Open Arms

Open Arms: in collaboration with CounterPulse and Weaving Spirits Festival

Thursday, February 6, 2025, 8pm 
CounterPulse, 80 Turk St, San Francisco, CA, 94102
Tickets available on a sliding scale

7:30pm viewing of Jeneen Frei Njootli’s sculpture casino chips fall out of you, broken hearts and baggies too (2021)
8pm Performance

The public programming of Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions continues the desire towards knowledge-sharing and insists on the potential of collectivity on the local and global level. The concurrent exhibitions at KADIST San Francisco and the Blaffer Museum at the University of Houston and their related public programs are guided by Judith Butler’s notion of intertwinement and interdependency as ethics in order to untangle forms of oppression toward liberation.

The programs in San Francisco are titled Open Bodies and extend across the city in collaboration with local arts and cultural organizations. The series is conceived as a collective body that tends to various organs, perceptive faculties, and phenomenologies. Acting as the ears, the limbs, and the tongue to the exhibition body, Open Bodies reflects on the transformation of physical and social bodies through sound, dance/movement, and familial and collective language.

Learn more about Open Bodies

Open Arms

Weaving Spirits Festival performing artists respond to Jeneen Frei Njootli’s casino chips fall out of you, broken hearts and baggies too (2021), a powerful meditation on Indigenous sovereignty, two-spirit identities, and the cyclical nature of movement. Njootli’s sculpture will temporarily move from KADIST San Francisco’s exhibition to CounterPulse for one night only, inspiring new multi-genre works by Indigenous-and-queer artists curated by Weaving Spirits Festival. The program includes a series of performances by the Brush Arbor Gurlz (with Drag Mother Landa Lakes), and Javier Stell-Fresquez with Wailana Simcock—marking these artists’ first collaboration together.

The performances invite us to explore rich intimacies and loss, through different confrontations with our shared history. Featuring aerial suspension, drag, and dance, this program burns through boundaries and reclaims the space to honor Indigenous voices, presence, (in)visibilization, and healing. A vital expression of connection and protest, Open Arms explores sorrow and the embodiment of survival.

Biographies:

Javier Stell-Frésquez (Piru & Tigua Pueblo ancestry, Mixed Chican@; hometown El Paso TX; “she”/“he” pronouns) helps build the visibility and resilience of two-spirits as Producer of Weaving Spirits Festival of Two-Spirit Performance, and Board Member of BAAITS. Her life-long performance experience spans: Mexican folklorico, vogue, flamenco, and performance art. Her multimedia performance work includes the touring show & short film Mother / Forgotten Blaze, and Chaac & Yum, a short art film distributed internationally.

Wailana Simcock was born in the Philippines and raised in Hawaii. They were born to a Waray-Waray (Samar) mother and Scottish father from Aotearoa (New Zealand). They speak Tagalog, ‘Olelo Hawaii, and Hawaiian Pidgin. Wailana is a performing artist, choreographer, and director. They also have been known to moonlight as drag performers, Magdalena. Outside of the performing arts, they work as licensed massage therapists and have started a small textile/fashion design company, We Blood (@webloodfamily). Wailana earned an MFA degree in Dance from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2016. In Hawaii, they worked with Samadhi Hawaii, Tau Dance Theatre, IONA Contemporary Dance Theatre, ‘Ulalena (Maui) and studied with Halau o Kekuhi (Hawaii). Presently, they work with BANDALOOP and Joe Goode Performance Group as a teaching artist and core dancer. Wailana is living in their Philippine diaspora on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, a land colonially known as San Francisco.

For over 20 years The Brush Arbor Gurlz, or the BAGz has featured Native American drag performers from several tribal nations such as the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Navajo, Ojibwa, Squamish and Tohono O’odam Nations. These drag queens are out and about in the San Francisco Bay Area and larger Native Two-Spirit communities. The group’s name is based on the building of brush arbors by Southeastern tribes for social and religious occasions. Led by founding mother Landa Lakes (Chickasaw), the BAGz have continued to contribute to the Native LGBTQ scene with politically sharp work, ritual, and comedy. Current members include Kenya Pfister (Cherokee), Samantha Richards (Diné) Uphoria (Squamish), Cis-Sy Fitt (Choctaw), Miss Shugna (Kowlitz), Miso Hornay (Vietnamese, the one non-native) and Arbor matriarch Landa Lakes (Chickasaw).

CounterPulse is a dynamic movement of experimental art that sparks personal transformation and builds enduring community. We provide space and resources for emerging artists and cultural innovators, serving as an incubator for the creation of socially relevant, community-based art and culture. CounterPulse acts as a catalyst for art and action; creating a forum for the open exchange of art and ideas, sparking transformation in our communities and our society. We work towards a world that celebrates diversity of race, class, cultural heritage, artistic expression, ability, gender identity, and sexual orientation. We strive to create an environment that is physically and economically accessible to everyone.

Weaving Spirits Festival of Two-Spirit Performance convenes local and national Native American and international Indigenous artists through commissioning works and a range of community events. Their current theme responds to ecological and societal wildfires. Fire allows us to imagine what needs to be ignited, cleansed, and turned into ashes.

“We are…
Weaving the ways of the past into the loom of the present…
Embracing sexuality and our full selves in performance…
creating our own visibility!”

Wondering what “two-spirit” means? See BAAITS’s organizational description to get a sense.