upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024
Ezra Berkley Nepon (LTA ‘14, ACG ‘07) talks New Yiddish Theater, Queer Performance Arts, and “Dazzle Camouflage” with In Geveb, a journal of Yiddish studies.
“I first heard the term “dazzle camouflage” from a friend who was referencing that queer strategy of using big, bold aesthetics as a kind of protection spell for moving through the world. My friend had picked up the phrase from the book Cruddy by Lynda Barry, but the term originates from a way of painting war ships in a crazy-quilt pattern-mixed design that confuses and disorients a viewer’s sense of the ship’s speed and direction. In the book, I’m using “dazzle camouflage” to talk about the creative strategies used by theater artists who want to perform radical political intervention without losing the audience: camp, clowning, surrealism, satire, and spectacle.”
Read the original article here.
