CounterPulse and the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAIT-S) welcome you to the first contemporary Two-Spirit Performance Festival in Yelamu (San Francisco).
Weaving Spirits will feature Two-Spirit Indigenous artists, many of which are already known both nationally and internationally, as well as artists emerging in the Bay Area community. We are bringing together, or weaving, the ways of the past into the present.
These artists utilize performance and storytelling to visibilize a diverse range of experiences as California Natives, Natives relocated to The Bay Area, and visiting Native performers and culture bearers.
Festival evening performances range from traditional forms to experimental performance art, dance, and drag. Workshop offerings dig deeper into decolonizing sexuality, performance, and language. Curated by an intergenerational team of Two-Spirit community leaders, with cultural protocols honoring the Rahmaytush (Onlone), ancestral stewards of Yelamu (San Francisco).
Buy Tickets and find the full schedule here!
FESTIVAL PROGRAM
FRIDAY PERFORMANCES, 7PM-10PM
L Frank Manriquez: L Frank will perform a California Native Song
Roger Kuhn: Mvto. Song writer and performer Roger Kuhn performs Mvto, the Creek word for thank you
Dismantle: An intergenerational collaboration across time by Amelia, Amanda & Peter Vigil
Brush Arbor Gurlz: We Are Woven. Connecting our spirits by Landa Lakes, U-phoria Glitter, Kenya Pfister and Miso Hornay
Mason Smith: Black Waters Mixing: Dance-film and poetry presentation with creative relationship to movement, disability and two spirit history
Sissy Slays: Urban Indigenous Vibes. Dance/vogue piece bringing out the indigecunt
Kanyon Sayers- Roods: Coyote Conversation. Artists weave together conversations of coyote medicine with decolonizing perspectives and reindigenization of ritual and ceremony into communal art spaces
SATURDAY WORKSHOPS
WAKAN WIYA HEALING DRUM CIRCLE
12:00pm-2:00pm at CounterPulse
Open Drum presenting work done in the Bay Area. A facilitated healing work with all attendants invited to sit at the drum and offer songs together with our drumkeepers and singers.
About the facilitator: Zamora is a two-spirit Yaqui and Tongva feminist scholar and organizer. She has been a ceremonial singer for many years in Two-Spirit women’s ceremonial community. Through several years of participating in women’s’ drumming, Zamora has learned from other singers and drummers, sharing prayers, sharing songs and traditions. She is a board member of the Chicana Latina Foundation and has worked in community based non-profits in grant management. Zamora will lead a healing drum offering on Saturday night of Weaving Spirits Festival.
DECOLONIZING OUR SEXUALITIES
3:45pm-5:00pm at CounterPulse
Panel coordinated by Javier Fresquez with Roger Khun and Jennifer Lisa Vest
About the facilitators:
Mescalero Apache, Mexika-Chichimeca/Cano is a UCR Critical Dance Studies Ph.D. student whose studies have been supported by the U.S. Department of Education Native American Studies Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (G.A.A.N.N.) Fellowship, the Dean’s Distinguished Doctoral Student Fellowship, and the Max H. Gluck Arts Fellowship. Their research focuses on how the House Ballroom Scene children of the western hemisphere have deployed the dance form of vogue (voguing/Performance) as a praxis of decolonization.
Dr. Jennifer Lisa Vest is a philosopher, poet, and healer. She has a PhD from UC Berkeley in Indigenous Philosophies, is a former professor of Philosophy, and has published poetry and philosophy in the areas of intersectionality, feminism, queerness, and Native and African thought.
SATURDAY PERFORMANCES, 7PM-10PM
Wikan Wiya: Wakan Wiya Healing Drum Circle
Dismantle: An intergenerational collaboration across time by Amelia, Amanda & Peter Vigil
Jennifer Vest: (Re)Counting (Wo)Man. a one-person show that explores indigeneity, sexuality, queerness, history, ancestral traditions, anti-black racism, and strategies of survival in a mixed media tapestry of poetry, storytelling, images, and film.
Chaac
SUNDAY PERFORMANCES, 5PM-8PM
Bagz: We Are Woven. Connecting our spirits by Landa Lakes, U-phoria Glitter, Kenya Pfister and Miso Hornay
Faun: ALL ALONG is a digital tour of healing. A 1722.7 mile road trip seeks to end enveloping self hatred and colonization.
Kanyon Sayers- Roods: Coyote Conversation. Artists weave together conversations of coyote medicine with decolonizing perspectives and reindigenization of ritual and ceremony into communal art spaces.
Mason Smith: Black Waters Mixing. Dance-film and poetry presentation with creative relationship to movement, disability and two spirit history
Sign up here! Don’t miss out on this historic event!
