Zendra Giraudo is WHITESNAKE3000

Performance artist Zendra Giraudo delves deeper into WHITESNAKE3000 as part of Co3 Contemporary Dance’s fourth IN.HOUSE season showcasing emerging makers. It is a new take on an old story, re-telling the Myth of Madam White Snake. A legendary folktale that has woven its way through geographies and histories in perpetual transformation since its origins in 11th century China.

Now Zendra, a Chinese-Malaysian-Australian, Queer, Buddhist raised Capricorn, and a vaping dance theatre artist, asks Madam White Snake to transform again.

The twists and turns of an identity in movement are unfolded through body, memory, and mic. A single tale unravels outwards to trace lineages of Chinese diaspora, Western dance forms and queer histories. In the intersection of half-researched histories, half-remembered mantras, and tiny facts in time and place, a profound connection emerges.

In WHITESNAKE3000, we find the community we wilfully turned away from, and although we may never find it again, this re-telling, stitches another version into the evolving history of worship to the White Snake.

WHITESNAKE3000 is devised by Zendra Giraudo alongside theatre makers Joe Paradise Lui, poet Andrew Sutherland, and movement artists Briannah Davis and Emma Fishwick.

This season of IN.HOUSE is curated by Raewyn Hill and supported by City of Perth.

The production was first presented as part of The Blue Room Theatre’s 2023 Summer Nights Season.