Spider and The Web of Life: Words & Movement

Link to Ticket Information HERE.

Event: Legendary Makers Market Performance

Date: July 27, 2024
Time: 5:00-6:00 p.m.
Location: Reser Mainstage

Description: Home is in the heart. Home is a connection between, through, and around people and memory and story. Weaving together words, bodies, visuals, and sounds of home and dream, listen to a generation of storytellers as Spider grasps the true nature of the Web of Life.

Spider and The Web of Life is a collaborative storytelling and movement performance/ritual for all ages. This tale/performance was written and devised specifically for the Legendary Makers Market. Spider & The Web of Life is a story of birth and renewal, connection and disconnection, hope and love.

Liminal Bodies is a Pacific Northwest based queer and transgender asian & pacific islander writing project focusing on movement as a process for deepening our writing practices

Cast & Crew:

Stephanie Adams-Santos is a Guatemalan-American artist and writer whose work spans poetry, prose, screenwriting, and illustration. Often grappling with themes of strangeness and belonging, their work reflects a fascination with the weird, numinous and primal forces that shape inner life. They are the author of several poetry collections and chapbooks, including DREAM OF XIBALBA (selected by Jericho Brown as winner of the 2021 Orison Poetry Prize; finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award) and SWARM QUEEN'S CROWN (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award). Stephanie served as Staff Writer and Story Editor on the television anthology horror series TWO SENTENCE HORROR STORIES (Netflix).  In addition to their literary work, Stephanie is creating an original tarot deck that blends poetry, animism, and ancestral magic.

Kat Chen (she/her) is a queer East Asian American community facilitator, mindfulness and yoga teacher, and design consultant. She has spent the last decade deconstructing internalized patriarchy, racism, and people pleasing through mindfulness and somatic practices, and sees the physical embodiment of rediscovered, authentic stories and beliefs as a powerful mechanism to healing. Kat founded and runs BIPOC Mindfulness PDX, a community organization dedicated to making mindfulness and healing easily accessible to BIPOC folx in the Portland area. She has taught mindfulness and yoga to hundreds of employees at Fortune 100 companies, non-profits, and in the community through classes, workshops, talks, and multi-week courses. 

Lilly Do (she/her) is a queer Chinese American facilitator and instructor. Lilly is the Program and Administrative Coordinator at Write Around Portland and works to build the BIPOC writing community through Resonate: A BIPOC Writing Circle, a free writing program that consists of participants writing, sharing, and giving strength-based feedback. When she isn’t facilitating writing workshops, Lilly spends her time engaging in the BIPOC, AAPI, and queer and trans communities in Portland as the cofounder of the QTAPI writing project Liminal Bodies and was a member of the APANO’s Art & Media Project.

Blossom Drearie is a trans Filipina drag goddess with a penchant for vintage fashion, divine femininity, and liberation. She’s passionate about building community on and off the dance floor and is beyond proud to call Portland, Oregon home. She is also the co-host of Portland’s longest running queer party, Blow Pony.

cay horiuchi (they/them) is a Japanese-American DJ and artist based in the unceded lands of the Chinook and Multnomah tribes. cay is a co-founder of UwU, a multidisciplinary artist collective creating underground events for T/GNC and QTBIPOC communities to dance in safety. cay weaves in multitudes of genres from house, humidifier bass, disco, zouk, city pop, to ambient into their playful set, guiding the dancers to a place beyond binary and borders. Through their set filled with imagination and infinite giggles, they wish to help create a sweet dance floor where people can dance freely with friends and lovers under the sun and the moon.  

Miro (She/they) Korean diaspora, queer, designer, facilitator, process work therapist, writer and dancer. Her movement practice is inspired by Process Work, Bhutto, Contact Improvisation, authentic movement, Korean shamanism, and somatic therapy. She enjoys creating and holding a nonjudgmental, nonbody-shaming space for movement and play. 

Miro has over 20 years of experience in design thinking and strategy. Her latest collaboration with Multnomah Idea Lab helped her combine her passion for systemic change and racial justice work with her design expertise. In 2024, she co-founded StudioYellow, a social design consulting group that challenges systemic injustice by taking action rooted in Revolutionary Love within a Racial Justice and Equity framework. She frequently teaches equity-centered design approaches and community engagement and offers counseling and facilitation for individuals and organizations. 

Kelly Novahom (she/her) is a queer Pilipino and Mexican American multidisciplinary artist, educator, community organizer, event producer, cultural worker, and co-founder of the Queer & Trans, Asian & Pacific Islander writing and movement project, Liminal Bodies. She is currently a student of prose, in the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) Portfolio Program and a Program Manager at Center for Community Engagement at Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling where her work strives to bring social justice-focused continuing education opportunities to writers, educators, and counselors. In the past, she has served as the Education & Community Programs Director for Shaking the Tree Theatre, organizing events on fight choreography, movement, and intimacy direction. Other works include co-producing Coming Out & Overcoming with Theatre Diaspora and Artist Repertory Theatre, a storytelling project that seeks to provide connection and opportunity to center narratives around what it means to fully live in multiple identities as queer and trans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), and guest curating and co-producing events such as the APANO Annual East Portland Arts & Literary Festival and the Portland launch event for the Pilipinx Radical Imagination Reader with Whitenoise Project.

Ami Patel (she/her) is a queer, diasporic South Asian poet and young adult fiction writer. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, an IPRC 2023-2024 re/source resident, and a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellow. Ami’s poetry is published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Moss, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, & others. She writes about queerness, grief, ancestry, and nature. You can find her work online at amipatelwrites.com.

Ezri Galban Reyes is a vibes-based artist born in the 408 where he was raised by his family, community, and the land. She is currently based in Portland and lives in the Muppet Museum. Ez is passionate about collaborative theatre-making as a container for chaos. At their former college, they were a resident advisor, student art center co-manager, improv team co-captain, and held a leading role as the Emcee at Fir Acres Theater. Since graduating in 2022, they have performed in Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble's (PETE) The Americans and Cardiac Organ and Third Rail’s Sanctuary City. They recently completed their PATHWAYS mentorship program at Artist Repertory Theatre and will participate in this year’s ICP training program with PETE. And right now, she’s cooking up some bangers with her dear friend and musical brother Rocco Weyer. 

Sam Syharath (He/They) is a Laotian-American artist, educator, and content creator based in Portland, Oregon. After attending B.A. from the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith and the The Actors Conservatory, he was part of TCG's Rising Leaders of Color Cohort in 2017 featured by American Theatre Magazine and was the recipient of the Portland Civic Theatre Guild’s Leslie O. Fulton Fellowship that same year. He is the Founding Managing Artistic Director of Theatre Diaspora.

Atlas Tan (they/them) is a spiritual care provider, facilitator, movement artist, and educator on topics like grief, death, mindfulness, and place-based contemplative pedagogy. They enjoy designing community-led learning spaces and retreats, organizing and mentoring in foraging, hunting and fishing gatherings, training self defense and combat arts, Being with horses, and playing archery tag in the woods. They like to build these spaces in ways that play with concepts like hierarchy, power, time, perspective, and the erotic. They believe in co-creating a culture of sanctuary that disrupts oppressive power patterns, while nurturing and expanding our capacity to be unstoppable in the path of liberation. Atlas identifies as transgender, nonbinary, neurodivergent, relationship anarchist, third culture, and someone living with chronic pain. Working with embodied movement and grief have given them an outlet to explore how to find ease in a state of discomfort. 

Armin Tolentino is the author of the collection We Meant to Bring It Home Alive (Alternating Current Press) and served as poet laureate for Clark County, WA from 2021-2023. He earned an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark and he works for a local government agency addressing poverty and educational gaps.

Wendi YuLing is a queer non-binary artist and activist of Filipino, Chinese, Scottish, and Dutch descent. In their formative years, punk and new wave counterculture informed their practice, and painting, drawing, and fashion were their main modes of expression. Wendi is still a nonconformist, and does not adhere to a dedicated style, theme or visual language; they are a performance artist, costume designer, ritualist, and visual artist, and she explores the complexity of existence through the multiple lenses of queerness, liberation, death, and subversion. Their projects manifest as everything from installations, to performance pieces, to silkscreened t-shirts and patches.