Interview with MEN
Gabby Quynh-Anh Miller writes:
I will admit it, when I am in Hanoi, I desperately miss sweating it out in the dance club full of beautiful gays in San Francisco. It has been beyond my imagination that any fragment of the glorious dance nights that I leave behind in San Francisco would make its way across the Pacific. That is, until now…
CAMA is bringing an amazing show to Hanoi Rock City. Brooklyn based art + music collective MEN create an otherworldly dance experience. As MEN, JD Samson, Michael O’Neil, and Lee Frisari’s electro-house music will make you sweat.
Local heroes GO LIM – a mind-blowing, mostly ladies experimental rock group that just formed in Hanoi this year – will open up the show.
Do not miss this show.
Gabby spoke with JD Samson, the “wildly handsome GLBTQ icon, and former member of Le Tigre, who is the front woman to MEN”.
Below are some excerpts from their conversation.
You can read the entire interview on the CAMA website.
Your shows feel like a momentary utopia – a taste of total liberation. Can you describe that’s like as a performer?
For me, the show is an energy exchange, between us and the audience. What they are willing to let go of. Their vulnerability, the lines they cross. When I can tell that I’m trusted with human spirit, I feel not only worth something real, but I feel like we are all experiencing utopia. A movement. That’s true bliss to me.
MEN is often described as a queer music group. Overall, the idea of “queer” doesn’t exist in Vietnam. What’s your most useful explanation of what queer is, and how does that apply to what you do with MEN?
MEN began as a music and art collective that was focused on making conceptual work around queer politics. Queer to me means anything different than the norm. You can have a queer gender identity or a queer sexuality. Right now its an easier grouping to identify a group of people who identify as gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans and a lot of other things too. In this case one word is better than 15. And it’s nice to bring them all together into a bundle and a large community of people. MEN is part of the queer community. We make art for queer people and we are very vocal about queer politics.
A fundamental part of your work is creating a safe space for the queers to dance. Can you explain what safe means for MEN?
I feel that creating a space that is void of criticism or oppression. A place where anyone can be who they want to be. A place where intellectualism and creativity thrive. A place where your body can live exactly how it wants to be. These are all really important parts of what it means to be safe.
Artist Keith Haring is quoted on the MEN blog, saying “How do you participate in the world but not lose your integrity? It’s a constant struggle.” Can you tell me what this struggle is like for MEN?
Well, it’s very complicated to participate in art culture right now. There is a strict boundary at times between what is art and what is commerce. When your art is also your rent money, that simultaneous role the art plays can have an effect on the work itself. We try very hard to be able to stay true to what we do. Our conceptual work. Our art. Our political standpoint, but it gets complicated at times not to lose your integrity in order to possibly have an easier time of paying the rent. So, it’s a constant struggle for us, and most artists right now, to be able to continue to do what you do best, and push through the hard economic climate.
