Slay the Dragon / Save the Dragon

Created by: Jane Yonge, Nathan Joe, Leo Gene Peters
Sound Design/Operation: Chris Marshall

A Slightly Isolated Dog presents Slay the Dragon / Save the Dragon: a collision of magic realism, detached irony, and severe earnestness.

In 2012, after her mother’s death, a Chinese-New Zealander flew to China in an attempt to make sense of her ‘Chinese-ness.’ Instead of the identity eureka moment she had anticipated, she was flung into a strange, surreal, and funny dream – one that lingers through to the present day.

Slay the Dragon / Save the Dragon uses direct address storytelling, performance poetry, conversation, PowerPoint presentations, and more to explore our gymnastics around grief, our fear of facing the losses we’ve all suffered, and an attempt to understand who we are and where we belong when the world falls apart. It is a dedication to lost loved ones through a witty, ridiculous celebration of our complex and tangled identities.

Jane Yonge and Nathan Joe take us through a fast, funny, fragmented jumble that points to the non-linearity of grief and how we try to stabilise ourselves through identity and connection.