Performing Diaspora

Cherie Hill (choreographer) is a choreographer, dancer, teacher and scholar, whose art explores human expression and how it is conveyed through the body in collaboration with nature, music and visual imagery. Her IrieDance works have been showcased at the Live Oak Theatre, the African American Cultural Center, the Black Choreographer’s Festival, Anschultz Theatre, Bao Bao Festival, P.L.A.C.E Performance, the San Francisco Cathedral, Omni Oakland Commons, SF Moving Arts Festival, Kinetech Arts, Alena Museum, the Milk Bar, SAFEhouse Arts, and the

Gabriel Christian is an artist bred in New York City and baking in Oakland. Their work metabolizes the vernaculars within BlaQ diaspora—futurity, afrovivalism, faggotry—through body-based live performance and poetics; moreover, they feel the bio to be an unfortunate by-product of capitalistic modes like chattel slavery. Chibueze Crouch is a queer Nigerian-American (Igbo) actor and artist from Danbury, Connecticut (Paugussett land) currently living in Oakland, CA (Chochenyo Ohlone land). Her creative practice straddles theater and performance art, examining Diasporic longing and constructions

bByb Bibene is a dance educator, choreographer and performer working in theater, ethnic, Afro urban, and contemporary dance forms. His own technical and aesthetic sensibility is rooted in the culture and dances of his country of origin, the Republic of Congo. He has toured the world and performed internationally with companies and choreographers originating from Africa, Europe, and the USA. Collaborators Dance Artists As a dancer and choreographer, Rashidi Omari is known for his magnetic mashups of traditional dance styles.

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist and educator who is shaped by her somatic experiences as a refugee. Her practice takes on an alchemical process of distilling symbolic representations into messengers of liminal spaces. She creates objects, installations, and audience participatory scores with interest in liminal spaces experienced by the viewer-participant, while her sound performances and compositions make use of her voice and innate properties of everyday objects as an ether for direct communication in an otherwise disparate

Image Description: A photograph of the top part of a building through a worm’s-eye view. The multi-family apartment building has 3 units side by side, and in the picture 2 stories are visible. In front of the building, the top part of a street lamp can be seen. Behind the building, a gray sky. We are a group of East, Southeast, and South Asian diasporic movers, makers, and settlers on Ramaytush and Chochenyo Ohlone land. What brought us

Image Description: VERA! Stands in profile, wearing a red bellydance top with jingle belt, and deep red eyeshadow, gold under eyeshadow, long, wavy brown hair, large Armenian eyebrows, painted mustache and beard, and a deep red lip. Vera Hannush/VERA! (they/them) is a queer Armenian American drag king, dancer, and community activist. VERA is a member and host of the Rebel Kings of Oakland, a member of SWANA Kings (South West Asian North African drag king collective), board member

Cynthia Ling Lee (concept and choreography) instigates postcolonial, queer, and feminist-of-color interventions in the field of experimental performance. Trained in North Indian classical kathak and US postmodern dance, she is committed to intimate collaborative processes and foregrounding marginalized voices and aesthetics. Cynthia’s interdisciplinary performance work has been presented at venues such as Dance Theater Workshop (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Painted Bride Arts Center (Philadelphia), Links Hall (Chicago), SZENE Salzburg (Salzburg), Taman Ismail Marzuki (Jakarta), and Chandra-Mandapa: Spaces (Chennai). Cynthia

Melissa Lewis (顾眉)  is a ChineseAmerican artist working with mixed identities and mediums. Her work has been presented here and abroad. She thinks often of decolonization, mother tongues, and queerness. Melissa has been dreaming and reading about Bruce Lee for the last year, and comes from a background of traditional Chinese folk arts.   Current Key Collaborators: Brenton Cheng. Rose Huey. Kim Ip. Nina Wu.   About this Project An all-Chinese cast performs identity, martial arts technique, and cha-cha. This