2023 FRESH MEAT FESTIVAL of transgender and queer performance

A 40 year resident of San Francsco. Former Performer. A black trans woman fighting for Social Justice and Equality for the trans community, worldwide

JanpiStar was born and raised in Puerto Rico. With a Degree in Drama from the University of Puerto Rico, They moved to Oakland in January 2018 to join AXIS Dance Company and had the opportunity to work with choreographers like Robin Dekkers, Arthur Pita , Jennifer Archibald and Asun Noales. Janpi has been commissioned in the Bay Area by different festivals & organizations like : Queering Dance Festival on 2019, 2020 & 2022 and by The FreshMeat Production in 2021 & 2022.

Myles Hochman (they/he) began their circus arts journey in 2014, when aerial hoop expanded their life beyond being “a brain in a jar.” They push to redefine the boundaries of what aerial hoop can be, and are fascinated by the use of momentum and gravity to punctuate and accentuate compelling stories. Whether it’s the complexities of queer joy in an inhospitable world or finding freedom in the monstrous queer, they aim for their work to center emotional authenticity and speak to those who need it most. Myles is grateful to have had opportunities to share their work across the US and internationally.

LOTUS BOY is a shapeshifting, transgender and nonbinary, unapologetically disabled and chronically ill-USTRIOUS, Chinese-American Drag King and anti-disciplinary artist based in occupied Lisjan Ohlone Land (Oakland, CA). Ze explores gender fluidity, accessibility, and healing from trauma through the mediums of poetry, lipsync, ancestral movement (qigong), and original music. King LOTUS BOY’s work uplifts issues regarding ableism, anti-Asian racism, transphobia, and sustainability, often incorporating humor as a vessel of universal connection. With every performance, he aims to help the audience learn—or unlearn—something about themselves and the world around them. LOTUS BOY is on the Board of Directors for Oaklash, the Bay Area’s drag festival, and the Drag & Spirituality Summit. When not onstage, LOTUS BOY also brings drag and gender exploration workshops to high schools in SF and Oakland.

Angie and Audrey are a married, queer, non-binary dance couple. Born and raised in the Caribbean, together they specialize in Afro-Latin dances. By uplifting Afro-rooted art forms and breaking the traditional binary roles in partner dance, they aim to represent and inspire marginalized people who want to be leaders in inclusive and creative spaces.

They began their work together in Boston, MA in 2016 while teaching for Hyde Square Task Force (HSTF), where they touched the lives of hundreds of immigrants and inner city youth. At this art-based youth development organization, they helped direct El Barrio, a production on Boston gentrification, and Raíces, a compilation of folk stories originating from Indigenous and African culture in Latin America. Angie and Audrey also founded and led HSTF’s alumni salsa troupe, Oshun, where they choreographed Afro-Latin dance pieces and performed all over the greater Boston area. The couple also co-directed, choreographed, and performed in the original production Yo Soy Lola 2017 and 2018, a multimedia show that sought to rewrite the Latina narrative. Concurrently, Angie and Audrey also danced and coached at world-renowned Afro-Latin dance company Masacote until 2020. In early 2021, Angie and Audrey moved to Austin, TX to establish ORO Dance Company.

Together Angie and Audrey have performed and taught at several dance congresses across the U.S. and Canada. In 2022, they were featured on PBS’s Emmy-winning web series, “If Cities Could Dance” by KQEDArts.

LBXX (pronounced Lunch Box) is an up and coming queer Bay Area artist, DJ and the co-founder of the local DJ collective Makeroom. His gritty flow, mixed with fresh rhymes, adds something new to the scene. Born in the West and raised in the East, LBXX pulls from both sets of cultural roots that allows him to have a smooth flow and yet a powerful sound.

Jocquese “SirJoQ” Whitfield is a dancer/performer/choreographer/MC born and raised in San Francisco. They are the first Vogue instructor of San Francisco and has been teaching their Vogue & Tone classes since 2010. Starting their career steeped in the improvisation of freestyle hip-hop, Jocquese has added modern, classical, and Diasporic dance traditions over the last several years.

Jocquese is currently signed to Molly House Records and has opened for as well as performed alongside internationally recognized artists and organizations.

Charles Peoples III (He/They) is a performing artist, composer, lyricist, and choreographer. He uses sound, movement, and visual storytelling to create experiences that bend towards mysticism, spirituality, queerness, and transformation.

Charles has performed his music at multiple conferences, workshops, and theaters; significant mentions include the 9th International Sound Healing Conference, the New Living Expo, Oakland Pride Festival, San Jose Pride Festival, and the Lesher Center for the Arts.

Currently a grad student at Dartmouth College, Charles is researching societal/individual misremembering and the therapeutic value of performance. He is now merging his interests in ancient ritual, storytelling, and shamanism with technology to create transformative, mystical, and immersive performances. @CPIIIMusic

“We are love. We are one.”

Sean Dorsey is a San Francisco-based choreographer, dancer, writer, educator and activist. Dorsey has toured his work to more than 30 cities across the US and abroad – and taught with his explicitly trans-positive pedagogy in more than 35 cities. He is the founding Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions.

Dorsey is a 2020 Doris Duke Artist and an inaugural Dance/USA Artist Fellow. He has been awarded five Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and the Goldie Award for Performance. In 2009, Dorsey was named in Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch;” in 2019, he became the first openly-transgender person on the cover of Dance Magazine.

A longtime social practice artist, Dorsey creates his works over 2-3 years in deep relationship with/in community. Dorsey’s dances are powerful explorations of human experience – a fusion of full-throttle dance, luscious partnering, intimate storytelling and theater. Highly physical, accessible, rooted in story, and danced with precision and guts and deep humanity, Dorsey’s works have been praised as “exquisite…poignant and important” (BalletTanz), “trailblazing” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “evocative, compelling, elegant” (LA Weekly).

As a teaching artist, Dorsey leads workshops, classes and DREAM LABS with a trans-positive pedagogy – and centers and celebrates gender non-conforming and trans bodies, voices and aesthetics.

Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazi trans lesbian, is an internationally-recognized writer, preacher, and community organizer. She has performed with the Fresh Meat Festival, Mangos With Chili, the Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Collective, Queer Rebels, Brouhaha, and Girl Talk: a Cis and Trans Women’s Dialogue, which she co-curated; co-edited the book Queer and Trans Artists of Color, Volume 2, with Nia Levy King; and teaches and consults extensively. Elena serves on the Board of Directors for the Bay’s Queer Cultural Center and the Allied Media Projects in Detroit.

Batey Tambó is an Oakland and San Francisco-based, women of color-led cultural group grounded in the centuries-old musical tradition of Afro-Indigenous Puerto Rican Bomba. Batey Tambó director/founder Denise Solís (La Bombera de la Bahia), founded one of the first ever all female Bomba ensembles, Las Bomberas de la Bahia, and more recently co-founded and co-led, Taller Bombalele. She has been a student of Bomba since 2001 and continues to learn from maestrx and elders from Puerto Rico and the Diaspora, she is one of the first women to play the subidor (lead drum) in the tradition of Bomba. Batey Tambo co-director, Julia Caridad Cepeda (Julia Danse), is from the esteemed Cepeda Family who have carried this tradition for more than 8 generation and counting.

Batey Tambó’s mission is to facilitate a discussion through teaching and sharing space for Bomba (Batey’s) that intervene discussion and practice on racial, gendered, geopolitical contexts by offering an opportunity for dialogue about capitalism and colonization through Bomba. As an embodied musical tradition Bomba is the result of the transatlantic slave trade and a tool for survival practiced by freed Africans (Cimarrones) in alliance with Taínos in Puerto Rico to communicate, pray, to agitate and organize revolts.

As with many spaces and cultural traditions of resistance, Batey Tambó plays a role in healing the long-standing patriarchal influences that interplay and are passed on into the very fabric of a society through generations. Within the Bomba musical tradition, the most celebrated musical role, that of drumming, were held primarily by men. “La Bomba es Nuestra” in 2007 was the first ever convening of an all women drumming ensemble bringing Bomberxs from the Diaspora (New York, Chicago, California) and Puerto Rico to the San Francisco Bay Area to learn from each other, share experiences and collaborate in series of performances, community Bateys (the space where Bomba is practiced and a place of healing) and workshops offered to the Bomba community in the Bay Area. Denise Solis was one of the directors/facilitators of this first ever convening in 2007. This was the catalyst for the formation of her two projects/ensembles Las Bomberas de la Bahia and later Taller Bombalele (with Julia Caridad Cepeda).

Batey Tambó continues in that service of healing and liberation by facilitating spaces through the music and dance tradition of Bomba, offering classes, workshops and performances both on the stage and in community honoring our complex histories and experiences in our diverse Latinx Diaspora.

Becca Dean has been creating and performing site-specific vertical dance with Bandaloop for ten years across 6 continents, dancing in theaters, on skyscrapers, Yosemite cliffs, a Soviet-era crane, stadiums, and on film. They hold a certificate in somatic movement facilitation from the Moving On Center School and teach Dance for Parkinson’s at Stanford. Since arriving in the Bay Area twelve years ago, Becca has had the pleasure of working with Joe Goode Performance Group, Flyaway Productions, La Alternativa, and Fogbeast. They grew up in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains and received a BFA from the University of Utah.

NEVE (they/(s)he) is a Disabled, multiracial, multidimensional dramatic terpsichorean multigender femme artist. They are an Indigenous African living in Duwamish country and traveling wherever they have access/an invitation. (S)He is a 2020 Pina Bausch Fellow, a 2022 Arc Artist Fellow and a Disability Ford Futures Fellow!
NEVE loves life, the delights and pains of love, the higher power inside us, the earth’s lullabies and war cries, drinking color, and dreaming with their queer family (especially their cat child Caravaggio). They collaborate with fellow Seattle multidisciplinary artist Saira Barbaric as MouthWater.

Peekaboo under the appellation transcriptions (they/them) is an experimental cellist, composer, multi-instrumentalist and youth educator situated on Ramaytush Ohlone land (SF). Their compositions are rooted in honoring the essence and spirit of Filipinx/Latinx past, present and future Queer ancestors, prioritizing sonic exploration practices towards the decolonization of Euro-centric structures embedded in youth and adult music education and performance. Their “expressions” dive into drag, theater and improvisational soundscaping, performing in spaces such as Counterpulse, the STUD, Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, Brava Theater and more. They’re mobilizing to grow a youth music program, visiting classrooms and collaborating with Bay Area educators.

SHAWNA VIRAGO is a songwriter celebrated for her striking lyric-based songs. Her songs twist together folk, alt-country and punk. Virago was one of the nation’s first openly transgender women to perform and tour nationally, and has performed as an out transwoman since the early 1990’s. shawnavirago.com

Natasha is a stand-up comedian and humorous writer who moved to San Francisco last century and hasn’t been pushed out of the City (yet). She likes puns, wordplay, and portmanteaus, and enjoys weaving them into jokes and comical bits about being trans, being a mom, and being alone with her thoughts. Some audiences don’t know what to make of her, so it’s a good thing she’s a self-made lady. When she’s not making scores of people laugh on stage, she’s plugging away at her blog. Natasha’s comedy is so good it’s not even funny.