Friday, January 13, 2006

From an email:

I am Korean-American, and my worst nightmare is to make a show about Korea called Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven presents my confused, disturbing, and frequently offensive take on my cultural background in all of its romanticized, half-informed, and brutal honesty. The show is also about being in love and trying to be happy when you're so fucked-up that all you want to do is destroy everything in your path. But most of all, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven is about white people.

The show starts with a video of me getting hit in the face repeatedly (for real) and then launches into a weird pseudo-Korean world navigated by a Korean-American, who is kind of like a contestant wandering through different stages of an identity-politics video game. Then, out of nowhere, there is a white couple having a relationship drama. The Koreans and whites alternate scenes, infecting each other thematically and occasionally coming into direct conflict, until eventually the whites "eat" the play and we never see the Koreans again. A good chunk of the play is spoken in Korean and Japanese (see if you can tell the difference!) and there's some Korean dancing as well.