ezra berkley nepon

Fall 2011

• Lots of good adventures lately. I was in TN for almost two weeks for Work Hard/Stay Hard. About 100 people came to take part in an incredible work week that included re-roofing the front barn and a million other exciting projects, and we met our fundraising goals!
• A few days after getting back to Philly, I jumped up to NYC to spend a weekend working with The Sukkos Mob and Great Small Works folks to perform in a show on Rosh Hashana themes: “Truth in Gay Clothes: Your Goose is Cooked!” It was a treat to run around with a bunch of Yiddish-speaking chicken puppets at the GSW Spaghetti Dinner and at Dumbo Arts Festival.
• Soon after getting back from NYC, I led a cool fundraising-strategy workshop for Books Through Bars Philly which was especially interesting because they have a huge network of supporters, a proven history of doing powerful work, and a great earned-income stream from selling extra donated books online, so this workshop was less about how to ask for money and more about thinking through what strategies make sense for their collective and larger volunteer base to prioritize.
• I’m finishing my third packet of the semester in my MA program at Goddard and right now I’m writing about Magical Realism as a Tool of Cultural Resilience in Jewish Writing.
• and the really big news is that my video (with Kate Sorensen and Niknaz Tavakolian) Little Orphan Gender Revolutionary Annie will premier next month at MIX, the NYC queer experimental film festival. More info here!

summer 2011

Here’s a little update on what I’ve been up to lately:

• It’s official: I start at Goddard College’s Individualized MA program in August! I’ll be in a focused MA program called “Transformative Language Arts.” I’m thrilled to be centering writing and performance in my life in the next few years, and into the future.
• Since moving back to Philly, I’ve been working as a fundraising consultant
• at Mariposa Food Co-op I helped to raise a ton of $$ for the capital campaign through loans, donations, and member equity.  This income breakdown shows that grassroots fundraising has brought in over $500k!
• I’ve been having a great time working with Yasmeen Perez to offer a couple of  grassroots fundraising trainings. Last weekend we led a 4-hour training for a group of Resource Generation activists who are raising money to support immigration justice work in AZ.
• Work Hard / Stay Hard 2011 is coming up in September and there are fundraising events planned all across the country. In Philly, there’s a Garden Party July 24th and a Queer Country show (“Gay Ole Opry“) on August 6th. Also, there’s an IndieGogo Fundraising Page to bring in donations. Check it out!
• I’ll be MCing the Milk Not Jails Full Gender Spectrum Dairy Prince/ss Pageant at Dixon Place’s HOT Festival on July 24th
• This week I got trained on using video equipment at Philly CAM (community access TV) with the folks at Leeway Foundation. Now I can’t wait to take a class there to learn video editing software!

Philadelphia

whipped apricot

After three years in NYC, I moved back to Philly! I’m living at Fancy House, a big old Victorian in West Philadelphia – the neighborhood I lived in for 10 years before moving away. It feels great to be back, and I’m settling into the mixed feelings of newness and comfortable-oldness of coming home.  My bedroom has 5 windows – on three walls – and I painted it a light and airy color called whipped apricot that captures the sunlight and looks great with pink.

I had a very rewarding life in NYC, but I didn’t have chemistry with it as a home. I felt overstimulated and exhausted all the time, and my body kept finding new ways to communicate that it wasn’t healthy for me. I’m re-generating over the past few weeks – giving my brain and body new ways to function. I took this picture of a plant that was painted grey along with the wall it’s growing on, but the new leaves are growing in with color.

regeneration

Updates!

Finally coming back to update this site and a lot has changed in the past few months.

First, it was a pleasure to work with Mx. Justin Vivian Bond and all of the fine feathered members of the House of Whimsy who were part of Re:Galli Blonde at The Kitchen. This review in Huffington Post, by Roya Rastegar, captures the magic of the show gorgeously.

Ms Danger hard at work

Looking a little further back into the Fall, I helped to organize a week-long work party at queer commune Idyll Dandy Acres (IDA). The event was a powerful show of love from people coming from around the country to appreciate this community space and its residents that have inspired and supported us over the years. We rocked out tons of projects including a new solar shower, greywater kitchen drain system, historical archiving and digitizing, running an electrical line to the back barn, hauling tons of trash, a new outhouse, and much more. The food was incredible, the nightly entertainment was outrageous, and all of the work was done with an inspiring intention to practice feminist work ethics. And the project was fully-funded by the donations and fundraising efforts of the attendees!

coming up!

I’m very excited to be part of this show coming up in October at The Kitchen- save the dates!

Justin Bond and the House of Whimsy: Re:Galli Blonde (A Sissy Fix)

Friday–Saturday, October 22–23, 8pm
Wednesday–Saturday, October 27–30, 8pm

In this new work conceived as a performance ritual, Mx Justin Bond and the House of Whimsy create an evening of music, spectacle, and magic inspired by the story of the Order of the Galli. In ancient times, these gender variant priests/priestesses maintained temples to the goddess Cybele which were spread throughout the Roman Empire. First detailing the tragic end of the Order of the Galli, Bond and a bevy of NYC’s finest performance witches then gather to lift the harmful curse on gender- and sexually-ambiguous people and to celebrate the legacy of the Galli and the third identity position in our understanding of the natural world.

Documenting the History of Self Education Foundation

Enough – a fabulous site focused on “the Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism” -  just posted a new article by Jessica Hoffman: The Practice of Freedom: A History of the Self Education Foundation.

The Self Education Foundation is a big part of what I did with my life from ages 20-25,  how I learned much of what I know about grassroots fundraising, building and running organizations (collectively), and wrestling with the intersections of oppressive systems.

My dear friend Tyrone Boucher of Enough writes in the introduction:

Their story is especially inspiring in this era of professionalized social change work – SEF is a great example of what capitalism often makes us forget: that change is created by regular folks with vision and creativity, learning as we go, making mistakes, making up new models, taking risks, working together. Check it out.

For me, one of the coolest things about SEF has been seeing what the people involved – as then bad-ass youth activists – have gone on to do with our lives. I definitely track my work with SRLP to the education on both fundraising and racial/economic justice that I got in SEF.  Taina Asili is a revolutionary performer and activist.  Sara Zia Ebrahimi is film-maker who raised tons of $$ for social justice movements in her work with Bread and Roses Community Fund and then went on to turn her indendependent film screening series into a business. Adrian Lowe did all kinds of work for trans justice and is now in law school getting another set of tools. Billy Wimsatt went on to found and run the League of Young Voters, which had a big impact on the 2004 and 2008 elections.   & there’s lots more stories out there…

My curated-webgallery for Visual AIDS is up!

Every month, Visual AIDS invites guest curators, drawn from both the arts and AIDS communities, to select several works from the Frank Moore Archive Project. This month, I curated a gallery titled “HELP! HOLD ME!” featuring the artwork of Archive Members Angel Borrero, Michael Borosky, Joe Brainard, Greg Cassin, Michael Golden, Derek Jackson, David King and Preston McGovern.

From the Curator’s Statement:

Studying these images for several months after choosing them, I’m still emotionally impacted by each one in a way that I rarely respond to art on museum walls. I chose these pieces because they made me catch my breath. Now, seeing them as a group, I think that each of the artists is giving us a wrestling match between power and vulnerability. The tensions in that false duality are exciting to me — which parts are tender and which parts strong? (read more)

Highlighted in Purim article

Check out this new article at Tablet Mag about re-interpretations of Purim – I’m the poster-child!

“Emily Nepon, a writer, performer, and activist, has come to see Purim as an opportunity to reconcile her Jewish and queer identities. In 2004, she helped organize “Suck My Treyf Gender,” an evening of progressive-themed performances inspired by the Purimspiel, the ancient tradition of staging rowdy bits of theater loosely based on the holiday’s story.

“There was something incredibly powerful about the overlap of the Jewish cultural norms of Purim and the queer cultural otherness,” she said. “When we put them together, we were shocked by how much they magnified each other. We were moved by it.”

The evening came complete with a manifesto, which reflected these sentiments. “On Purim,” it reads, “we are religiously obligated to get so shit-faced [drunk] we can’t tell the difference between ‘blessed’ Haman, and ‘cursed’ Mordechai. Binaries, dichotomies, opposites are emphasized, exaggerated and celebrated. We masquerade as Good vs. Evil, Male vs. Female, Oppressed vs. Oppressor, but the goal is not to reinforce these dichotomies, but to realize that they are false separations, that there is a beautiful space in between all opposites, and that is the space where we live as happy, healthy beings. It is in between the extremes, somewhere between ‘male’ and ‘female,’ healing our experiences of oppression while checking ourselves on the power we have to oppress others, that we walk Hashem’s path.”

purimspiel

The annual legendary Purimspiel is back…

Choose your own PURIM!
LOVE REVELATION CONCRETE REVENGE
$15; no one turned away for lack of cash or costume

CABARET! BANDS! ART! FOOD! BAR! COSTUME CONTEST * Inner Princess vs Yiddish Princess battle of the bands * Rude Mechanical Orchestra *& more
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Presented by: Jews for Racial & Economic Justice,  Workmen’s Circle & Great Small Works Spaghetti Dinners

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Facebook Event Page.  More JFREJ/WC Purim history…

and about the history of radical queer purimspiels! Wrestling With Esther: Purim Spiels, Gender, and Political Dissidence. Zeek Magazine, March 2006

wounded by ally picard

It was truly a pleasure to manifest some variations of “wounded” looks in a photo shoot with Ally Picard of Bloodhound Photography and be her covergirl for this event (flyer below) and included in this article.  Go Ally!!