One More Step West Is the Sea: ruth weiss

The life story of Ruth Weiss is a pioneering and intensely artistic one. Growing up as a Jewish girl in Berlin and Vienna and fleeing to the U.S. with her family in 1938 to escape the Nazis, Weiss engaged in creative circles in Chicago and New Orleans. Soon after graduating from High School, she hitchhiked across the States and in the early 1950s emerged as a singular poet in San Francisco.

She was one of the first artists to develop the joint genre of Jazz & Poetry and interacted with greats of the Beat Generation such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Bob Kaufman, although as a woman she was usually overshadowed by her more famous male counterparts. It was only when she was in her 70s that she gradually gained the recognition due to her.

She has consistently maintained her unique Bohemian lifestyle well into old age. Still performing on stage at the age of 90, she is the cosmic refugee among the ecstatic memories of counter culture. Beat scholar and award-winning poet Thomas Antonic traces Weiss’s pioneering art and her world without boundaries.

Cast

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Ruth Weiss

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Hal Davis

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Sojun Roshi Mel Weitsman

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Tate Swindell

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Rent Romus

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Doug O’Connor

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Karl Schoen