Zara Joan Miller
“Year of the Dragon”
TX: Tuesday, 15th April – 12:00 – 12:20pm / Thursday, 17th April – 6:00 – 6:20pm BST
Year of the Dragon. A mother draws a circle. Spins round. Pins everything but the tail on the donkey. She wants to know how the dragon makes fire, gets inside it. On the inside things slow.
Written in the Year of the Dragon, Zara Joan Miller’s long poem traces fire across a year. The figure of Saint Margaret, who freed herself from the belly of a dragon, is relocated in living voices that challenge structures of oppression today. A year of feeding fire, of dousing and soft loving. A mother waits in disguise by the fire exit.
Zara Joan Miller is an artist working across poetry, performance and film. Her work seeks to unravel boundaries between human and non-human nature, often playing with movement and sound as a way of reimagining a body’s rhythm. Zara is the author of poetry collection BLUE MONDAY (JOAN Publishing, 2022), which was also released as a duo LP with cellist Ute Kanngießer (Reading Group 2023). Her work has recently been presented at Barbican Centre, Muse Gallery, Horse Hospital, Cafe OTO (London), In Vitro (Brussels), Default
Year of the Dragon is co-commissioned by Radiophrenia, TACO! and blurt. blurt is an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast on rtm.fm. In this testing-site for testing text, four artists and artist-groups consider radio broadcast as an expanded form of publishing. This co-commission is supported by the Outlands Network Exchange programme.