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Heirlooms & Baggage (My Mother’s Story) is at KinVillage Feb 16 to 18

A local theatre company with a mission to be a ‘local theatre that tells local stories’ , is presenting the workshop production of Heirlooms & Baggage (My Mother’s Story) at KinVillage in Tsawwassen from Feb. 16 to 18.

The performances take place at 7:30 p.m. and include a matinee on Feb 18 at 3 p m

“This show emerges from of a year-long writing and theatre devising process involving diverse voices from the Delta community and professional theatre artists weaving together stories about their individual mothers’ lives,” says Peg Christopherson, Delta Stageworks artistic lead.

Audiences follow the unique and universal journeys of five diverse women, all knit together with the personal discoveries made by their storytellers - their children The catalyst for the show’s development is the My Mother’s Story writing project founded by award-winning actor/ author/playwright Marilyn Norry Norry’s book Writing Women’s History - Starting With Your Mother, has been hugely popular, and she just filmed a TEDX Talk about the important and transformative work of writing our mothers histories.

Heirlooms & Baggage (My Mother’s Story) features Stageworks actor/writers

Camryn Chew, Ragini Kapil, Renee Iaci, Eric Keenleyside and Christopherson who all came to the project with a personal desire to delve into their Mom’s life story

Kapil, whose mother’s journey began in Fiji, took her to Nelson, B.C. and a noted career as an educator says, “I’ve often taken my mother’s strengths and accomplishments for granted, and this creative process has really opened up my understanding of who she is as a womannot just as my mother - and what it’s been like for her to negotiate the cultural expectations and judgements faced by a woman of colour coming to Canada in the 1960s”

In turns celebratory, humorous, relatable and transformative, the play explores those oh-soessential relationships, the ones we have with our mothers.

Working with Norry and the actor/writers to shape their written stories into theatrical scenes is director Cory Haas who has worked with the company as a devised-theatre facilitator for the past three years Also on the creative team; shaping the visual elements of the work-in-progress show, is Ladner filmmaker Cliff Caprani

Heirlooms & Baggage (My Mother’s Story) also features veteran Film and TV actor Keenleyside, whose mother’s story offers glimpses into the extraordinary ordeal of a woman escaping Europe in the wake of The Second World War and coming to Canada as a refugee with little but two pieces of her fam-