June 2023 Week 2 QCC News
 26th Annual National Queer Arts Festival: week 2!NQAF 2023 is officially OPEN!  Thank you all so much for a fantastic NQAF opening weekend! We had a blast sharing our first round of events with our community. Your support means so much to this year’s NQAF artists. We hope you’re ready for this week’s event line up – from music to comedy and so much more! Have you seen our exciting feature in 48 Hills? We think they summed up the perfect reason to support our National Queer Arts Festival: “I think we could all use some murmurations, quiet and loud, of queer power at this scary moment for the community. Come out and support the resistance and power that’s happening in our cute little backyard.” Continue reading This week’s QCC COMMISSIONED EVENTS  Queer Ancestors Project Resists! Date: Thursday, June 15, 2023 Queer Ancestors Project Resists! is a free virtual panel where emerging artists share their experiences connecting with Queer/Trans ancestors and creating prints that envision ways to a world with justice, peace, and joy.  & seeking OYSTERKNIFE Date: Friday, June 16, 2023 & seeking is an immersive performance by OYSTERKNIFE interrogating their Afro-Diasporic lineages inside the Christian church, using Igbo masquerade, church mime, experimental video, house music, and choreography. The NQAF showing is a preview building towards our full show at Grace Cathedral in February 2024. OYSTERKNIFE––derived from a famous Zora Neale Hurston essay––was born out of a longtime creative friendship between Gabriele Christian and Chibueze Crouch. Feeding a desire to subvert theatrical upbringings that often ignored our complex Black + Queer (or BlaQ) experiences, we’ve formed an interdisciplinaryapproach that nourishes fuller versions of our work. Through nonhierarchical collaboration, we revise common historical narratives to negotiate with the archives on our own terms. Grab your tickets here! :)  Mighty Real: A Sketch Variety Show It’s Qwere Presents Date: Saturday, June 17, 2023 Recalling ’90s-era comedy TV shows like In Living Color, All That, and SNL, Mighty Real: A Sketch Variety Show features segments of comedy, spoken word, song, and dance. The all-female cast will perform never-before-seen sketches along with memorable favorites from the sold-out 2022 Mighty Real production, including the laugh-out-loud family dinner scene featuring the sassy, opinionated, tipsy, unfiltered character Aunt Tea, and Gwen Stafani’s 2004 hit “Hollaback Girl” becomes a hilarious music parody, “Take It From a Black Girl.” Now in its fifth year, Mighty Real by ItsQwere takes its name from the 1978 Billboard chart-topping hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” by Sylvester, the Black, flamboyant, San Francisco chanteuse whose unmatched acrobatic vocals made him an international music sensation and a queer icon still revered over 30 years after his passing. Ready to LMAO! This week’s COMMUNITY PARTNER EVENTS  Fresh Meat Festival of trans and queer performance Fresh Meat Productions Date: June 14 – 18, 2023 The FRESH MEAT FESTIVAL centers transgender, gender-nonconforming and queer BIPOC artists, and lifts up our performing artists as truthtellers who light and lead the way to our collective liberation, healing and JOY. Accessibility Information: Venue is wheelchair accessible. KN95 masks offered and required. ASL interpretation provided. Get your tickets now! A NQAF-filled Live & Queer! Miss our in-person live taping of Live & Queer? Lucky for you, it’s now streaming on our Youtube! On this episode, Maya talks all about NQAF with guests from some of the other shows in the festival. Our guests include individuals from NQAF 2023 artists Gaia WXYZ & Xtal Azul, It’s Qwere, and OYSTERKNIFE, who gave us sneak peeks at their upcoming shows… Watch Now! LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT  We acknowledge we are on unceded ancestral homeland of the original inhabitants of this land otherwise known as the San Francisco Bay Area. Click below to access our visual land acknowledgement created in partnership with The Association of Ramaytush Ohlone and Inés Ixierda for the National Queer Arts Festival. Visual Land Acknowledgement If you are non-Indigenous, we invite you to pay a Shuumi Land Tax to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust – an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people. Copyright © *2021* *Queer Cultural Center*, All rights reserved. |
