CREATED WITH: Therese Collie and Hilary Beaton
RECOMMENDED FOR: Tertiary Students
A PLAY TO: read, read aloud, study, perform excerpts or scenes, use as stimulus for making and responding, to produce to an audience with the following requirements:
NOTE: The permissions given are within Australia only. There is NO permission for this play or any scenes or excerpts to be performed or studied in classrooms outside of Australia. It may not be studied or performed in Hong Kong or China, not even in an Australian school or part of an Australian school curriculum. No section of any classroom performance of the work may be filmed or put on the internet or intranet, rooster.
CAST: A core group of performers (2-3) play a series of characters including Warrior, Grandmother (at different ages), Anna, the other Anna, teenage Anna, hawker, child, Mother, Husband, Father, customer at dressmakers, famous Australians, a taunting spirit – in reading and studying the play, characters/roles could be distributed quite broadly to build participation
NOTE: some of the characters in the original production appeared through projection or voice over (see the script)
STYLES: included in the script: storytelling, circus skills, physical theatre, clowning, magic, music, Cantonese/English languages, projection, allegory
THEMES AND CONCEPTS: Identity, family, culture, migration, death, grief, joy
SYNOPSIS: Three generations of women; Grandmother, Mother and Anna, make a figurative ‘journey’ from the mores of Old China to those of contemporary Australia. A tragi-comic, one-woman show richly realised through voice and circus.
In the play I set out to honour my ancestors, and now the publication takes that a step further. I strongly wanted stories of Asian-Australians to be out there, on stage; stories that are rich and not stereotyped and the whole thing speaking from my humanity to the humanity of the audience (Anna Yen, playwright).
STAGING: The script provides details about the staging of the first production through projection and symbolic set pieces and objects. Visually beautiful
