Simply being in the same room as this consummate improviser for a couple of hours is to watch the unknown unfold before your eyes. Yet to reduce Wise's work to a mere curiosity, like a sideshow at a traveling fair, is to do it a great disservice. For I was more deeply moved and entertained by Wise's eccentric take on the evening's discussion than I was by the discussion itself. It was Wise who distilled something of the complexity of living in today's world for me that night, transforming the evening's polite discourse into something bizarre, beautiful, and brave.

SF Weekly
[read entire review]

In the fall of 2006, Nina Wise in collaboration with San Francisco’s Z Space presented the first series of Illuminating Talk, Enlightening Theater then called A Festival of Optimistic Voices.

I felt honored to be invited to join in the experience and was moved to both tears and laughter by the translation of complex neurobiology and its social implications into bodily images of sight and sound.

Dr. Dan Siegel,
Director of the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain and Development

Nina Wise is a gift to us all of intellect, wit, sensibility and compassion. To see her move, or to have her help you explore the unity of the bodymind, is to expand and deepen your sense of who you are and why you are here.

Dr. Michael Lerner
Founder, Commonweal

My deepest thank you from the bottom of my heart for last night’s performance. Your indescribable, gifted ability to weave movement, storytelling and reflection into one glorious, hypnotizing braid left me inspired, in love, in community.

Adee
Audience member

Raves from the Santa Fe Production

The success of the San Francisco production of A Festival of Optimistic Voices inspired yet another series of Illuminating Talk, Enlightening Theater called Election Year in the spring of 2008 at Santa Fe’s Lensic Performance Arts Center.