Performer/ writer Amanda Erin Miller premieres her performance/ yoga class hybrid, transporting audience to Indian ashram, and launches her memoir on which the show is based. Saturday, March 9^th 7:30pm. FREE.

Miller journeys with the audience to a yoga teacher training on an ashram in India where, at age twenty-six, she has traveled alone seeking healing to avoid destroying herself like her father. Playing herself, her father, a friend, and the elderly ashram leader, Purnima, Miller guides the audience through breathing exercises, chanting, yoga poses, and meditation. During her training, she reflects on mortality and the workings of her mind, learning to surrender to the present moment, inviting the audience to do the same.  Direction and Sound Design by Colleen Toole.

From a young age, Miller identifies with her father, a heavy smoker with food issues who starves himself until he is skeletal. She, in turn, develops a severe case of anorexia that leads to hospitalization. A year after she recovers, he dies of lung cancer.  She is seventeen and afraid of succumbing to a similar fate. “I became hypnotized by the sound of my own breathing.  So reliable: one breath, then another then another, then—“ writes Miller in her memoir, of sitting in her father’s chair immediately after his death. The theme of breath recurs throughout: Miller’s own breaths accumulating as she moves through time, the passage of breath from one generation to another, the breaths of all individuals who connect in this lifetime, and finally the deep breathing fundamental to the practice of yoga.

“Rhythm. This entire piece follows the percussive beats of breath. The language of Amanda Miller’s One Breath, Then Another carries us along a tender backward glance of a young adult saying goodbye to her father. She, coming into her being; he, sauntering toward the end of his.” —CoCo Harris, Founding Editor, Telling Our Stories Press

The event will take place in the lounge at Dixon Place and admission is FREE. The Dixon Place lounge is open before, during and after the show. Proceeds directly support Dixon Place’s artists and mission. Dixon Place is located at 161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey) New York, NY 10002. Tel: 212-219-0736. www.dixonplace.org

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WATCH One Breath, Then Another: An Interactive Solo Show Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttd-raRC1-E

One Breath, Then Another: A Memoir.  (ISBN 978-0-9888543-0-7, February 2013; Lucid River Press. Available for $8.99 on Amazon.com http://amzn.to/U8k1oH)

Amanda Erin Miller is an actor, writer, yoga instructor and massage therapist.  Excerpts from One Breath, Then Another: A Memoir have appeared in Underwired Magazine, Om Times, Love Your Rebellion, So Long: Short Memoirs of Loss and Remembrance, and Runaway Parade. Her writing has also appeared in The Rumpus and UC Riverside’s Cratelit. Amanda and her collaborator Shawn Shafner have performed their two-person comedy Please Don’t Let Me Die Alone at The Tank, Magnet Theater and The PIT. Amanda earned her BFA in Acting from NYU and her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Website: www.onebreaththenanother.com. Twitter: @Amandaerin25

Colleen Toole is a director and sound designer who has been working on Nuclear Love Affair for over a year. She has worked with such companies as the Hangar Theatre, the Attic, Built4Collapse, Center for Contemporary Opera, Te Ilum, Theater Mitu, Theater in Asylum, The Other Mirror, and Fresh Ground Pepper. Projects in development include a clown-opera about St. Francis and St. Clare and a production of Amahl and the Night Visitors in her Bushwick apartment. She is a member of the Hymn Society of the US and Canada.  Colleen earned a BFA in Theater from NYU’s Tisch, where she studied in Playwrights Horizons, specializing in Directing and Sound Design.