B-Dragon Suite

Bridging South Korea and Korean America, Kafka and K-pop, Stine An’s B-Dragon Suite is a revelatory libretto for the absurdist afterlives of modernity-coloniality. In this dazzling debut, An queers, camps, tickles, and remixes language into a series of shimmering anti-translations, transforming a journey through the underworld into candy-coated spectacles of visual poetry. Accompanied through this mirror world by Lil Bang, “your favorite soft power ethno-nationalist global sensation *pop* boy band,” we watch as “bomb” bubbles into the balms and blossoms of bom (spring), as gutters fill with dreams of a lemon-flavored limitlessness. Underneath it all, a troubling question pulsates: “But has anyone told you what it costs to make it back out of the underworld just to perform your role well enough to save others?” In conversation with a rich tradition of feminist Asian/American avant-garde poetic practice, B-Dragon Suite is both highly referential and wholly original; an intoxicating, brain-scratching joyride that is also deeply moving.