CELEBRATION of LIFE

Saturday June 04, 1-4pm, SF CA

5 queer artists. 5 queer ancestors. 1 day of radical joy.

Free communal Celebration of Life sharing the artistic legacy of queer ancestors.

Saturday JUNE 04, 1-4pm PDT.

An indoor/outdoor event.

In and around the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Galleries and Forum Building at 701 Mission St, San Francisco CA, 94103.

Five Bay Area artists (including Rotimi Agbabiaka, Meliza Bañales, Tiff Lin, Aléta Mascorro, and Enormvs Muñoz) will invite visitors into the living legacy of cultural ancestors Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Kapaemāhū, Walter Mercado, and Guan Yin.

Bring your proof of vaccination and a mask (required indoors). ASL interpreter present.

Email info [at] eyezen [dot] org to discuss any access needs or accommodations that will help you have a great experience! Organizers will do our best to meet these needs when shared in advance of the event.

Trandisciplinary art, communal gathering, and radical joy

Each artist has chosen a QTBIPOC ancestor meaningful to them who they will celebrate, educate about, and welcome audiences to directly engage with through performance and interactive creative activities. The three-hour event will begin with a playful outdoor ritual in the YBCA courtyard followed by the opportunity to explore and engage with artists at individual ancestor stations throughout the Grand Lobby. The afternoon culminates in a closing ritual of co-creating a shared altar.

(Image: Teaching artist Tiff Lin prepares for their FabLab.)


A collaboration between EYE ZEN PRESENTS, SOL VIDA, and LATINX MAFIA presented as a YBCA ARTST POWER CONVENING.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND ANCESTORS

5 Queer Ancestors. 5 Queer Artists. 1 Day of Radical Joy. Saturday June 4, 1-4pm, SF CA.


Rotimi Agbabiaka (all pronouns) celebrates James Baldwin

Rotimi Agbabiaka (all pronouns) is an actor, writer, director, and teacher who uses humor, glamor, and drama to upset the status quo, with artistic credits at Cal Shakes, Magic Theater, SF Mime Troupe, Playwrights Horizons, and Yale Rep.

James Baldwin: novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and activist whose vivid words, insightful commentary, and fiery activism gave voice to the experience of being Black and queer in America and who has inspired generations of people all over the world to insist on the dignity and liberty of all humans. 


ALÉTA MASCORRO (She/her) will celebratE Walter Mercado

Aléta Mascorro (she/her) is a multi-hyphenate theater artist, instructor, and astrologer of the Xicana trans experience.

Walter Mercado: Puerto Rican astrologer, actor, dancer, and writer known for his bejeweled capes and his wildly creative and love-centered daily televised horoscope readings.


Meliza Bañales (she/They) Celebrates Gloria Anzaldúa


Meliza Bañales (she/they) is an author, advocate, teaching artist, and Oakland Grand Slam Poetry Champion.

Gloria Anzaldúa: Chicana- Tejana- Lesbian, feminist poet, activist, theorist and fiction writer known for her book Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza.


tiff lin (they/Them) Celebrates guan yin

Tiff Lin (they/them) is a 1.5 gen Taiwanese American, queer, nonbinary, Yang Earth Dragon, Chinese Astrology practitioner, pleasure + intimacy activist, kinesthetic storyteller, and facilitator of API community healing.

Guan Yin: 5th century Chinese Bodhisattva known for taking 33 different forms across gender boundaries to effectively reach those who call for them in times of fear, despair, and uncertainty. 


Enormvs Muñoz (he/him) celebrates Kapaemāhū

Enormvs Muñoz (he/him) is an educator, actor, dancer, clown, writer, director, & burlesque performer who calls New York, Hawaiʻi, & California “Home.”

Kapaemāhū: 15th century māhū healer from Tahiti and Hawai‘i, who embodied both female and male gender traits and was renowned for their healing gifts, experience, and wisdom. 

The gathering brings together a community of artists who have explored these ancestors individually in the FabLab series of playshops (playful workshops) during the pandemic. After a 2021-22 fraught with isolation, June 4th will see the artists growing those individual events into a jubilant shared gathering open to visitors from all communities and identities. 

Celebrations will include visual art installations in the form of an altar, creative performance activities that invite audiences to dance and move, reflective and contemplative opportunities, and chances to learn about the ancestors and their legacies through live personal sharing and e-zines. Visitors get the opportunity to rotate through a series of indoor and outdoor offerings in the immersive environment.

Rather than dictate a single expressive form for CELEBRATION OF LIFE, this event invites its artists to bring their interdisciplinary backgrounds and whole collaborative selves to the sprawling Grand Lobby space of YBCA and its outdoor surroundings to create a unique collective experience with multiple artistic disciplines to choose from.


“FabLab is an incubator of radical play, instigating radical joy that’s critical for our health, especially in challenging times like these…

FabLab’s Celebration of Life is a calling in of our ancestors and gathering with chosen family that lifts our spirits because we can’t help but see the fabulousness in one another.

That recognition is contagious because we know an embodied knowledge of who and where we come from brings us joy, resilience, solace, and a clearer vision of our path forward.

Who doesn’t want some of that?”

—Eye Zen Presents Artistic Director Seth Eisen.


ABOUT THE PRODUCING PARTNERS:

EYE ZEN PRESENTS, founded by Seth Eisen in 2007, is a San Francisco-based transdisciplinary theater company working to unearth and elevate the stories of our queer ancestors. The organization promotes social change by preserving and disseminating LGBTQIA+ stories and traditions in danger of obsolescence. Eye Zen’s productions engender an experimental aesthetic that blends performance and the visual arts: puppetry and live drawing is fused with contemporary dance, drag, live music, physical theater and video. Its critically acclaimed works include Blackbird: Honoring a Century of Pansy Divas (2007), Buffet Flats: Queering Slow Food (2011-12), Homo File: Chronicling the Life of Samuel Steward (2012) and Rainbow Logic: Arm in Arm with Remy Charlip. The first chapter of its performance-driven San Francisco queer history tours, OUT of Site: North Beach, premiered in 2018, followed by OUT of Site: SOMA in 2019 and 2020 and OUT of Site: Haight-Ashbury in 2021. For more information visit eyezen.org.

Eye Zen has received generous support from SF Grants for the Arts, California Arts Council, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as well as individual donors.  The YBCA Power Convening Grant supports the expansion of the FabLab program to include a Celebration of Life gathering in 2022. This event will provide a platform for participants to share their art and build relationships with other QTBIPOC artists in the community. The Celebrations will raise the bar on opportunities to educate the public about QTBIPOC histories with creative activities by the artists and participants that will have an enduring ripple effect.

LATINX MAFIA is a collective of diverse Latinx/e identified artists. The group was born out of a need to address our collective experiences with racist, problematic and misunderstood casting and storytelling practices of Latinx/e stories in a white-dominated media space. We come together in community to advocate for our radically accurate representation, to provide support and resources for Latinx-identified artists and to uplift our talent. Our mission is to empower and support Latinx teatristas by reclaiming, demystifying and recreating Latinx representation in theatre/media and ensuring that Latinx representation in theatre and media radically and accurately embraces historically marginalized communities including but not limited to: the LGBTQiA2 community, indigenous and Afro-Latinx people, differently-able folks, migrants regardless of immigration status, and the many linguistic backgrounds in Latin America.

SOL VIDA is shifting normalcy from systemic oppression to radical freedom utilizing dance and expressive arts as tools for personal transformation, collective liberation and embodied healing justice. We are dedicated to preserving Afro-Diasporic cultural traditions, creating progressive, multigenerational dance communities, and affinity spaces for education, empowerment, leadership and advocacy. To provide safe spaces for Queer, Trans, Black and Indigenous People of Culture (QTBIPoC and BIPoC) as well as Two-spirit, lesbian, gay, trans, queer, intersex, aesexual and gender expansive identities (2SPLGBTQIA+ ). We are a  global movement company that uses dance and expressive arts to release people from feeling traumatized, isolated, stressed out, ashamed, shut down, afraid and insecure and give them safe, sacred inclusive havens to express themselves fully, restoring confidence, sparking life creativity and sharing tools to disrupt and break down the oppressive systems in society.

ABOUT FABLAB

FabLab is a series of playshops that provide a vital space for QTBIPOC culture bearers to conjure and celebrate the legacies of queer ancestors, igniting a fabulous re-telling of queer history facilitated by the fiercest QTBIPOC creative voices. Each month’s facilitators introduce participants to one queer ancestor as inspiration for the creation of fresh new work exploring dance, performance, visual art, video, music, and spoken word.  

FabLab connects Bay Area residents to the lives and legacies of QTBIPOC ancestors that have been omitted from our mainstream media and cultural knowledge. Historically, many QTBIPOC ancestral stories have remained silent, hidden, or lost. Many factors have created this historical void: queers practicing silence as self-defense during oppressive times, failures of academia, AIDS, and the general racial-, gender-, and hetero-normativity of dominant cultures steeped in the voices of settler colonialism. Originally launched by Eye Zen Presents in 2014 and grown through a partnership with April Axé Charmaine and SOL VIDA starting in 2019 and in collaboration with Latinx Mafia since 2020 to provide an interactive communal experience to learn about our QTBIPOC ancestors. For more on FabLab and the FabLab team: https://www.eyezen.org/fablab22

(Acronyms defined:

2SLGBTQIA+ Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Plus.

QTBIPOC- Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Culture * POC formerly utilized as “people of color”; we are strategically using the term “People Of Culture” because we would like to address the issues of colorism implicit in the term “color”.)


ABOUT YBCA ARTIST POWER CONVENINGS

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is undertaking a series of Artist Power Convenings, a new community investment strategy to build the capacity of artists and artist-led organizations in service of their communities.

With the Artist Power Convenings, YBCA wants to support artists getting together, virtually or in-person, to imagine, create, and lift up each other across our region. As the first initiative of its kind at YBCA, the program will continue to evolve in order to better serve Bay Area artists and artist-led organizations.

Artist Power Convenings were made possible by $400,000 in funding from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. More at https://ybca.org/artist-power-convenings/


Eye Zen Presents, the boldly transdisciplinary San Francisco theater company dedicated to promoting and protecting lost LGBTQIA+ histories, has announced a communal Celebration of Life. Artists Rotimi Agbabiaka, Meliza Bañales, Tiff Lin, Aléta Mascorro, and Enormvs Muñoz will joyfully celebrate their own QTBIPOC cultural ancestors Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Kapaemāhū, Walter Mercado, and Guan Yin through performance rituals, interactive creative activities, and a communal altar installation. Produced in collaboration with Sol Vida and Latinx Mafia as a YBCA Artist Power Convening, the event welcomes artists and non-artists of all identities who wish to be invited into the living cultural legacy of QTBIPOC ancestors.

WHEN: Celebration of Life: 1-4pm PDT Sunday, June 04, 2022

WHERE: In-person at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Galleries and Forum Building (701 Mission St/San Francisco CA/94103).

TICKETS: Free. REGISTER HERE.

PRESS: Contact Megan Cohen, megan@eyezen.org