As the audience enters, a blonde woman drums along to an instrumental loop from Bowie's China Girl. It's a surprising, clever start to this clever solo show about the way performer Alice Canton experiences having one white and one Chinese parent.
An assured, strong presence with a wonderfully clear voice, Canton uses sound, light and movement as well as speech to express her personal, subjective reality - to great effect.
We see the process of making theatre onstage.
Listing racist remarks and restrictive stereotypes may seem simplistic at first, but this is mere preparation for some smart theatrics.
How those micro-aggressions collectively disturb the calm routines and certainties of everyday life is deftly portrayed using sound loops and live editing. Both Te Aihe Butler's remarkable sound design and operation are integral to the show (directed by Holly Chappell and Tom Eason).
Rather than being merely poetic, the short script comes across as hard-edge poetry. Repeating not rhyming, the poems are made with Canton's dancing body as well as her matter-of-fact voice.
