“Whenever Black people walk into a room, spines tingle with such imagination... Will they pretend to join the living or will they make us join the dead?"
— Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms
A Dangerous Ruse is an ongoing collaboration between writer/dramaturg Zachariah Ezer and director/curator Dominique Rider. The company is founded on the notion that the middle step between theory and practice is rehearsal, and that there is nowhere more apt to do that rehearsal than the theater.
Zachariah and Dominique’s process involves using texts from Black Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and Philosophy as the fertile ground from which their theater springs. They undertake each new theatrical process by beginning with a worldview other than the status quo. This allows them to foreground theme in their works, creating an imagined world that expands audiences’ minds to accept radical new possibilities.
A Dangerous Ruse has existed in one form or another since Dominique met Zachariah in 2018. They began working together almost immediately and have engaged in nearly 40 theatrical processes together since that time. Their work has spanned the philosophies of afropessimism, postcolonial theory, radical trans separatism, and more. What unites them most is the notion that in order to tell a good story, it needs to be about something. This credo has kept them working together for nearly a decade and will continue to do so far into the future.
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