A Sunshine Coast author, educator and activist will this weekend premiere an original one-woman interactive theatre performance at the Nanaimo Fringe Festival. Danika Dinsmore is the author of eight young adult novels and four books of poetry. She has been a storytelling instructor at the Vancouver Film School. What she didn’t expect — until earlier this year — was to be sharing her own story in front of a live audience.
A former colleague from Vancouver’s Women in Film festival, Yvette Dudley-Neuman, now serves as the Nanaimo Fringe’s artistic producer. She encouraged Dinsmore to perform about mustering the courage (in her mid-50s) to admit that she has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. “I was tired of holding back,” Dinsmore said, “and tired of seeing my divergence as a lack. My fears about myself were just confirmed by the trolls of social media, [saying] suddenly now everybody’s ADHD. You just have to be more focused and more disciplined. To me, that’s like telling somebody on crutches that they just need to walk.”
Fringe Festival shows are selected through a lottery of applicants across four categories: local, regional, national and Indigenous. Dinsmore’s production was the last to be drawn in the regional category. Then the shock set in. “Have you ever said you’re going to do something and you get excited,” she said, “and then you realize that you actually have to do it?”
Dinsmore performed a dress rehearsal of The Storyteller’s Smithy: Forging Narratives at the Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons last weekend, soliciting feedback from the audience to refine the presentation. To hammer home the metaphor of forging impactful stories, Dinsmore contacted Roberts Creek-based blacksmith Kelly Backs. Backs loaned iron tools and counselled her in the correct use of metalworking terminology.
At the outset of Storyteller’s Smithy, Dinsmore reframes her ADHD as a source of power. It enables her to scan and absorb a page in seconds. She wakes up every day with a song running through her head. Her propensity for developing educational curricula is unrelenting (“I just start turning everything into a lesson plan,” she admitted).
During the show, she relates the story of a graduate student who interviewed writers about their creative process. After Dinsmore was interviewed, the student was crestfallen. Every one of his interviewees had described radically different approaches. “He wanted some kind of golden ticket, a formula, that would make him the best creative writer,” she recalled. Eschewing conformity, she guides the audience through her own process, inviting them to invent story elements and fuse them with unexpected inputs from other collaborators.
For Dinsmore, who is working on a doctoral degree in psychology with a focus on neurodivergence and creativity, telling her own story became a way of overcoming the immobilizing effect of perfectionism.
“I’ve always wanted to put on a one-woman show,” she said. “But I couldn’t even start because I was afraid that it wouldn’t be perfect. No one’s going to show up. No one’s going to laugh. I’m not going to do it right.” She found inspiration in a conceit by Dr. Temple Grandin (diagnosed with autism at three years of age), who argues that while neurotypical cave-dwellers in prehistory may have excelled at socializing around the campfire, their neurodivergent peers were busily inventing tools that advanced civilization.
“You need visioners,” said Dinsmore. “You need lateral thinkers. But most of all, you need each other.”
The Nanaimo Fringe Festival — now in its 15th year — will feature more than a dozen shows. Dinsmore’s Storyteller’s Smithy opens on Friday, with five performances through Aug. 16. Tickets and festival details are online at nanaimofringe.com.
