Making cake at The Alden in McLean
“I don’t bake,” Dasha Kelly Hamilton concedes on top of make cakeits stimulating and inspiring multimedia presentation with dessert plate.
In fact, Hamilton is a writer/poet and performance artist, and the most recent Poet Laureate from her home state of Wisconsin, and her broadly defined work focuses on inspiring creativity, facilitating dialogue, and building community.
The nationally touring show comes to The Alden in McLean as a Women’s History Month event.
With make cakeBaking, and specifically the history and ingredients of cake-making, just works as an accessible, timely, and even rewarding means to those ends.
In the show, the cake becomes both a real experience (each attendee receives a piece of cake freshly baked by two bakers on stage at the end of the performance) and a metaphor for America and American life and speech, or the “way of being that’s baked all over America.”
“The point is, we all get a slice of this pie,” as Hamilton put it in a summary of his show and its major importance published last month in Virginia’s Chesterfield Observer. “We have been debating for years about who is the real truth, who is the dignified reality, whose perspective makes sense, and that is the wrong conversation.
“You can’t tell me my slice is thick, and I can’t tell you yours is rich. Instead, I can tell you about my slice of the pie and you can tell me about yours. But it came from the same box: we are all in this together. This is a ‘your story matters, my story is real, this experience is valid, and that perspective is in the mix whether I agree or not’ experience.”
Saturday, March 18, at 6 pm Tickets are $15-$25. The Alden at the McLean Community Center, 1234 Ingleside Ave. Visit www.aldentheatre.org or call 571-296-8385.
Other upcoming events this month at the McLean Community Center that you might consider attending include:
The New Zealand Light Theater Trick and Show the grigoldescribed as “a haunting, elegant and wordless tale of death, love, pain and monsters”, and “a superbly rendered, mythical dark fantasy”. [conjuring] magic and laughter from silhouettes, puppets, live music and animation”. (3/25)
Fiesta Del Sol: Latin American and Caribbean festival with exhibitors, live music, salsa and merengue dance classes, tapas, and rum and tequila bars. (3/25)
BLCKSMTH, a community engagement project in which fun, witty, and quirky quotes generated by community members on the topics of motivation, support, self-expression, and creativity will be installed on the center premises. (3/27-4/1)
Visit www.mcleancenter.org or call 703-790-123.