2021 FRESH MEAT FESTIVAL
20TH ANNIVERSARY
#superFRESH Program 3
Program Credits
(artist bios at bottom)
Breanna Sinclairé
Summertime
WORLD PREMIERE
Performed by: Breanna Sinclairé
Song: Summertime by George Gershwin
Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi
Mary Jones
WORLD PREMIERE
Text & Performance: Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi
Cinematography & Editing: Shannon Braine
Lighting & Tech: Faryn Kelly
This piece was created with the support of a FRESH WORKS! Artist Commission, from Fresh Meat Productions. Special thanks to Dance Place (Washington DC) for their generous support in the filming of this new work.
lafemmebear
Queen Tone aka Black Rage
Performer: LeahAnn “Lafemmebear” Mitchell
Cinematographer & Editor: Crystal Liu
Director: LeahAnn Mitchell
Detour Dance
The Nelken Line
Director & Editor: Eric Garcia
Cinematographer: Peggy Peralta
Choreographer: Pina Bausch
Cast: Mizz Ellemenohpee Q. Aresteeyuvee, Elizabeth Castaneda, Melissa Castaneda, Glamputee, Gold, Natalie Greene, Major Hammy, JanpiStar, Buka Kay!, Krimm, Ana Leash, Deuce Lee / Melissa Lewis, Jota Mercury, Mira, Wiley Naman Strasser, Rahni NothingMORE., Bhumi B. Patel, pretty plz, Leigh Rondon-Davis, Trixie Salope, Black Betty Towers, Grace Towers, Paige Turner, Vera, Hennessy Williams, Rihanna Wintour
Music: “West End Blues” by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five
J Mase III
My Favorite Flower Blooms in Winter
WORLD PREMIERE
Written & Performed: J Mase III
Cinematography & Editing: Vladimir Kremenovich
Edits & Animation: CreativeDevs
This piece was created with the support of a FRESH WORKS! Artist Commission, from Fresh Meat Productions. Special thanks to Velocity Dance Center and 12th Avenue Arts (Seattle WA) for their generous support in the filming of this new work.
NEVE
CODA
Performer & Choreographer: Neve Kamilah Mazique-Ricardi
Set Design: Beza Ayele, Mathew Bermudez, Kohl Dybdahl, Sky Fernandes, Christopher Mayo
Sound Designer: Victoria Duflot
Assistant Sound Designer: Tze Lok Ng
Media Manager & Artist Assistant: Marwa Popal
Production Assistants & Performers: Kohl Dybdahl, Marwa Popal, Sky Fernandes, Sana Iqbal, Bezs Ayele, Jonathan Weidemann
Special Thanks: NEVE would like to thank their partner, husband, fairy, lover Tony Mazique-Ricardi. With additional thanks fo Satchél, Saira, Vero, Rusty, Sara, Joy, Jasper, the Duwamish countryside, the Goat Girls and Evan Flory-Barnes, whose music really brings “is it my skin” into a realm of healing when he plays with me.
Under the mentorship and supervision of: Anida Yoeu Ali and Masahiro Sugano
Antoine Hunter / Purple Fire Crow
Rules ur walk!
WORLD PREMIERE
Choreographer: Antoine Hunter
Company: Urban Jazz Dance Company
Dancers: Antoine Hunter, Kelly Garrett, Marissa Head, Cynthia Rodriquez, Danielle Silk, Zahna Simon, Linda Steele II, Piper Thomasson
Costumes: Antoine Hunter
Music: Beyoncé
This piece was created with support from a FRESH WORKS! Artist Commission, from Fresh Meat Productions.
Mya Byrne
Explain Yourself
Performers: Mya Byrne, guitar, bass, vocal, mandolin; Suganthi Jeganathan, backing vocal
Song: written by Kirsten Opstad, recorded and arranged by Mya Byrne
Cinematographer: Mya Byrne
Editor: Damon Beirne
Mark Travis Rivera
Yearning
WORLD PREMIERE
Choreography by Mark Travis Rivera
Performed by Tajh Stallworth
Videography: Clare Schweitzer
Editing: Genevieve Hand
Special thanks to Sean Dorsey for the commission and California 2727 for the space subsidy.
This piece was created with support from a FRESH WORKS! Artist Commission, from Fresh Meat Productions.
Toby MacNutt
What we ask of flesh: Passing
Choreography: Christal Brown and Toby MacNutt
Performance: Toby MacNutt
Creative Consultant: Serenity Smith Forchion
Project Assistant: Dawn States
Videography: Angus Kittler Reid (QFilmworks)
Excerpted from A Singular They. Filmed in August 2020 in residency at the New England Center for Circus Arts, Brattleboro, VT. A Singular They is supported in part by: the Vermont Arts Council, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the MAP Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Fiscal sponsor: Vermont Dance Alliance.
Kevin Gaytan
Undocu-Queer
Choreography and Performance: Kevin Gaytan
Music & Composer: “Winds of Sleep ” – Native American Flute
Spoken word & Narration: Kevin Gaytan
Make up and Costume: Kevin Gaytan
Filming : Matt Han
Commissioned by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center for the 2020 Queering Dance Festival (QDF). See the next iteration of the piece at QDF 2021, September 20-27, shawl-anderson.org
Special thanks to Queering Dance Festival for commissioning and sharing this piece with the #20thAnniversaryFreshMeatFest!
Star Amerasu
We Got It All
Music by Star Amerasu
Rotimi Agbabiaka
An Excerpt from MANIFESTO: The Film
Performer: Rotimi Agbabiaka
Cinematographer: Christian Figueroa
Director & Editor: Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe
“Show Biz Circle Jerk” Title Design by Andy MacLennan
Angelica & Jahaira
Dame Corazón
WORLD PREMIERE
Performers: Angelica & Jahaira
Song: Dame Corazón
Artist: Raulin Rodriguez
Cinematography & Editing: Natalia Roberts
Lighting & Tech: Emily Paulson
This piece was created with support from a FRESH WORKS! Artist Commission, from Fresh Meat Productions.
Artist Bios
Breanna Sinclairé is a graduate from Calarts and San Francisco Conservatory of Music (first Trans person in the Opera program). On the stage, she has performed in many operatic works: Carmen, Samson and Delilah, Durufle’s Requiem to name a few. She has sung with the SF, Washington DC and Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus as their guest artist, recently she performed for the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention (alongside House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi). She sang the national anthem for the SF GIANTS, OAKLAND A’s , and The San Francisco Deltas as the first trans singer to perform at a national sporting event. Breannawas named OUT Magazine’s LGBT Hero of the Year 2015.
She has traveled across the States and Canada. Her debut at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on July 2017 was a huge milestone in her operatic career. She performed at the Lincoln Theater, Nourse Theater and many celebrated halls.
December 31st, 2018, she made her debut with the San Francisco SYMPHONY as the first trans singer to perform with the orchestra.
Dubbed the Ancient Jazz Priestess of Mother Africa, Lady Dane Figeuroa Edidi is a Black Nigerian, Cuban, Indigenous, American Performance Artist, Author, Educator, Speech Writer, a Helen Hayes Award winning Playwright (Klytmnestra: An Epic Slam Poem (2020), For Black Trans Girls…, Ghost/Writer, The Diaz Family Talent Show, Quest of The Reed Marsh Daughter, The Dance of Memories), Advocate, Dramaturg, a 2x Helen Hayes Award Nominated choreographer (2016, 2018) and co-editor of the Black Trans Prayer Book. She is the curator and a co-producer of Long Wharf Theater’s Black Trans Women At The Center: An Evening of Short Plays.
LeahAnn “Lafemmebear” Mitchell has long been featured and praised in the music industry for her talents as a musician, music producer, and sound engineer, having worked with major label studios and more recently as an independent artist under the moniker “Lafemmebear.”
As an up-and-coming producer, Mitchell worked alongside artists including Boyz II Men, Grammy-winners The Jackie Boyz, Eric Dawkins of The Underdogs, and Interscope Records producers from Nelly’s songwriting team. When she came out as a transgender woman in 2013, she was effectively blacklisted from the industry despite her skill and accomplishments, including a 2012 Grammy nomination for album engineering.
This only prompted Mitchell to take her music into her own hands under the name Lafemmebear in 2018. The arrival of her first indie release, Blaq* A Note to the World, showed that her sound has evolved into a genre-blending experience speaking to the trials of Black queer, trans femmes. The music video for the EP single “SHUTUP! (feat. Bella King)” premiered on Billboard.com in March of 2019; she subsequently became the first Black trans woman to headline the state of Utah’s Pride Festival in June, performing original music to an audience of over 60,000. Her words and work have since been featured by The Guardian, GLAAD, Queerty, Out.Tv Euro, Autostraddle, and Billboard once more.
Her first full album, Blaq: the Story of Me, premiered Fall 2019 and is available on all platforms. She is composing, mixing, and sound designing part of the original score for Alice Sheppard and Kinetic Light’s new work WIRED, set to premiere soon. She collaborated with PEG Records, Cody Belew, and Dustin Ransom to co-write and produce the first mainstream Pop-R&B single “What You’re Looking For” for the artist Peppermint (Rupaul’s Drag Race, Head Over Heels original Broadway cast, God Friended Me on CBS), which premiered on Valentine’s Day 2020.
Detour Dance is a devised dance-theater ensemble based in San Francisco. Our mission is to center the prismatic experiences of queers & people of color. Detour is committed to creating bold performance that promotes intersectional justice through collective storytelling. We produce the annual Tiny Dance Film Festival, host devised theater workshops, and present Clutch The Pearls drag cabaret. Founded in 2009 by Artistic Directors Kat Cole + Eric Garcia.
J Mase III is a Black/trans/queer poet & educator based in Seattle by way of Philly. As an educator, Mase has worked with community members in the US, UK, and Canada on the needs of LGBTQIA+ folks in spaces such as K-12 schools, universities, faith communities and restricted care facilities. He is founder of awQward, the first trans and queer people of color talent agency. His work has been featured on MSNBC, Essence Live, Everyday Feminism, Black Girl Dangerous, the New York Times, Buzzfeed, Blavity, the Root, the Huffington Post, TEDx and more. J Mase is author of And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment & Inappropriate Jokes About Death. Currently, he is head writer for the theatrical production Black Bois and is co-editor of the #BlackTransPrayerBook.
NEVE (they/he) is a Nubian (Indigenous Sudanese), Southwest Asian, and Celtic/Germanic American enchantrexx of queer joy and consequences (read: Black American, Indigenous, Arab/South Asian, queer, multigender femme, trans, Disabled performing artist freak), creating and producing in the realms of dance, musical theatre, and experimental film, and casting punk spells in Duwamish (Seattle) and other Unceded Coast Salish Territories, and being of other rivers- the Raritan, the Mississippi, the Nile. He is a lover of Levar Burton, Reading, and Rainbows. They are the Great Great Grandchild of the Author of The Velveteen Rabbit, and this lineage factors greatly into their work. NEVE is a river fairy and a merqueer and a chip of hard sap shimmering down to the bottom. He is a 2020 Pina Bausch Fellow, and one of the first two Americans to receive the award. They are an award-winning actrexx and filmmaker, and they are currently working on the screenplay adaptation of their original dance musical Lover of Low Creatures. He is currently a contributing writer at The South Seattle Emerald and has also been published in Curve Magazine, The Black Scholar, Everyday Feminism, ModelViewCulture, Plenitude Magazine, and MaximumRockNRoll, among others.
NEVE believes in God(exxes), Liberation, Land Back, Right of Return, Reparations, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Multiverse. They are polyamorously gay married, and they talk to animals, but the talking to animals came first and shed light on future relationships. Much like that Velveteen Rabbit, they are magical, real, and yearn to be changed by loving.
Artist statement: I am a multidisciplinary, access-centered, liberation ethicked choreographer
because I believe how we relate to our bodies and each others’ bodies
determines how we treat space, the earth, and the possibilities of our future.
I believe that our bodies are a mixed medium.
Dance is the perfect venue to show what they can do.
That is why the dance I make is more than dance,
or rather, I believe in what dance is.
Dance is as expansive and life-giving and diverse
as the bodies it’s made with.
Dance is as mixed-genre and discipline as the stories it needs to tell. Dance deserves more than to have its complexity erased.
Bay Area native, Antoine Hunter also known Purple Fire Crow is an award-winning Internationally-known African-American, Indigenous, Deaf, Disable, choreographer, dancer, actor, instructor, speaker, Producer and Deaf advocate. He creates opportunities for Disable, Deaf and hearing artists and produces Deaf-friendly events, and founded the Urban Jazz Dance Company and Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival (BAIDDF) Antoine has received numerous grants and awards including the inaugural Jeanette Lomujo Bremond Award for Humanity, Isadora Duncan (Izzie) for BAIDDF, and SF King of Carnaval. Antoine’s work has been performed globally, most recently in Turkey, UK and Russia. He has lectured across the U.S. including at Kennedy Center’s VSA, Harvard and Duke University, and the National Assembly of State Arts. His shoe company DropLabs and Susan Paley just released an innovative product to help people feel music through their shoes.
Splitting her time between San Francisco and New York, Mya Byrne is an award-winning songwriter, filmmaker, and activist, and the first trans dyke to be featured as a solo performer at the SF Dyke March. Her “rootsy, soulful” music (Time Out London) has been featured on official Spotify playlists, terrestrial radio, SingOut!, Advocate, New York Magazine, MSNBC, and NPR, compared to artists like Lucinda Williams and Nick Drake. Other highlights include lecturing at colleges and performing at many folk festivals and stages including Berkeley Rep, San Francisco Trans March, Levon Helm’s Ramble, and Folsom Street Fair. Her directorial debut, a short film on gay trans pioneer Lou Sullivan, was highlighted as a centerpiece of the 2020 SF Trans Film Fest.
Mark Travis Rivera is an award-winning professional storyteller––telling stories is at the core of Mark’s purpose in life. A graduate of William Paterson University of New Jersey, Rivera earned a bachelor’s in women’s & gender studies with a minor in public relations. Rivera is the youngest person to found an integrated dance company in the United States, marked dance project, a contemporary company for dancers with and without disabilities, established in March 2009, made its debut at Rutgers University. The company has also performed at the Silk City Summer Arts Festival, the Painted Bride Art Center, the Mandell Theater, the Actor’s Fund Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY and New York University. Through MDP, Rivera has worked with choreographers such as Caitlin Trainor, Stacey Tookey, Todrick Hall, Tyce Diorio, and Marinda Davis. After ten years of remarkable dancing, Rivera decided to dissolve the marked dance project and continue working as an independent disabled choreographer.
Toby MacNutt is a queer, nonbinary trans, disabled dancer/choreographer from Burlington, VT. Their current work in progress, “A Singular They”, is a solo work showcasing fluidity and changing embodiment. Past works include “Enter the Void” and “One, Two”. They have also danced for Murmurations Dance (“Bone Hooks”, “When Women Were Birds”), Tiffany Rhynard’s Big APE, and Heidi Latsky’s “GIMP”, among others locally and internationally. Toby was an AXIS Dance Choreo-Lab choreographer in 2018 and 2019, and a 2019 recipient of the Rebecca Blunk Fund Award from the New England Foundation for the Arts. Find out more about Toby’s work at www.tobymacnutt.com, on twitter @tobywm, or instagram @tobymacnutt.
Kevin Gaytan graduated San Jose State University as a double major in Sociology and a bachelor’s in fine arts. He has worked and trained under Bay Area choreographers and lecturers such as Heather Cooper, Raphael Boumaila, Jill Yager and Dominique Lomuljo. In his time at SJSU, he studied composition and choreography under Fred Mathews. Some of Mr. Gaytan’s performing highlights include classical Jose Limon works such as Psalm and Misa Brevis. He has also had the honor of performing and working for Tandy Beal & Company. As part of a choreographer-in-residence program, he performed with Doug Varone and dancers in Doug Varone’s “In the shelter of the fold” in 2018. Mr. Gaytan is currently an active company member of SjDanceCo (under Artistic Directors Gary Masters and Maria Basile); Rogelio Lopez and Dancers; and Cypher Dance Company (under Artistic Director Karina Cervantes).
Star Amerasu is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her music and video work have been featured in many publications including Out Magazine, Paper Magazine, Them, I-D, Billboard Magazine and KQED Arts to name a few. She creates indie electronic music under the moniker Ah-Mer-Ah-Su and her last album “Star” Released in 2018 was voted Top 20 LGBT albums of that year by Billboard Music. Her voice though its own unique timbre has been compared to Nina Simone, her sound in a world of its own. www.starmusic.tv
Rotimi Agbabiaka is an actor, writer, director, and teacher who uses humor, glamor, and drama to upset the status quo. As an actor, Rotimi has collaborated with companies like American Conservatory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience, Word for Word, and the Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe. Rotimi penned the solo shows Homeless, Type/Caste, and MANIFESTO; the musical, Seeing Red; and has dazzled nightlife stages as alter-ego, Miss Cleo Patois.
Angelica Medina and Jahaira Fajardo are the Directors of In Lak’ech Dance Academy, in Oakland CA. They both share an immense passion for dance, and in 2014 they met and fell in love on the dance floor. They soon after decided to grow as dance partners while training for competition. In December 2015 they placed 1st in the Latin Ladies Same Gender Division, at the World Latin Dance Cup. Jahaira made history as the first Bachata female leader to become a World Champion. In 2018, they returned to WLDC as pros and placed first in the Bachata Couple Pro Cabaret division. In 2017, Jahaira and Angelica participated and completed the Alex and Desiree Bachata Instructor Certification Course. They also had the honor to Direct The AnD WW ~Team SF Season One. In 2018, In Lak’ech Dance Academy produced the first ever Queer Latin Dance Festival, where Queer and Trans Latinx dancers are highlighted and celebrated. This event continues on an annual basis. In Lak´ech Dance Academy is the direct result of the passion Angelica & Jahaira share for Latin Dance and for their community.