KVT Together and a Little Higher

KVT Together and a Little Higher

KVT 2014

Vietnam in the 70s EN

KVT explores and expounds far too much on 4 dances

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After a scintillating contemporary dance performance the night before by the Together Higher company I was in high spirits when I went along to the same venue, same seat, same time.

The Together Higher group had given four respected, experienced local choreographers the chance to stage original concepts and I was excited to see the results….which ranged from a couple of moments of squirming in my seat to some flashes of excellence.

The theme of the program, Vietnam in the 70ies, was a bit of a challenge for me to get my head around but the decade that began with President Nixon declaring that he would like to nuke the north to primeval dust after trying to bomb Hanoi to smithereens over Xmas 1972,

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and ended with the Vietnamese army turning back the Chinese after their unsuccessful, but scorched earth policy, in the northern border towns and villages was indeed the most momentous decade for Vietnam as a fledgling nation on the world stage.

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‘TOTAL VICTORY’

With a lot of the world cheering on because Samson had defeated two Goliaths in one ten year period, unified two parts of itself after a long civil war

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, and also brought to an end a neighboring genocide, Vietnam had a right to feel proud and virtuous of even though it had to deal with soldiers and volunteer women returning home after extremely prolonged absences with all the PTS symptoms imaginable, implementing a collectivization policy in agricultural and industrial areas, rehousing urban populations, rebuilding and re-energizing bombed out and devastated areas and traumatized people,

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coping with a cruel embargo laid on by the defeated Goliaths and those countries they could bully into complying, realizing that a famine was imminent that could and would cause hard travail, encouraging migration to new economic zones in far flung and isolated regions, coping with the real and implied fear of invasion- while we empathetic lookers on from countries of safety and plenty crossed our fingers, blocked our ears to the pronouncements of doom from conservative news sources and some slightly demented governments, hoped and willed that all would work out for the best and that a people who’d been yoked under for so long by colonial and imperial powers would be able to step into a blazing euphoric dawn of socialistic individualism

Thus ended the seventies during which hordes of empathetic westerners who had protested and marched

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in favor of the oppressed and bombed and agent oranged

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and had a hero in Jane Fonda

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were parading around in bell bottom pants, tube tops, rayon and jersey fabrics, turtle necked shirts or flowered prints with fly away collars, hippie inspired clothes and jewelry , high platform shoes, hair a la Farrah Fawcett or long sideburns down the faces of the hirsute gender; with a bit of punky stuff creeping in to compete with lava lamps

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that lit up the areas where we sat around on floktaki rugs and played first generation video games like Space Invaders on cabinet like TV sets that dominated living rooms while our peers got their rocks off with Led Zeppelin or the Bee Gees and thought that JohnTravolta was the coolest thing ever, and the oldies mourned the recent demise of Elvis and kept on telling the kids to free up the phone.

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But enough already of my personal nostalgia…which definitely doesn’t wish to bring back the fashion sense, much less the Travoltas of that era!

As I’m too culturally and geographically, even if not too historically, removed from the time frame of Vietnam in the 70ies and carry my own baggage about it, I will extrapolate upon the intents of the architects of the four dances and apologize for misinterpretations. and also for the presumption of assigning translations dominated by the mythologies of my literary background

Quach Hoang Diep abstracted to a child locked inside a house while benevolent but strict parents went about the job of getting things done, not expecting that the child would disobey parental dictates and seek to undermine and stretch authoritarian boundaries or that outside influences may seep in to tempt and corrupt the young mind and make it angry about limitations imposed. and a bit deranged about being kept in the dark.

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It was a piece with huge possibilities, mainly because its four, young male dancers showed that they really had ‘the goods’, so much so that the photographer in front of me, even though we’d been asked not to take photographs or videos of the performance, couldn’t contain his desire to capture some images and his iphone lens lit up like crazy when the bare chested young males strutted their stuff. And boy oh boy, they sure were able to dance, very athletically.

I can rarely come to terms with adults trying to impersonate young people on stage and, for me,this didn’t work in this piece, though when three tempters pounced and strutted onto the scene the piece became dynamic and the choreography had a woa factor. An intertwining, gymnastic paux de deux was excellent.

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A golden carp imprisoned in an almost opaque plastic bag that was central to the minimal set was a great metaphor as was the balloon that wanted to float free but was tethered to reality by a long string and even when it was given the chance to escape and rise defiantly to the cloud painted dome of the theater, it was immediately captured by a young audience member in the front rows and it held in check.

Nguyen Dung apparently has had his choreographic roots embedded in the Vietnamese revolutionary dance forms of the eighties and nineties and in his work he attempted to combine the stylized ballet that promoted and constructed revolutionary glories with a contemporary movement ethos.

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His dancers were all students and though the four males almost had the goods the five females were a little lacking in vitality, or perhaps that was the purpose of the choreography they were handed.
The premise, as I saw it, was that the dancers were, perhaps like Godot, waiting for a sense of meaning to explain their existence. They were all presumably tethered to invisible strings that kept them within bounds even though they wanted to go in different directions. The males succumbed first into the trench of conformity leaving the females leaderless and fluttering about like butterflies soon to be brought to earth by the mundane realities of the world.

The audience involvement was a little tepid and at interval about a quarter decided to leave-though this may have had more to do with the seats being free. So while they fled I shifted to a little nook on the second level because I often enjoy choreography more when I see it from above…though up here the cameras were going flat out and below iphone screens were ablaze in their owners’ conservative acceptance of a herd mentality.

Dance four for three dancers by the only female choreographer, Tran Ly Ly,

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had an impressive male solo flung into its midst and that made me really glad I’d stayed the course.
For me, the intent of the dance seemed to be the despair of an individual wishing to blaze his own trail but becoming a conformist to the norm when the problems associated of being an isolated, of being different, of leaving all behind, hit home.

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The doorway that opens and shuts is guarded by two sirens, male and female, who give two options One to try to emigrate to a nether world with them and close the door on the present …it’s a delicious metaphor that door…or become conscripted into the known …which was the inevitable decision as the dancer becomes a clockwork character and marches in and out and around the immediate confines of the door in stiff legged precision accompanied by those sirens who are at once mocking the decision and at the other, conjoined with it.

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The last dance was choreographed by Quach Phuong Hoang who has had 11 years experience as a dancer/choreographer in France and Vietnam. The experience showed

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Unlike those in previous pieces the dancers were two very good, mature males and appeared to represent a traditional Buddhist culture coming to terms with new constructs. Fine dust was shed like the sands of time from suspended fabric lanterns over the bodies of the dancers, and the music…usually tympanied by one dancer…seemed to be tying to make sounds, birthed in and attuned to the past, catch up to an industrialized future (symbolized by a large iron fuel drum that was enshrouded in seeping dust, causing enveloping clouds when it was beaten to dents in clashes and clangs with a metal stick.

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The denouement was powerful with tradition being given a drink from the well of modernity which is immediately smothered by the dust of past histories and the sands of time that drift relentlessly on subsuming all that went before and all that will be in the future

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Excellent set, and competent all the way through except for a bit of repetitious movement …but a piece worth developing further as it would definitely become a contemporary dance hit.

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Once again my sincere apologies to conceptualizers and choreographers for my interpretations which most certainly veer wildly from their intent.

Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below.

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