THEYFRIEND
Featured Showcase
Hosted by: Vin Seaman
Live & Video Performances | In Person + Livestream
View Festival Program
November 17, 2022 (Thursday)
7:00pm PT
In Person: $20 Early Bird | $25 General Admission
Livestream: $5
About the Event
Join us for the featured performance of the 2022 THEYFRIEND Nonbinary Performance Festival, co-presented with KQED Live. Hosted by interdisciplinary artist and Diamond Wave Director Vin Seaman, this sensational showcase of nonbinary performance will include newly commissioned work from this year’s featured performers — writer-performer Rawiyah Tariq, multimedia artist Sharmi Basu, and musician Tyler Holmes — as well as video from national nonbinary performers Evan Spigelman and Moonyeka.
This event is made possible with support from the California Arts Council, and is presented in partnership with KQED Live, and Intersection for the Arts as part of the Intersect SF Series (supported with funds from Grants for the Arts).
ACCESSIBILITY: ASL interpretation will be provided.
About the Artists
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For over 15 years Rawiyah Tariq (mammyisdead.com) has blended the art of storytelling with song and burlesque to create performance art that is vulnerable, empowering, hilarious and intimate.
Rawiyah has danced on stages throughout the country with the award winning and internationally traveled troupe Rubenesque Burlesque as Magnoliah Black from 2009 to 2015. As a solo performer their work continues to reflect body liberation, visibility and self possession beyond the static sizest Eurocentric beauty myth. Rawiyah has performed with the world famous Hubba Hubba Revue at the DNA lounge, “SomeThing” at the Stud and is a past regular with Oakland’s Rebel Kings at one of the countries oldest gay bars The White Horse.
They have traveled internationally for their art and have been invited to speak about their multi-disciplined performances at Universities around the country. Rawiyah is also a feature in the award winning film Heavenly Brown Body.
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Sharmi Basu (they/them) is a South Asian American multimedia performance artist, curator, composer, arts advocate, and organizer born and based on Ohlone Land aka Oakland, CA. They create sound and performance pieces that investigate the emotional landscape of people in struggle. They research vulnerability and accountability in the interest of creating decolonial narratives. Their performance project, Beast Nest transmutes trauma and chronic illness through vast sonic worldbuilding.They received their MFA from Mills College and host workshops internationally that center on sound healing, decolonization, conflict & accountability, as well as technical skill-shares. They have performed for SFMOMA, YBCA, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Cluster Festival, and Ableton Loop, and have exhibited work at Coaxial, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, Counterpulse, Gray Area, and the Smithsonian. Their organizational work is dedicated to mutual aid and advocating for the rights of arts workers and artists.
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From the depths of the ocean to the reaches of space spirals can be found all around us; Tyler Holmes’ work aims to draw us to remember that whether spiraling out in exasperation, downward out of despondency or inward toward oneself that we are always in one spiral or another. The honk of a woodwind swirling around the hissing din of electronics tempered by the breeze of the human voice to create a tapestry of terror and delight. They perform with a constantly changing electro-acoustic arrangement exploring what humanity is left in electronic music and what inhumane violence is trapped in acoustic sound, always finding new ways to showcase an intimate horror. They released their first vinyl ‘Nightmare In Paradise’ in 2021 on Ratskin Records and are releasing a series of music videos and remixes in 2022. Most recently Holmes' released their music video "To Accept" via Paper Magazine.
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Evan Spigelman is an actor, drag performer, performance artist and one half of Creep Cuts: Is this drag? Is this a cartoon? Is this real life? CREEP CUTS follows agitprop surrealists and anti-fascist clowns Mz. Asa Metric (Evan Spigelman) and her imaginary friend Mqr En Between (Dylan Hunter) as they accidentally present an evening of genre-queer cabaret. Join them as they careen between dada drag, original electronic music, social media diatribes and malfunctioning sketch comedy for a wholly new form of drag cabaret to confound the senses. CREEP CUTS has been performed in various venues in New Orleans and New York, and culminated with the outsider art feature film CREEP CUTS IN FREEZE RESPONSE presented by Dance Place in Washington DC. Our submission for THIRD WAVE is a selection from that film.
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Moonyeka (they/them/Angel) is a nonbinary Filipinx femme shapeshifter, witch, teaching artist, curator, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist with a specialty in dance and movement-based storytelling. Moonyeka is one of Velocity Dance Center’s 2022 Creative Residents where they are creating CENSORED, a research process centering QT + POC show girl histories, re-mything work + divination collaborations of Aswang* Filipinx spirits, the whorearchy, performance intelligences, systems, and technologies of artist working girls.
As 2022-2023 Base resident Moonyeka will be doing interdisciplinary dance, divination and sonic research of Harana, a Filipinx serenade song form that centers courtship rituals, and more unpopularly, grief rituals. Their research will also call upon Pandanggo sa Ilaw to create a grief ritual in reverence to the erasure of QT diasporic history. Moonyeka will also draw upon their relationships to waling-waling orchids to uncover the constellations of unspoken histories, rememberings, and forgettings of the QT diasporic lineages their a part of.
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Kevin Seaman (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and the Artistic & Executive Director of Diamond Wave. Their videos centering queer history, symbolism and intersectionality were presented on SalesForce Tower in June 2021 in collaboration with Jim Campbell’s Studio. Their work exploring queer identity and drag culture has also been presented at The Stud, Brava, CounterPulse, YBCA, Frameline, the Tank NYC, the Austin International Drag Festival, SATTELITE ART SHOW Miami, the National Queer Arts Festival, Stockholm’s Stolt Scenkonst, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Yale School of the Arts. They have been featured on Shondaland and Vice, were an inaugural Association for Performing Arts Professionals Leadership Fellow, and received the 2017 Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Award, the 2019 Theatre Bay Area Legacy Award, and a 2022 CALI Catalyst award. In their role as founder and Artistic & Executive Director at Diamond Wave (diamond-wave.org), they oversee the MASCellaneous workshop series exploring restorative masculinities, the THEYFRIEND nonbinary performance festival, and the Artists’ Adaptability Circles mutual aid and leadership development initiative.
To Attend
Ticket Pricing:
In Person: $20 Early Bird | $25 General Admission
Livestream: $5
Discounted early-bird tickets are available until November 1.
About the Festival
Now in its second year, THEYFRIEND is the world’s first performance festival uplifting, centering, and celebrating nonbinary identity! With THEYFRIEND, we’re creating a space of trust and growth for nonbinary artists to connect and present their work.
