The world's first performance festival
✦
uplifting
✦
centering
✦
celebrating
✦
nonbinary identity!
✨
The world's first performance festival ✦ uplifting ✦ centering ✦ celebrating ✦ nonbinary identity! ✨
THEYFRIEND
Nonbinary Performance Festival 2025
PERFORMANCE 1
November 14, 2025
8PM @ CounterPulse
80 Turk Street, San Francisco
Two nights of nonbinary music, drag, dance, comedy, & more!
From a lineup of beloved THEYFRIEND alumni:
-
Alder Duan Hurley (they/them) is a poet and facilitator living on Ohlone land. As Alder & the Kindred, they perform spoken-word pieces work scored to music. They are an MFA student in Creative Writing at SF State, where they have been awarded the Wilner Award in Short Fiction and the Daniel Langton Poetry Prize. His work appears in The Margins. For their evolving practices, artistic and otherwise, gratitude to: Audre Lorde, Grace Lee Boggs, Marquis Bey, Octavia Butler, aja monet, and many more.
-
Brown Angel (they/them) is a queer/trans Chicanx DJ/Producer based in Oakland and San Francisco. With roots in Wilmas and Long Beach CA, they were immersed in music and culture at a young age, and started drumming at the age of 4. Their background has inspired and shaped them into one of the most respected DJs in the Bay Area’s underground music community. They have played all around the country, opening up for icons like Honey Dijon. Brown Angel’s music ranges widely from their oldies upbringing to current electronic tracks. They have a debut EP release on Dark Entries Records OUT NOW!
-
Edgar Fabián Frías (They/them, Elle) is a boundary-defying multidisciplinary artist, educator, and brujx based in Los Angeles, holding degrees in Psychology, Studio Art, and an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley. Drawing on their Wixárika lineage and informed by post-internet, queer, and glitch aesthetics, Frías creates immersive works that interlace technology, spirituality, and collective healing, deliberately unsettling conventional categories. Their practice investigates resilience and radical imagination through Indigenous Futurism, queer/trans cosmologies, and data justice, crafting portals that function as spells, maps, and mirrors. Through these works, Frías invites re-enchantment while conjuring futures grounded in justice, care, and magic. text goes here
-
JanpiStar (they/them) was born and raised in Puerto Rico. They moved to Oakland, California to join AXIS Dance Company in 2018. Janpi has been commissioned by several Bay Area festivals and organizations like: Queering Dance Festival (2019, 2020 & 2022), The Fresh Meat Festival (2021 , 2022 , 2023 & 2025). In the last three years JanpiStar has developed their art of being a drag queen in a wheelchair, with performances at the SF MOMA, The Academy fo Sciences, Oasis SF and Oaklash (2023 & 2024).
-
Jota Mercury (He/him, They/them) is an award-winning drag king who challenges machismo with humor and titties. He is Latiné and Indigenous, born in Fresno, California but entertaining crowds in the greater bay area since 2016. He’s lucky enough to be one of the co-hosts of Rebel Kings of Oakland (RKO), the longest running drag king show on the West Coast. Aside from RKO at the White Horse Bar, you can often find him at venues in San Francisco like The Stud, Oasis, and more.
-
KaiKai Bee Michaels (She/her, they/them) is a Bay area drag performer and cosplay artist with a passion for social justice and community care. They specialize in performances that are often fun yet thought provoking or deeply emotional as a reflection of culture and their own personal feelings. KaiKai is a co-host/producer of several shows in SF and the East Bay. They delight in always bringing something new and refreshing to queer art and are not afraid of sharing their stories with others.
-
Maya Songbird(She/her, They/them) is an independent musician, performer, and multidisciplinary artist known for her genre-defying sound and captivating stage presence. With 15 years in the underground music scene, she’s toured nationally, including the Sister Spit 20th Anniversary Tour, and performed at festivals like Multiverse and Island Fest. A recipient of grants from Women’s Audio Mission and YBCA, Maya blends experimental soul, electronic pop, and storytelling into transformative live experiences. Her latest project, Space Cadette Bachelorette, expands her cosmic, femme-powered vision. Maya’s performances are invitations to connect, dance, and dream beyond boundaries.
-
Olivia Bratko (She/her) is an SF-based theatre/cabaret/comedy artist who exists at the edges of reality. She makes viciously funny and outrageously generous work that weaves strands of cultural ephemera into a compelling artistic narrative. She often performs as KYLE KYLE KYLE KYLE KYLE KYLE KYLE, an award-winning surrealist comedy act.
-
ASL Interpretation will be available for the Friday, November 14 performance.
All audience members and staff will be expected to wear a N95 or KN95 mask (which will be provided for free)
All THEYFRIEND Performers will be COVID rapid tested before the performance as they may be unmasked while performing.
We are estimating a house of 100 audience members
During public events CounterPulse will run a fully equipped building-wide outside air ventilation HVAC system that continuously displaces interior air with filtered air from outside. CounterPulse uses CDC-recommended MERV 13 filters throughout our HVAC systems.
If you have any access needs or requests, please email vin@diamond-wave.org and we will do our best to accommodate you!
The 2025 THEYFRIEND Nonbinary Performance Festival is presented by Diamond Wave, a fiscally sponsored project of Independent Arts & Media, and is supported by San Francisco Grants for the Arts, the San Francisco Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and presented in partnership with the CounterPulse and the Transgender District.