Mixing Diasporas: Interactive Beverage Archive & Drag Cabaret

Mixing Diasporas is an intercultural, interdisciplinary, and interactive event that aims to evoke community dialogue and storytelling of personal and ancestral histories.

What’s the CHSA Beverage Archive?

This new, interactive, community story-sharing project provides a unique opportunity for connecting through beverages that tell a story. Audience members are invited to participate in a guided creative writing exercise: Share a story from your life in the form of a beverage or cocktail recipe. The story can be from any time period, moment, or memory, encouraging the audience to explore: What were you drinking at a certain time of your life, and how does this drink represent that time, the challenges you face, and overcoming these issues? How does this beverage relate to personal or family history and how can this be expressed in the ingredients, the type of glass or cup, the name of the drink or the way it is made? How do you relate to the concept of diaspora? The event encourages engagement with the museum not as a static repository but, “archive as engagement” to facilitate people sharing personal stories of mixing cultures, races, genders, political perspectives, metaphysics, locations, geographies, etc.

Beverages made from the recipes of the featured drag performers will be available for purchase at the event. Audience members can choose to contribute their recipe to this project, which will eventually be published at CHSA as a community exhibit.

DRAG CABARET

After the exercise, emcee and Drag King LOTUS BOY will present a dynamic cabaret that highlights the multicultural creativity and resilience of local AAPI drag performers: Hennessy Williams, Amit Dances, Harddeep Singh (special guest from London!), and Nia Politan.

LOTUS BOY is a shapeshifting, transgender and nonbinary, unapologetically disabled, Chinese-American drag king and ANTI-disciplinary artist based in occupied Lisjan Ohlone land, AKA Oakland, CA. Ze explores gender fluidity, accessibility, healing from trauma, and rage, through the mediums of poetry, lipsync, ancestral movement (qi gong and tai chi), monologue, and original music. King LOTUS BOY’s work uplifts issues regarding ableism, anti-Asian racism, transphobia, and sustainability, often incorporating humor as a vessel of universal connection. With every performance, they aim to help the audience learn—or unlearn—something. LOTUS BOY is on the boards of directors for Oaklash, the Bay Area’s drag festival, the Drag and Spirituality Summit, and the Stacey Park Milbern Disability Justice Fund. LOTUS BOY also brings drag performance, education, and gender workshops to high schools around the Bay Area.