The lights are coming back up at CounterPulse.
As part of the Market Street Arts & Theater Festival, CounterPulse presents MIXTAPE, an evening of dance, theater, drag, performance, and gathering, and a first taste of what’s ahead here at 80 Turk.
This isn’t the grand reopening just yet! But it is a chance to come home.
Step back into the theater, reconnect with an old friend (or meet someone new), and experience CounterPulse the way we love it best: artists onstage, audiences in the room, and something unexpected unfolding between them.
MIXTAPE brings together performances by Curry Senior Center’s LGBTQ+ Proud & Present Theatre Ensemble, Beef Cakes & Major Hammy, Clarissa Rivera Dyas, Johnny Huy Nguyễn, and hosted by Interim Producing Director Vin Seaman.
Whether you’ve spent countless nights at CounterPulse or have never stepped through our doors before, come see what’s stirring at 80 Turk.
Press play. We’re just getting started!
Accessibility Information
CounterPulse is fully ADA compliant with a step-free entrance, wheelchair-accessible performance spaces, and accessible, all-gender restrooms. Accessible seating is available, and we encourage guests to contact us in advance with any specific access needs.
Masks are welcome and encouraged. If you are experiencing any symptoms or are feeling vulnerable, please mask up. KN95 masks are always available free of charge at CounterPulse.
If you have any accessibility questions or requests, please contact us at vin@counterpulse.org, and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.
MIXTAPE @ CounterPulse
Saturday, October 17, 2026 @ 6 PM
CounterPulse, 80 Turk
FREE – RSVP Link
About the Artists
The People Next Door (Excerpt)
By Curry Senior Center’s LGBTQ+ Proud & Present Theatre Ensemble
What if the adventure of a lifetime was waiting on the other side of the wall? In The People Next Door, four neighbors are drawn together by a mysterious work of art and an unexpected journey that brings memory, friendship, and chosen family into focus.
Created and performed by Curry Senior Center’s LGBTQ+ Proud & Present Theatre Ensemble and led by theatre-maker Evan Johnson, this funny and heartfelt play also features original costumes by Dead End Vintage and sound and video elements by Phillip Gerson.
Come back to experience the full work premiering October 24 & 25 @ 1:30 PM at CounterPulse.
Rebound
By Beef Cakes + Major Hammy
Premiered at this year’s Queering Dance Festival, Rebound fuses modern & jazz with drag aesthetics and sensibilities. Exploring the culmination of our shared experience, shaping ourselves and those we come into contact with. The pair creates a joyous journey where the antidote to queer erasure is presence.
Beef Cakes (or Garrett Lukas Dellios) is a dancer, drag artist, and general joyful menace. They have a large dance background stretching across several practices/techniques and strongly believe that your identity and sense of self are the most important aspect you can bring to any artistic endeavor.
Major Hammy (or Saharla Vetsch) is a Somali American multidisciplinary artist rooted in the Bay Area. Major aims to foster community and connection, striving to be a beacon of self-expression, harnessing the liberating power of dance to ignite the same sense of freedom in others. He does this in the spaces of queer nightlife entertainment, teaching youth & elders, and through collaborative dance performances.
Clarissa Rivera Dyas
Clarissa Rivera Dyas is a Black, Filipinx movement artist, choreographer and arts producer rooted in Bay Area, Ohlone land. Her practice treats the artistic landscape as a site for optimistic, futurist world-building, upholding non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist models centering rest, collective care, play, and decolonial art making. They are a Co-Director of ROT Festival, a Queering Dance Festival (QDF) Steering Committee member, co-conspirator of RUPTURE, and perform with Embodiment Project, Zaccho Dance Theater, Sara Shelton Mann, B Dean, GRAVITY, and Keith Hennessy.
BURN (excerpt)
By Johnny Huy Nguyễn
How do you burn? Reclaiming fire as a regenerative force for rebirth, BURN envisions dance as a transformative act of self-immolation. How do we set ablaze inherited legacies of war, forced displacement, and violence to create ash for new growth? The full work draws upon personal history, Vietnamese spiritual fire practices, Black dance music traditions, and Indigenous fire stewardship in a torrent to envision rebirth in the aftermath of a country and world that is on fire. In this excerpt, Johnny shares stories that feel both intimate and universal, surfacing powerful underlying inquiries critical for each of us to sit with in light of our world today.
Johnny Huy Nguyễn is a Vietnamese multidisciplinary dance artist and son of refugees based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone territory. He weaves together movement, theater, multimedia, spoken word, ritual, and installation to create body-based works characterized by sweeping physicality and dramaturgical depth. His works deal with themes of masculinity, spirituality, lineage, loss, and inheritance while interrogating the social, political, and cultural forces that shape us. Nguyễn is a 2025 Walter & Elise Haas Creative Power Award Finalist, 2026 Ragdale Resident Artist, 2025 Caldera Artist-in-Residence, 2023 United States of Asian America Festival Featured Artist, and 2022 Isadora Duncan Dance Award recipient.
IG: johnny.huy.nguyen
www.johnnyhuynguyen.com
Hosted by Vin Seaman
Vin Seaman (they/them) is a stand up comedian, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural worker that has been active in San Francisco for 20+ years. Their work exploring queer identity and drag culture has been presented locally at The Stud, Brava, Oasis, El Rio, CounterPulse, the de Young, the Salesforce Tower, Frameline, and (inter)nationally at the Tank NYC, the Austin International Drag Festival, SATELLITE ART SHOW Miami, Stockholm’s Stolt Scenkonst, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Yale School of the Arts. They are founder of the THEYFRIEND Nonbinary Performance Festival currently serves as CounterPulse’s Interim Producing Director.
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