets here.

Also included in the show: Being B.A.D, by activist artist Brittney S. Harris, explores the lengths one woman goes to take that power back after years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her family and romantic partner.

And, in PICNIC IN THE TIME OF COVID-2, by dance collective Taproot CLT, two friends who can’t gather in person must find each other in an absurd, silent film themed virtual reality picnic that takes place in a future that no longer recognizes the norms of eating real food.

I recently had the privilege of working on the first installment of videos for the Black Asheville Storytelling Experience, an interview series hosted by Roy Harris and filmed at the YMI Cultural Center.

Being part of Hamilton Media Design, the crew that filmed and edited these videos, gave me the opportunity to hear the stories of some of Asheville’s Black residents. They spoke of their lives, careers, families, and personal encounters with racism. As a white person, these are stories I hear far too seldom. It’s my honor to share them with others.

Watch all of the videos here:

I’m offering media kit services to performance artists across genres. More details in the video below and at FIVERR.

Contact me for pricing and personalized packages.

I was recently invited by Davaion Bristol, aka Asheville-based hip-hop artist Spaceman Jones, to be a guest on his video podcast “Smoke Break.” We talked about creative writing, journaling, meeting the shadow self through artwork and self-inquiry, and … wrestling. Watch to the end for a poetry slam like you’ve never seen poetry get slammed before.