Golden rice and apples sliced: staging GMO controversy in Snow White and the Apple’s Revenge

ABSTRACT

In 2019, Artist Inc. and the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project presented Snow White and the Apple’s Revenge at the Likhandula Festival in Los Baños, the Philippines. Adapting the original Grimm version of the fairytale to challenge the validity of GM crops, it was presented in the town where the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is located. In 2019, both IRRI’s controversial ‘golden rice’, a new GM rice containing beta carotene to prevent night blindness, and a new GM apple that does not brown when cut were put on the market, providing the context for the performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Snow White
• GM crops
• golden rice
• applied theatre
• the Philippines

Notes on contributor

Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre and environmental literature at Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan, and the author of Communities of Imagination: Southeast Asian Theatres (2012).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. At the same time as the Arctic Apple, the Opal Apple was conventionally developed that also does not turn brown. Splitter 2018.

2. Reyes 2016.

3. Cotter, Erwood, and Truchi 2010.

4. Oh 2009.