SCENES FROM A
YELLOW PERIL

BY NATHAN JOE

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Taking a scalpel to these outdated and orientalist images, Scenes from a Yellow Peril violently smashes performance poetry, documentary theatre and political discourse together to create a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

THE CIVIC THEATRE
A rehearsed reading
13 March 2021

My first public outing with Scenes from a Yellow Peril was its development and presentation as a part of Auckland Arts Festival 2021 (Open Stage). Before this, Proudly Asian Theatre (PAT) had granted the work its first outing through their “Fresh of the Page” initiative.

(I would like to note that Nathan and I had been developing Scenes, among other plays, since 2019. I was very taken by Scenes as a bold poetic offering in a main-stage theatre landscape that is drowning in naturalism. We 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 in Aotearoa. It allowed us to gauge audience responses to the play and build company with our performers, our creative team and our producing team. I’d like to highlight a few of the things we learnt, as testament to why layers of development and presentation are so important for new work.

Our original intention was to do a Q&A and run a 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. I played the role of host and came up with a series of questions to ask the performers throughout the reading. We didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity for the audience to learn about the performers, their thoughts and connections to the questions of the work, particularly their life experience with identity, belonging and racism.

We discovered the immediacy, vulnerability, and suprise 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.

The other thing we discovered through the reading was the power of standing still. Afterwards, many people asked us what our plans were for the full production, with many observing that the play reading felt like a complete show. As a director, I realised that the performers did not need to move around and embody the text in any way for it to be powerful. In fact, movement distracted and detracted from the enormity, beauty and wit of Nathan’s poetry. It needed to be used selectively. This was something I took into the staging of the final production.

ASB WATERFRONT THEATRE
Full production
21 June - 3 July 2022

Co-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

In the rehearsed reading Michael McCabe was our costume designer and Chris Tse was one of the performers.