Dana Rayment was a multi-disciplinary artist, fearless in a dizzying array of media—dance, theatre, film, photography, glass fusing, jewelry making, ‘pysanka’, encaustic, painting, gardening—a creativity that also informed her work as a Pilates instructor and as a Spiritual Caregiver at NAIT and MacEwan University.
Her passion for the arts, moreover, overflowed into many communities, evident in a generosity of volunteering, for example, on the boards of AMAAS (Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society), FAVA (Film and Visual Arts Society of Alberta), and the Alberta Dance Alliance (ADA), to name a few.
A highlight, though, was heading in collaboration with Bobbi Westman Theatre of the New Heart, a company focusing its mandate on supporting ‘emerging’ productions to the benefit of many local theatre companies and playwrights.
It was through theatre that Dana turned her own pain into catharsis.
In “The Adventures of Ayla and Avalon,” staged at the Fringe Festival, she chronicled the ‘renovation gone wrong’ of her basement Pilates studio, but from the perspective of her cats, Ayla and Avalon, their snide comments about the unscrupulous contractor making children giggle, and their toppling of his ladder, at the end, as he reached the top rung—witnessed in shadow behind a scrim—implying for the adults the ultimate revenge!
And out of the ashes of her experience with infertility, she wrote and produced, “The Photo,” plumbing a photographer couple’s agony over a stillbirth through the fiction of witnessing in photos her growth to adulthood, eventually coming back to reality in the framing, with their stillborn, of a final, still photo.
As a feminist, Dana fought to raise up the stories and perspectives of women.
Building on her legacy, The Dana Rayment Emerging Playwright Fund has been established to provide financial support to an ‘emerging’ female playwright in the development of new work within the SkirtsAfire Festival, Edmonton’s annual celebration featuring the work of women in conjunction with International Women’s Day.
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