HELLA CLOSE IS BACK by popular demand!!!
Join RADAR Productions on our signature series, Hella Close, part of our year-long Queering the Castro program!
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Friday, May 20, 2016
Strut in The Castro
7 PM
==FREE==
Curated and Hosted by Arisa White
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Featuring
Joshua Merchant
Joshua Merchant is a writer, and native of East Oakland. Combining a masterful eye for detail, startling vulnerability, and unflinc...
HELLA CLOSE IS BACK by popular demand!!!
Join RADAR Productions on our signature series, Hella Close, part of our year-long Queering the Castro program!
▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼
Friday, May 20, 2016
Strut in The Castro
7 PM
==FREE==
Curated and Hosted by Arisa White
▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼
Featuring
Joshua Merchant
Joshua Merchant is a writer, and native of East Oakland. Combining a masterful eye for detail, startling vulnerability, and unflinching courage, Joshua explores queer issues, black identity, and the complexities of their intersection.
In 2011, he won the title of Youth Speaks champion and represented the Bay Area at Brave New Voices. Later that year, he became the Berkeley Slam’s youngest Individual World Poetry Slam (IWPS) representative. He helped represent the New Shit Show's first slam team in 2014 at the National Poetry Slam and was third in the nation in 2015 with the Berkeley Slam team. His writing has brought him the honor and privilege to perform alongside artists and activists such as Chuck D, MC Lyte, Angela Davis, Michael Poland, and Saul Williams. He continues to perform and work with youth in his community and across the country.
Jezebel Delilah X
Jezebel Delilah X is a queer, lush-bodied, Black, femme performance artist, writer, actress, filmmaker, educator, facilitator, orator and Faerie Princess Mermaid Gangsta for The Revolution. She loves to flirt, laugh, perform, crack corny jokes, and insert Octavia Butler references into every conversation. She is a co-managing editor for Everyday Feminism; co-host of the queer/feminist Open Mic, Culture Fuck; creative director of queer, Black, multi-disciplinary performance troupe, Congregation of Liberation; and one of the founding members of Deviant Type Press. She has performed in a wide variety of Queer and Queer People Of Color theatre projects and cabarets, and has been a featured reader at literary events all over the Bay Area. She uses a combination of memoir, poetry, theatre, and feminist storytelling to advance her politix of radical love, socioeconomic justice, anti-racism, community accountability, critical reflection, love, healing, and liberation. She loves romantic songs, romantic films, romantic books, romantic conversations, romantic friendships, and writing long, vulnerable, passionate Facebook statuses about romance.
Brontez Purnell
Brontez Purnell has been publishing, performing and curating in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 10 years. He is the author of the cult zine Fag School, frontman for his band The Young Lovers and co-founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. Formerly a dancer with Gravy Train!!!, a queer electro indie band that gained national prominence in the mid-2000's, Purnell recently published his first novella Johnny Would You Love Me (If My Dick Were Bigger) with Rudos and Rubes and will publish a second novel, Since I Laid My Body Down..., with the Sister Spit imprint of City Lights Books. He has currently been awarded the Creative Work Fund to begin work on a documentary about the life of the late Black experimental Bay Area choreographer Ed Mock.
Ramona “Mona” Webb
Scholar practitioner, teaching performance artist, and activist Ramona “Mona” Webb serves as the executive director of the Eden LGBTQ Youth Foundation, the artistic director of Project ABLE and Lyrical Minded415, which is an art-based learning for equity seasonal course implemented in various San Francisco Bay Area school districts, and is the director of The State of Black Bodies by The Pr3ss Play Poets. For nine years, Mona has served as slammaster and host of San Francisco's The City Poetry Slam. She served on the 2014 and 2015 host city committee that produced the National Poetry Slam Festival in Oakland. Mona is a conservatory-trained artist who writes and performs in “docu-ritual- drama theater” and is currently a graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies and Chichester University in London, pursuing dual MFA degrees in Theater Performance Making. How to Catch a Rapist in 12 Parts, her current work in progress, has appeared at Piano Fight Theater and Brava Theater. This performance theater piece chronicles Mona’s journey to seeking justice for her rape that took place 20 years ago.