Royce Ng

The performance by Royce Ng focuses on Olive Yang, the notorious drug baroness and uncrowned queen of Zomia, the mostly anarchic highlands between Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Yang, who had numerous affairs with men and women, assumed different gender roles and became a nun towards the end of her life, controlled the opium trade in Southeast Asia for decades. Royce Ng creates a labyrinthine web of narratives by com- bining the biography of this flamboyant female warlord with historical facts and research on opium cultivation in the Golden Triangle and his own drug experience. Conceived as a dialogue between a performer and his dream, the performance takes place within a glass triangle, where narration, computer-generated hallucinatory 3D-animations and the soundtrack by the Australian composer John Bartley meld to form an intoxicating whole. (esc)