Landyn Endo

Landyn Endo (he/they) is a queer, transmasculine-of-center actor, dancer and circus performer, specializing in aerial/acrobatics. He graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a double major in Dance and Drama. Since graduating, they have enjoyed dancing professionally in LA and on tour with Multiplex Dance Company, helping to found the West Hollywood Dance Festival. He also had the opportunity to perform in Europe with DTM2 Improvisational Ensemble, Off-Broadway in NYC, and in Japan in “Dreaming Forward,” an artistic collaboration with choreographer Motoko Hirayama, as well as teaching dance for two years in Grenada. They have been an instructor of circus, dance, and gymnastics for over 18 years.

Landyn is a proud member of Flying Rabbit Circus, Bow and Arrow Circus Collective and People’s Circus Theatre. He currently teaches at the SF Circus Center and at VRV3, and has a deep passion for encouraging queer and trans youth to find their voice through movement and art. Find them on IG @smooth_landyn

From the artist: Using the mediums of circus and dance, my piece will explore the experience of growing up trans in an Asian immigrant household, and the ways in which my father’s struggle to understand my gender stems from a framework of colonialism and forced assimilation into toxic Western ideas of masculinity. I am seeking to create a new genre blending storytelling through acrobatics and dance as my signature style of artistic expression. Since there are no words in the performance, language barriers become a non-issue. Therefore, as I continue to expand on this idea, I want trans children of immigrants to be able to bring their parents to see the full production and see the same show as everyone else, even if they don’t speak English.

I wanted to tell a story that I’ve never seen put on stage before. Representation matters, and I hope that the intersectionality of my cultural heritage and my trans story will speak to other trans and gender nonconforming audience members of color. This is my love letter to them.

Layla Venegas

Layla Venegas (they/them) is a 27-year-old Mexican-American artist, born and raised in California and now based in San Francisco. She earned a BA in Filmmaking from San Francisco State University in 2020 before moving into event organizing where she curated grassroots art shows, dance parties, and community fundraisers. She also taught herself music production and graphic design, building a DIY practice that connects sound and visuals. Music is now at the center of her work, shaped by her background in film, organizing, and design, and she creates atmosphere-driven experiences rooted in storytelling and community care.

From the artist: Project description: Her performance piece explores queerness as resistance to colonial power, to rigid forms, and to the narrowing of expression. Layering music, sampling, spoken word, projection, and movement, it shifts between grief, rage, tenderness, and joy. Rather than telling a straightforward story, it creates an atmosphere where expression moves beyond what is permitted, where choosing oneself becomes an act of sovereignty, and where queer interconnectedness becomes sustenance. The piece reflects on release and abundance. Joy, love, and refusal are not only modes of survival, they are blueprints for cultivating and preserving an alternate world/legacy.
What is she presenting: A multidisciplinary performance centered on DJing and sound design with live spoken word and projected visuals. A freestyle dancer will move through the space as a collaborator. Venegas will be seated at two decks. The piece draws from her film background for projection, her community work for representation and equity, and her music practice for the sound.
What will folks experience: An emotional atmosphere that holds grief, rage, tenderness, and joy all at once. Low light, layered sound, and shifting textures invite the audience to feel before they analyze. The work explores queerness as resistance to rigid forms and narrow categories, opening space for release and abundance-an experience where choosing oneself becomes an act of sovereignty and connection.
How does society see her and the communities she is part of: Society often reduces Mexican-American and queer communities to stereotypes, statistics, or struggle, flattening complexity and erasing care. Venegas’s work pushes back by centering nuance, interdependence, and joy as forms of knowledge and power. The performance insists on the fullness of these communities—grief and celebration, refusal and imagination—and treats mutual care as a necessity to the culture, not an exception.

Melissa Charles

Melissa (she, her) is an educator-organizer of haitian and cuban descent who uses expressive writing as an outlet for healing and political education. she is the minister of education and co-founder of a TK-8 full-time liberation school (@916mxa) who has organized and served as a lecturer across various pan-afrikan spaces, bringing a sense of r/evolutionary love and queer-socialist-feminism alongside an approach which urgently balances materialism and idealism. her poetry is where she is best able to find that space.

From the artist:

Centering around themes of her debut collection, love poems about no one, she will be presenting an embodied political meditation and reflection on r/evoltionary love, aiming to invite the audience into her internal monologue and understanding of what it looks like to love and how it feels to be in love — where love is, in fact, enough. the audience will be invited to engage as active participants and learners in their own understandings of love, r/evolution and anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist/anti-colonial violence in a performance that is meant to activate, inspire and highlight the contradictions of life which we all maneuver. they will experience poetic sounds, somatic/meditative practices and political education.

For those who are engaged (or wanting to engage) as activists and organizers, she is hoping to uplift the message that in these spaces of material r/evolution and militant organizing, it is valuable to be able to lean into our softness, imagination and the parts of ourselves that may be tender and a little idealistic…that parts that some may deem naive or unrealistic. and in those parts, also hopes to inspire folks to also find that the love which anchors them can also serve as a catalyst for material change and tangible dismantlings of the oppressive forces which have shaped the society we exist in on a day to day for much longer than we should be willing to tolerate without moving into some kind of bold and meaningful action.

Rai Dang

Rai (she/her) is a queer, transfemme southeast asian drummer and artist residing on Ohlone Land for the past 17 years. She is driven by love, rage, and liberation in mind, creating art for the purpose of transmuting grief. Her work weaves ancestral rhythms and instruments with electronic experimentation, drumming as spiritual practice, music inspired by darkwave, punk, latin, folk, rock, jazz, and more.

From the artist: Rai Dang presents her project Blood 4 Rain: Animist grief alchemy alongside Inéz Nuñez de Arco, combining live drums, siku, quena, guitar, gong, and analog electronics, with roots in Darkwave, EBM, Techno, Cumbia, Saya, Huayno and Aymara/Vietnamese traditional music. With our ancestors, for our descendants. Prayers to transmute grief into a knife sharp enough to gut the empire.