SCENES FROM A
YELLOW PERIL

BY NATHAN JOE

The Civic Theatre, 2021
ASB Waterfront Theatre, 2022

The trope of the demure, soft-spoken and subservient East Asian has long populated the Western imagination: the model minority, the submissive schoolgirl, the kung fu master, the maths nerd.

Taking a scalpel to these outdated and orientalist images, Scenes from a Yellow Peril violently smashes performance poetry, documentary theatre and political discourse together to create a kaleidoscopic vision of contemporary identity politics.

A rehearsed reading produced by Auckland Arts Festival, Oriental Maidens & SquareSums&Co
Full production produced by Auckland Theatre Company, Oriental Maidens & SquareSums&Co
Written by Nathan Joe
Directed by Jane Yonge
Dramaturged by Ahilan Karunaharan
Production design by Filament Eleven 11
Costume design by Steven Junil Park
Composition and sound by Kenji Iwamitsu-Holdaway
Performed by Nathan Joe, Amanda Grace Leo, Zephr Zhang,
Uhyoung Choi and Louise Jiang
Music performance by Kenji Iwamitsu-Holdaway, Rhohil Kishore, J.Y. Lee, Daniel Mitsuru McKenzie
Artwork by Kerry Ann Lee
*NB for the rehearsed reading costume design was by Michael McCabe and Chris Tse was one of the performers.

Scenes from a Yellow Peril was developed and presented as a part of Auckland Arts Festival 2021 (Open Stage). Prior to this, Proudly Asian Theatre (PAT) had produced the first reading through their “Fresh of the Page” initiative in 2018.

(I would like to note that Nathan and I had been workshopping Scenes, among other plays, since 2019. For me, Nathan’s writing was a bold poetic offering within a theatre landscape that is (still) drowning in naturalism. Nathan and I continue to dream and make work together in different ways. I am in awe of Nathan’s tenacity and talent as a playwright and feel very #blessed to have him as a life-long artistic collaborator and friend.)

The Auckland Arts Festival event was billed as “a rehearsed reading of scenes… as well as a deeper dive into the core questions of the work through a post-reading discussion.” The opportunity to test the work in front of a festival audience was game-changing; we need more platforms like this for the development of new works in Aotearoa.

Doing the Auckland Arts Festival allowed us to gauge an audience response to Scenes, something we were apprehensive about given its overt references to racism and its sardonic tone. Thankfully, the audience response surpassed our expectations, confirming that New Zealanders were ready to be humoured and and challenged about identity politics through poetry.

Our intention was to do a Q&A and a public workshop after the reading, but Covid-19 had other ideas. In the lead up to the performance, Auckland was on Level 1 restrictions and on the day of the performance, we went into a Level 2 alert. This meant masks, distancing, and definitely no passing of the microphone.

As a failsafe, Nathan and I decided to build the Q&A into the work. We didn’t want to miss an opportunity for the audience to learn about the performers, and their thoughts and connections to the work, particularly their life experience with identity, belonging and racism. I played the role of host and, riffing off Nathan’s text, came up with a series of questions ranging from serious to very silly. The immediacy, vulnerability, and surprise of the Q&A sections worked to serve and ground Nathan’s poetry. It opened up a whole new element to the show and became a core part of the fully fledged production at the ASB Waterfront Theatre the following year.

Auckland Theatre Company offered to present a full production of Scenes. We were stoked to have the opportunity to present the show to an ATC audience, as well as have a new platform for our theatre-loving Asian communities. Often, more “experimental” works are overlooked when programming “main-stage theatre”, particularly in New Zealand where our colonial legacy has influenced our style of theatre-making. ATC took a punt with Scenes, and we are so very glad they did.

In the lead up to rehearsals, Nathan, Ahi and I spent several weeks workshopping the text. We were keen to push the questions of the work further, moving beyond the didactic into liminal spaces of dreaming and the unknown. What comes after racism? How do we re-imagine what the world might be like, while its simultaneously burning? Once you’ve found hope, what do you do with it?

Nathan wrote several new pieces that ventured into an abstracted space, playing with things like manifestos, empty words, and the breakdown of language. Finding ways for identity to break apart and become meaningless and slippery. We then worked together to move out of this breakdown, taking inspiration from meditation and music to burst through (with comedy and lightness of course). The final poem saw Nathan solo on stage, after chaos and intensity, apologising. A last appeal to audiences to hear him out, a playwright trying to change the world.

I’m not sure if we’ll ever do Scenes again. Not as an amazingly resourced spectacle. I think the conversation is the same but it’s shifted…