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Taking a scalpel to these outdated and orientalist images, Scenes from a Yellow Peril violently smashes performance poetry, documentary theatre and political discourse together to create a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 was borne from rage. Across a number of years Nathan Joe wrote poetry about East Asian racism. It poured out of him. Hundreds of poems. In its early stages, the play wrestled with living in an unjust society. The tone was dark, spiky, and very funny. It existed on an edge.

After several workshops, we added to this narrative. We needed to grow the questions of the work further. New Zealand is racist, ok, what else? Who are we as East Asians to be complaining about racism? Isn’t it worse for other minority groups? Is there a way that we can all support each other?

We dug deeper and came back to home, belonging, the diaspora. We looked at whakapapa and what that meant for each of us. Nathan took language and mangled it, broke it down, and remade it.

We created a large-scale theatrical event for Auckland Theatre Company that was part slam poetry show, part writers festival and part live music video.

We tried to imagine what comes after racism.