Enby International: THEYFRIEND Video Showcase
Hosted by: Vin Seaman & LOTUS BOY
Video Performances by nonbinary artists
View Festival Program
November 18, 2022 (Friday)
8:00pm
$10 Early bird | $15 general admission
$25 VIP with reserved seating & drink ticket
About the Event
Join us for the first ever THEYFRIEND Video Performance Showcase at Brava Theater’s Cabaret, located in the heart of the Mission District in San Francisco! Bring a friend, a date, or that enby QT you just met at the THEYFRIEND Happy Hour and enjoy some phenomenal, international video performances from artists: Sydney Scott (Toronto), Syd Franz (NY), Hennessy Williams (Oakland), Cecil Opia (Helsinki), The Living Altar (New Orleans), Christie Blizard (Concord, TX), Evan Spigelman (NY), Moonyeka (Seattle) and more! Hosted by interdisciplinary artist and Diamond Wave Director Vin Seaman and Oakland-based drag king LOTUS BOY.
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: Brava is wheelchair accessible and has all gender restrooms. The space also includes an upstairs mezzanine with additional seating that is only accessible by stairs. All videos will have open captions. To request live ASL interpretation, please email kiana@diamond-wave.org by November 10.
COVID: Vaccination required, Masking required, participating hosts/staff are COVID tested before the event.
About the Artists
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Sydney Scott (Cherrie Era) is an emerging drag performer, theatre artist, and child of the Tygr Haus. Most recently, they performed in Pride Toronto’s “Bloom,” a virtual stage for emerging and new artists craving a space to bloom into the abundant Queer community of Toronto. They also participated in Paprika Festival’s “COSMOCABARET,” an international cabaret showcase and collaboration of multidisciplinary artists from Canada and India. Their drag journey began with Sketch Working Arts in “It’s All A Drag” and “It’s All The Essentials” where they developed the foundations of drag and burlesque under the guidance of expert mentors working in Toronto’s queer performance scene. Their art primarily centers the body, desire, sexuality, gender, self-pleasure, the male gaze, and performance of femininity. It is through this work that they came to understand their expansive relationship with gender and sexuality which has been continuously evolving ever since.
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Syd Franz is a dancer / improviser / drag king based in Brooklyn. Their performance work emphasizes collaboration, creative play, and rigorous movement research to continuously explore identity, community, and queer joy. Lately they’ve been digging into devised theatre with Detour Dance, dreaming up highly choreographed group drag numbers, and exploring the fundamentals of mime theatre.
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Hennessy Williams is an Oakland-based genderqueer drag performer that performs as both a king and queen. They are the host of Hennessy's Great Brunch Show and Hennessy's Haute Ones, an interview-style talk show where they interview Bay area drag performers while eating spicy wings. They love all things goth, vintage, Western. You can follow them at @hennessy_williams on Instagram.
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I’m Cecil Opia, an alternative pop artist.
I’d describe my musical style as emotional, and intimate Alt-Pop with influences from 90s Trip-Hop. My way of writing lyrics involves a strong use of metaphors, which allows the listener to experience the story of the songs through their own experiences and thoughts. By talking about personal topics such as mental health and my non-binary gender identity, I intend to make my listeners feel less alone.
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The Living Altar is the ritual & performance art project of multimedia artists & community witches, Kiki Robinson & Ylva Mara Radziszewski. As queer and trans witches of Romani heritage; we seek to embody a faithless devotion to life in support of collective liberation through our art and ritual. We feel that the work of the Witch is to disrupt and transform the circumstances of culture, and the work of the artist is to document and synthesize the potential of these disruptions & transformations. We see the work of the witch and artist to account for, divest from, and dismantle systemic oppression from our altars, art, and magic; while tending pathways of joy, wellness and hope across all timelines within community and ourselves. We commitment to embolden the inherent magic of community through ritual performance and magical art practices.
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Christie Blizard was born in rural Indiana and lives and works in Texas. They were a participant of Skowhegan in 2018 and attended MacDowell and Artpace. Shows include those at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, School of Visual Arts, Black Mountain College, Good Morning America, the Roswell UFO Convention, and the Today show. They have been featured in Hyperallergic, ArtNews, Art in America, and NY Arts Magazine. Recent performances include those at Cloaca Projects in San Francisco, Interference Fest in Austin, TX, Marfa Myths, and an opera in Fort Worth, TX.
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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 apart 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.
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LOTUS BOY (Ze/Zir, He/Him, They/Them) is a shapeshifting, transgender and nonbinary, unapologetically disabled and chronically illUSTRIOUS, Chinese-American drag king, educator, and anti-disciplinary artist based in occupied Lisjan Ohlone Land (Oakland, CA). Ze explores gender fluidity, accessibility, healing from trauma, solidarity, and sustainability through the mediums of poetry, lipsync, ancestral movement (qigong and tai chi), monologue, and original music. When not onstage, King LOTUS BOY coaches a high school speech and debate team and facilitates youth drag workshops with Queens of the Castro, bringing drag and gender education to high schools in San Francisco and Oakland. LOTUS BOY is on the Board of Directors for Oaklash (@oaklash2022), the Bay Area's drag festival, and he is on the steering committee for the Drag & Spirituality Summit (@dragandspirituality). Connect with him on: Instagram @kinglotusboy / TikTok @kinglotusboy / Facebook: King LOTUS BOY.
To Attend
Ticket Pricing:
$10 Early bird | $15 general admission
$25 VIP with reserved seating & drink ticket
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.
