Canyon Sam - Artist

Home

Meet the Artist

Writer/performer Canyon Sam tours two nationally-acclaimed, original, full-length, one woman shows. She performs nationally and internationally and also offers workshops, residencies, and lecture-demonstrations.

Ms. Sam's show, CAPACITY TO ENTER, explores what happens when a Buddhist seeker and radical feminist finds passions, spiritual practice, and politics at odds. Finely drawn characters include a wry Zen master, a robust Italian chef, a hip hop poet, a bewildered Chinese American mother, a Tibet trekker, a 1970's Marxist radical, and others. A hilarious tour of what happens when desire, identity, and commitment pull in opposite directions.

"Irresistible,"
Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Examiner.

"Taut, involving...quite fun meditation on lust and life."
San Francisco City Search.

"Vivid, delicious, sparkling...Not to be missed."
The Edmonton Sun.

THE DISSIDENT (40 minutes long) is a powerful tour-de-force about Ms. Sam's travels in China and Tibet and her human rights work with Buddhist nuns. It features the story of her search for ancestral wisdom in China where, drawn to the Himalayan plateau, she meets a Buddhist nun with haunting accounts of post-Tiananmen Tibet. The Boston Globe hailed it, "Riveting... heartbreaking."
The Village Voice said, "Moving and evocative...real, specific, and universally relevant."

THE DISSIDENT can be performed with a shorter piece, TAXI KARMA (25 minutes), which takes a wry, lighthearted look at the Tibetan capital in exile in India, home of the Dalai Lama, via a madcap taxi ride through town. Ms. Sam plays over a dozen characters from Hindi movie stars to Tibetan aristocrats. For more reviews, see the Reviews page.