Folk singer-songwriter Bronwyn Claire Asha is bringing her one-woman show As I Roved Out: An Immersive Folk Experience with Story and Song to the Duncan Showroom stage on April 19 at 7:30 p.m.
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“I am excited to introduce my work to the community in Duncan which I know also has a very vibrant music and arts scene,” said Asha, who grew up on Bowen Island. “I love playing intimate shows because I see the performance not just as me on the stage but actually a co-creation with my audience. It’s an immersive experience! So I’m excited to see what the Duncan folks will bring to the show too with their own energy and good vibes.”
Asha is a ballad collector, multi-instrumentalist and storyteller who first began her training in classic violin at the age of four, earning her Royal Conservatory diplomas while playing fiery fiddle tunes and singing folk ballads since early childhood. She travelled the globe as the front-woman for the high energy Celtic folk group Knacker’s Yard and has also toured Europe with the acclaimed Scottish singer/songwriter Simon Kempston. During one of her tours she fell in love with Lisbon, Portugal where she now lives. She stays with her parents, who now live in Nanoose Bay, when playing shows around the island.
Asha will have folk fans dialed in as she brings the enchanting world of Celtic folk music inside the intimate walls of the Showroom as she weaves together storytelling, myth, spoken word and traditional Irish, English, Welsh and Scottish folk songs for this performance which first premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland last year. Asha’s one-woman show touches on the universal themes of love, grief, as well as our connection to our early history and our earth.
“It’s a pretty unique creation fusing the mediums of storytelling and music with history, theatre, spoken word and ancient myth,” said Asha. “I’m inviting the audience on a journey with me to explore the very beginnings of sound from the very beginning when the first sound waves pulsed through the cosmos to when our earliest ancestors gathered, exploring the origins of music, from the first lullabies sung by our ancient mothers to traditional Celtic folk songs that date back over hundreds of years. We will explore different creation myths from different cultures and see that story and song can be such a powerful way to connect us with each other and with our homelands.”
Asha grew up listening to ancient folk songs that her mother, who is half Austrian and half Irish, would sing. She notes that her dad is second generation Canadian, and her grandfather hailed from Scotland before coming to Canada at the age of 11 to work on farms.
“This music is in my blood very much and I’ve always loved it deeply,” said Asha. “I was singing and playing fiddle in a Celtic folk band when COVID hit, and I ended up spending a lot of time going back to these old songs — especially the ones about loss and heartache because I was feeling a lot of that at that point in my life. The album is full of songs about love and loss from the women’s perspective, which is actually quite rare in a lot of folk music. I really connected with these songs on a deep soul level — even though some of them date back over 500 years. I wanted to share them and my own arrangements and versions of them. I also got to sing into a microphone from the 1920s that was so sensitive I could hear airplanes flying three kilometres above, it was a pretty cool experience.”
Asha will be heading back to Portugal in June to tour over the summer, and is currently collaborating with some great musicians from there on a new album of original songs that she hopes to have released by the end of 2024.
“While playing festivals and shows in Europe I’ll be embracing the life of the wandering troubadour with my camper van and instruments on the road, waiting to see where the stories and songs will take us next,” said Asha. “I love traditional songs and writing my own, so putting these together on an album will feel pretty special. “
Tickets for Asha’s show are $25 in advance, or $30 at the door. For more information visit showroomproductions.ca
“I hope audiences will feel fully immersed in the experience and like they’ve been transported to another time and place with my storytelling and the ancient histories and music that is all woven into the fabric of the show,” said Asha. “I am going to be revealing the secrets of the Universe so they likely won’t be the same afterwards.”