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 of Oaklash, the Bay Area Drag Festival, and member of Drag Queen Story Hour – Bay Area. They are the father of the House of Pack and the current Mx. Starsearch 2022. @veritas_22
About this Project
This work encompasses dance, drag, theater, performance, comedy, and art as healing. “Try, Hye!” (“Try, Armenian!”) is a narrative arc of VERA! being taught by different queer SWANA diasporic dance teachers, learning the movement, experiencing trial and error, failure and success, culminating in a performance with those teachers, Step Up: SWANA Edition. The audience will see and experience the learning process, the void of cultural knowledge that queer SWANA people seek to fill, and celebrate the end culminating achievement.
About the collaborators:
Basinah is a San Francisco based belly dance performer and instructor. She is a 10 time multi-award winner from state-wide and National competitions in both soloist and groups categories. Basinah is a founding member of Asheq Collective. She can be found performing locally at restaurants and events. For more information and booking, see her website Basinahdances.com IG: @basinahdances
Hrayr Varaz is a white, bearded queer cis-male Western Armenian-ist, SF-based twitter-poet dancer linguist, sexpert intensity flow-er, ftografr out now is his first bilingual and bitranscribed poem collection “#twitterpoem”. IG: @hrayr_huh_died
Fusing culture and Drag together, Anoush Ellah is an Armenian gender-bending Drag pop Princess that is on a mission to infiltrate spaces with Queerness and culture. IG: @anoush_ellah
Shadybee Diamond – the pronoun is Queen – Queen Shadybee is an Arabic Drag artist all the way from the Middle East. This Queen is a bellydancer and teaches it too. This Queen is also a seamstress, and does wig styling. The art of drag is the hope that Shadybee is living for and it keeps this queen creative, productive, and alive. IG: @iamshadybee
Photo Credit: VERA! by Kane C. Andrade
Get a sneak peek into VERA!’s rehearsal process in their blog below!
https://dev-counterpulse.pantheon.io/oh-hye/
Thursday – Saturday, December 8-10 & 15-17, 2022