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POSTCARDS: From Rehearsal to Ringside: Tara Rynders Presents "A Nurse is Calling"
Happening June 19 - 21, 2025 at Newman Center for the Performing Arts, Denver, CO
A Nurse is Calling
Co-presented by The Clinic and the Newman Center
Thursday, June 19 - Saturday June 21, 2025
7:00 P.M.
Byron Theatre
Performed by nurse, artist, and dancer Tara Rynders, A Nurse is Calling is a personal narrative on grief, burnout, and its detrimental impact on nurses and health disparities. Through personal truth telling and artistic disruption we follow Tara's story as she redefines resiliency, creates new pathways for systemic resiliency and questions her role as a nurse in perpetuating health disparities and racism at the bedside.
Something happened today in rehearsal that I wasn’t expecting. I thought I knew what this scene was about when I wrote it. Turns out, my body had other plans.
Today I laced up boxing gloves and went to war.
Threw punch after punch at this invisible opponent that’s been systematically destroying everyone I’ve ever tried to save, including myself. My fists connected with air, but I felt every impact in my bones. This thing — this broken system — it’s been my enemy my entire career.
Then suddenly… it started dying.
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“Is there a nurse in the house?” “We need a nurse!”
Of course. Of course they called for me. Of course I ripped off the gloves and dropped to my knees, pressing my hands to the chest of the very thing that’s been killing us all. Pumped and breathed life into my opponent.
It died anyway.
That’s when the hands grabbed me — lifted my arm high above my head. “THE WINNER! THE CHAMPION!”
But I wasn’t looking at the cheering crowd. I was staring down at the body, my whole being screaming to go back, to try again, to keep fighting for something that was already gone.
And in that moment, with my arm raised in fake victory, it hit me like a freight train:
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This IS my entire career. Fighting a system designed to break us, then being ordered to save it. Being called a hero while watching everything we love die. Being paraded around as winners while we’re drowning in the wreckage.
That’s when the music shifted and my body showed me what I was really grieving. For two minutes, my body took over and danced my grief. The grief I felt when my brother died at the hands of the system. The grief of the realization that even I — a nurse who knows this system intimately — had been tricked by it, complicit in it.
Today I was reminded that sometimes it’s the movement that teaches us what the real story is. My movement revealed I wasn’t just fighting the system — I was grieving something I once believed could save us. Mourning not only a dying system, but all the deaths it took with it. My mom. My brother. All the people I thought this system could save.
My body swirled through disbelief, sadness, anger — at the system’s failure, at my own lost faith in it, at how we’ve all become part of the very thing destroying us. Let it move to every part of me, then released it out to make room for the next trauma coming.
Because THIS is what healthcare workers never get. The dance that processes what we carry. We go from patient to patient, crisis to crisis, with no space to let our bodies release what gets trapped inside.
None of us won. We never had a chance to win.
Tomorrow I’ll step back into that ring. Because putting these stories on stage — the raw, bleeding truth we’re taught to keep quiet, and giving ourselves the processing dance we’re never allowed to have — turns out that’s the most revolutionary thing a nurse can do.
See you ringside,
Tara
