Join writer and performer Benjie Lasseau as she presents her new solo show, Not Gone Yet: On Stage With My People, at Young Performers Theatre, Landmark Building D, Third Floor, at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture. Multidisciplinary performance artist Lasseau explores death, aging, and the artist’s journey. Director and story midwife Joyful Raven guides Lasseau through the experience of creating and performing Not Gone Yet; and directed, developed, and produced the work.

Lasseau grew up in a family of powerful personalities whom she recreates as life-sized, two-dimensional dolls on wheels. She manipulates these scene partners to reconstruct her past and emerge from the shadows of her family’s constellation. It is a story about the solace of art and blooming late just before the frost.

Not Gone Yet: On Stage With My People plays on Saturday, February 10, 2024, 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Sunday, February 11, 2024, 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Sunday performance includes projections, an art installation, and a talkback session.

About The Writer & Performer. Through her unique and whimsical performance art, Benjie Lasseau opens doors to the world of dreams and symbols. With her roots in the visual arts, costumes and sets are an integral part of her vision. Over the past 26 years Lasseau has created nine autobiographical solo performances combining movement, text, and installations. Her idiosyncratic “sewn paintings” of still lives and portraits were featured alongside Judy Chicago on Bill Moyers’ National Television program, Women and Creativity. In 2022, her recent short film Aquilone (Kite) Two Art Stories was selected by LA Women in Film Festival in 2022 and awarded “Best Female Director” by the New York Independent Cinema, and “Best First Time Filmmaker” by California Indies Festival. Lasseau has studied with Anna Deavere Smith, aerial improv artist Terry Sendgraff, modern dancer Anne Bluethenthal, and teacher of ballet and Feldenkrais Augusta Moore. One can see Lasseau’s ever changing window art at her house on Russian Hill. An ongoing theme in her work is defining herself as an artist after having grown up with an icon. When she passes the nine-foot portrait of her father Benny Goodman in San Francisco’s North Beach, close to her house, she looks up to him and says “See?”

About The Director & Story Midwife. Joyful Raven is an award-winning actor, director, and “story midwife” known for her powerful and thought-provoking solo shows. Her most recent show, Breed Or Bust, is hot off a critically acclaimed run at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland where it was nominated for an Offey. “Joyful Raven’s masterful approach to storytelling and exquisite performance skills elevate her work to another level.” — Theatre Weekly UK. The show was also nominated for Best Comedy at the 2022 Hollywood International Fringe Festival. Her previous show Tales Of A Sexual Tomboy won Best Of The Fringe at the San Francisco International Fringe Festival 2016 and enjoyed an Off-Broadway run in 2017. She has directed and mentored hundreds of storytellers, co-founded the award-winning theater company Rococo Risqué, and co-authored four plays for the Prize of Hope-winning company Human Nature. Joyful studied theater at Sarah Lawrence College in NY and holds an MFA in dramatic art from the University of California– Davis. She teaches regular storytelling and solo theater classes at the Berkeley Rep School of Theater and her own studio in Oakland, CA.