THEYFRIEND 2024:
PHULL PHANTASY
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Virtual via YouTube
FREE with registration, donations encouraged
Hosted by Gothess Jasmine
Featuring Aquarius Funkk, Ari is Speaking, Lúc Ami, Mojo Carter, Phoenix D'Nasty, Rafaella Angelica, T.Christal & Tyler Holmes
About the Event
The 2024 THEYFRIEND Nonbinary Performance Festival kicks off with a bang—and a spell! ✨🌙
Dive into PHULL PHANTASY, a virtual extravaganza centering Black, Indigenous, and Performers of Color as they explore the realms of mysticism, magic, and fantasy!
Co-presented and hosted by 2024 THEYFRIEND Advisor Gothess Jasmine (Austin) of Amazing Aeffects, PHULL PHANTASY is a celebration of ancestral wisdom, playful imagination, and cultural lore—inviting joy, wonder, and deep respect for the global majority.
🌀 Tune in on YouTube for a spellbinding showcase of musicians, poets, drag icons, and burlesque artists from across North America, including:
✨ Aquarius Funkk (Guadalajara)
✨ Ari is Speaking (Austin)
✨ Lúc Ami (Chicago)
✨ Mojo Carter (SF)
✨ Phoenix D'Nasty (Denton)
✨ Rafaella Angelica (LA)
✨ T.Christal (Oakland)
✨ Tyler Holmes (LA)
Prepare to be transported to realms where fantasy meets reality, and magic becomes a radical act of self-expression. Don’t miss the magic—stream PHULL PHANTASY and let your imagination run wild!
-
Auto-generated captions provided, with open captions on all videos. Host will announce content/trigger warnings before videos.
For any questions about accessibility please email sarah@diamond-wave.org.
About the Artists
-
Founder and CEO of AMAZING AEFFECTS, this Goth Goddexx is an award-winning artist specializing in makeup, body paint, and unique performance. Gothess Jasmine celebrates the power of art as a language and tool for healing. Gothess proudly represents undervalued and underbooked performers and artists and uses its platform to uplift others in marginalized communities. Gothess aims to inspire others to use artistic practices such as painting, storytelling, and visual performances as a means of radical self-expression and spiritual healing. Through these artistic outlets, it intends to inspire people in a manner that transcends culture, language, and ability.
-
Aquarius Funkk is an interdisciplinary performance artist who bends the realities of spacetime, reaching into the past to tell stories that are needed in the present. Known as The Interplanetary Extraordinary, they are an expansive being who channels the cosmos through a radical, queer, Afrofuturist and Afrosurrealist lens.
Shaped by the traditions of vogue ballroom, street performance, and freestyle dance, they cut their teeth in Portland, ME, in modeling, neo-burlesque, and drag. Their current practice weaves worldbuilding, persona-making, ritual actions, and internal transformation into emotive images, live performances, durational interventions, and video art. -
Indigenous, Latinx and 2S multifaceted artist/poet Ari (Ari Is Speaking) writes poems that honor the ancestors who had no voice. Ari seeks to liberate themself and their community through their journey of reconnection and decolonization. They are skilled in visual arts, performance, design, poetics and storytelling. Part of Ari’s work is to heal through literary expression and art that centers around queerness, breaking through gender binaries, the female anatomy and ancestral love. They dream of creating work specifically for their community to share and move away from artistic capitalization. They are currently based in Austin, Texas.
-
Lúc Ami is a drag alien deity that descended down to Earth and is based in Chicago! Lúc has been a professional drag artist for the past 8 years, performing in a variety of venues all across Chicago and the United States including Lollapaloza, Bushwig Festival, Oaklash Festival and more! In addition to the many projects they work on they also host an open stage show, Queeriod, every Sunday and stream it for free at twitch.tv/queeriodatcharlies. They are committed to working towards making drag as diverse and accessible through their advocacy for inclusionary casting, live-streaming their shows and pushing for Covid safer programming. Their work involves a mixture of empathetic and cathartic performances and unique creations to transport you to a different realm. They believe in pushing for a stronger community that invests in one another and the world around them through encouragement, intentional art making and using one’s platform as a form of activism.
-
Mojo Carter, also known as the Dawn Diva, is traveling drag performer now residing in the Bay. She’s very accomplished and very excited to be apart of the THEYFRIEND experience!
-
Phoenix D'Nasty is a performer best known for his high energy numbers and smooth dance moves. He's been lighting up stages all over the DFW for two years, and is a resident cast member of Glitterbomb Denton and the Lucky Lou's drag show rotation. Welcome to the Dynasty; it's only D'Nasty if he likes you.
-
Rafaella Angelica is a queer Filipinx lesbian artist. He incorporates spoken word, traditional instruments from the Philippines, affirmations, electronic music, and hand drawn animation into their art. His music primarily focuses on being queer, empowering oneself, community, and psychedelic themes. Rafaella Angelica also hosts queer Los Angeles events in nature that center sober and introvert friendly connection @VenusInAquariusEvents. He is based on land originally and still inhabited and cared for by the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples in Los Angeles, California.
-
Toshia Christal is a two spirit African American Oakland native and a Berkeley high school Graduate of the 2001 class. Toshia is a poet known for her sultry tongue. She is also a painter, illustrator, installation artist, photographer, jewelry designer, teacher, licensed cosmetologist and spiritual medium to say the least. "Choosing only one has never occurred to me, I would surely feel boxed in" Says Toshia. Her art is often feminine, vulgar, homosexual, figurative, political, abstract or infused with vaginas. The artistic reflections in her life are particularly stimulated by the art of African traditions, Triumph, spiritual visions, nature, lovers, chaos, and her gratitude for the mind and body of a wombman.
-
Tyler Holmes’ work reminds us that we are always in one spiral or another; spiraling out in exasperation, downward out of despondency, or inward toward oneself. The Wire calls Holmes’ work ‘Beautiful, at times frightening, confronting listeners and their complacency while holding space for a collective catharsis.’ They perform with a constantly changing electro-acoustic arrangement exploring what humanity is left in electronic music, always finding new ways to showcase an intimate horror. They released their most recent LP ‘Nightmare In Paradise’ in 2021 on Ratskin Records. Holmes' released their music video "To Accept" via Paper Magazine shortly afterword. They will be releasing new music in 2025 and as a MAP fund grantee will be premiering a new live performance piece entitled ‘Strangling Fruit’
To Attend
FREE with registration, donations encouraged
About the Festival
Now in its fourth year, THEYFRIEND is the world’s first performance festival uplifting, centering, and celebrating nonbinary identity!
This event is supported by the Borealis Philanthropy, the California Arts Council, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and is presented in partnership with Amazing Aeffects. Diamond Wave is a fiscally sponsored project of Intersection for the Arts that is supported by Grants for the Arts, the Horizons Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation.