Student Spotlight: David Solnit Takes the Stage

David Solnit, a senior student of Tai Chi and Northern Shaolin at 10,000 Victories in San Rafael, is performing clarinet and fiddle this month in the Curtain Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in Mill Valley. It’s a reminder of something we see often in serious students: the patience and presence built on the training floor tends to show up everywhere else in their lives too.

What Training Cultivates Beyond the Floor

Tai Chi and Northern Shaolin ask a student to develop qualities that don’t stay confined to a training hall — attention that holds steady under pressure, timing that responds rather than reacts, and the willingness to keep refining a form long after it looks “good enough.” Those same qualities carry directly into live performance, where a musician has one chance to land a phrase in front of an audience with no retakes. David’s presence in this production is a small but genuine example of cultivation extending into the rest of a student’s life.

David Solnit: Senior Student, Musician

David has trained with us in Tai Chi and Northern Shaolin as part of our Marin county in-person program. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, he joins a four-person live band — alongside Don Clark, Michele Delattre, and Jo Lusk — providing the show’s score in real time at every performance.

See the Show: Free Shakespeare in Mill Valley

Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Doyle Ott, runs Saturdays, Sundays, and Labor Day Monday, August 15 through September 7, 2026, from 2:00 to 4:30 PM at the Old Mill Park Amphitheatre in Mill Valley. Admission is free — no tickets or reservations. Bring a picnic and settle in among the redwoods.

Full schedule and details: curtaintheatre.org/loves-labours-lost

Photo by Robin Jackson
Left to right: D.G. Hardy (Berowne); Rachel Ka’iulani Kennealy (Rosaline)