Spirit – Day 1 | May 31
May 31
SPIRIT Day 1: Queer AAPI Artivism
Queer Rebels (Celeste Chan and KB Boyce)
AAACC
762 Webster St, SF
8pm.
$12-$20
For a full line-up go to: www.queerrebels.com
Brown Paper Tickets Link: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/672093
Queer Rebels presents SPIRIT: Queer AAPI Artivism. A rainbow of rabble-rousers. From the Arab Spring to Angel Island to Third World Liberation, these untold queer stories spring to life. Come see fresh performance and film/video from Asian, Arab, and Pacific Islanders artivists!
“a new and ripe realm for building power, community, and visibility” – Bitch Magazine
Mission: Founded in late 2008 by artists KB Boyce and Celeste Chan, Queer Rebels breaks down doors for queer/trans artists of color, connects generations, and honors our histories with art for the future. Queer Rebels has four main programs: Queer Harlem (now in its 5th year); SPIRIT: Queer Asian, Arab, and Pacific Islander Artivism; Exploding Lineage experimental films; and multi-ethnic QTPOC Salon shows.
BIOGRAPHIES
May 31: Performing artists include: BELLOWS, Elena Rose, Erin O’Brien, Heaven Mousalem, Maryam Rostami, MOON RAY RA, and Ryka Aoki! Bios below:
Bellows is a queer bay-area-native drag performance duo, featuring songwriter, Kyle Casey Chu on vocals, and Rachel Waterhouse on keys. Their murder ballad sound has been likened to that of Rufus Wainwright, Elton John and the late Freddie Mercury. They are committed to harping on their exes, publicly shaming gaycist queens and airing out only their moistest, most stinkiest laundry.
Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, is a writer, religion scholar, medic, and survivor from rural Oregon. Dedicated to the projects of radical love, community building, and media justice, she writes online as “little light” at http://takingsteps.blogspot.com. She co-curates and headlines the five-years-running National Queer Arts Festival production, Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue. Her writing has found its way everywhere from law school classrooms and academic conferences to bathroom mirrors and protest marches. Rose currently resides in northern California, where she studies, organizes, and stays busy being in good stories; she carries a pen, her ancestors, and the mismatched ID of a citizen of the borderlands with her at all times.
Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Vietnamese/Irish/American artist, culinary adventurer, community organizer, popular educator, incidental academic and occasional nanny to artists, activists, and academics alike. She holds an MFA in Studio Art/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. O’Brien was in Vietnam as a Fulbright Fellow in 2009 and 2010. O’Brien uses performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland”. As a mixed race child of Vietnamese immigrant mother and an Irish-American father, she investigates issues such as war and memory, transnational identity and belonging, and multiple identities and its attendant baggage. Using food, humor, narrative and conceptual structures, she develops work that is invested in collective healing from trauma, whether personal or inherited to further social justice and cultural understanding. Her conceptual and durational performances, as well as installations and videos have been presented at galleries and public venues in numerous cities including Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and across the US in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC. Her current performance series GEO Home and GEO work, explore the relationships we have to home and labor through food.
Heaven Mousalem is a dancer and performing artist trained in Modern Arabic Stage Style™ by the legendary Shabnam of Oakland, CA. She performs weekly throughout the Bay Area and is the Executive Director of Ooh La La Bellydance and Shabnam Dance Company. Known for her dynamic movements, flexibility, and charisma, she hopes to bring a greater appreciation of this often misunderstood art form to her audience. Shimmy on! http://www.heavenbellydancer.com
Maryam Farnaz Rostami is a San Francisco-based contemporary performance artist, director, and writer originally from Texas. She is the child of model minorities. She uses lipsync, movement,narrative, dance and an exaggerated high femme medium to play, destroy and create. Maryam is a co-founder of the performance experiment Nicole Kidman is Fucking Gorgeous, which played winter 2013 at CounterPULSE, and her last evening length piece, PERSIAN LOOKING, played at CounterPULSE in the summer of 2012. She has played at ZSpace, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the De Young Museum, The Garage, The Stud, the Dana Street Theater, La Pena Theater, Root Division Gallery and Catherine Clarke Gallery. maryamrostami.com
MOON RAY RA is a collaboration and collage of experimental sound, text, and image. MOON RAY RA creates space/time/travel with KB Boyce and Celeste Chan.
KB Boyce is a Two-Spirit musician whose adventures have brought hir from teenage punk band appearances at CBGBs in NY, to B-grade horror movies in LA, and on to solo Drag King blues performance as TuffNStuff in San Francisco. S/he pays homage to African-American and Indigenous legacies of resistance through art. Boyce is the Co-Founder of Queer Rebels, a queer people of color arts company that connects generations – and honors our queer legacies with art for the future. www.queerrebels.com
Celeste Chan creates work born from Queer Diaspora through wit, words, and film. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) literary fellow, her writing is published in As/us literary journal and Feminist Wire. Her films have screened at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, MIX NYC, Frameline, and National Queer Arts Festival, among others. She’s honored to be the Co-Founder of Queer Rebels (a queer of color arts company), with her partner, KB Boyce. For more info: www.celestechan.com and www.facebook.com/QRProductions
Ryka Aoki has been honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to free speech and artistic expression, as well as the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” Her chapbook Sometimes Too Hot the Eye of Heaven Shines, won RADAR Productions’ 2010 Eli Coppola Award. Her collection, Seasonal Velocities was a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her novel, He Mele a Hilo (Topside Signature Press) is being released as you read this. Ryka also appears in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (Seal Press), Transfeminist Perspectives (Temple University), and The Collection (Topside Press). She is a professor of English at Santa Monica College and coordinates the Queer Studies program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. www.rykaryka.com
