Gestures: The Six Tones in Hanoi
Sat 19 May 2012, 8 pm
Kim Ngan Temple
From Composer Kim Ngoc:
The Vietnamese Swedish group The Six Tones is performing at Den Kim Ngan (Kim Ngan temple) in 42 Hang Bac street on 19th of May at 20:00. Guests: Marie Fahlin (choreography) and Kim Ngoc Tran (composer and performer). Entry free.
This performance is an exploration of musical gesture: sound and visual movement. The Hanoi based composer Kim Ngoc Tran and choreographer Fahlin are developing a composition titled Chuyên Dich (Movement) (2011-12) which will be premiered (the first part) on Saturday.
Inside/Outside, an installation conceived of by Nguyen Thanh Thuy, in collaboration with the Swedish choreographer Marie Fahlin, to be premiered in November of this year, are part of this workshop. The first results of this work will be a series of improvisations that take gesture in traditional Vietnamese music as point of departure. The performance ends with a joint improvisation. The performance is organized by E- Center (Center for experimental music and art) and Nha San Studio in Hanoi and takes place with support from the Swedish Research Council and Malmö Academy of Music, Sweden.
The Six Tones
The Vietnamese language is a tonal language, using six tones or intonations. The Six Tones is a Swedish/Vietnamese project that works on a long-term basis on the amalgamation of art music from Vietnam and Europe. The group works by means of transcriptions of traditional Vietnamese music for Western stringed instruments and traditional Vietnamese instruments, free improvisation with live-electronics, and with new commissions to composers both from the West and from Vietnam. The Six Tones are Thanh Thuy and Ngo Tra My, two Vietnamese master performers, and the guitarist Stefan Östersjö. Since the project started, the trio has been collaborating with the composer and improviser Henrik Frisk, who has both composed works for the ensemble as well as toured with the group as a lap top improviser. The main ambition with The Six Tones is to create a foundation for a meeting between two distinct musical cultures on equal terms. Building on a concept of mutual learning, musical traditions from Vietnamese and Western art music are brought together into music that aims to reach beyond a mere collage-like superimposition of elements and strive for a more complex and experimentally oriented sound.
Marie Fahlin is educated at the School for New Dance Development (SNDD) in Amsterdam, 1988–1992. Fahlin has produced approximately 40 choreographies and her work has been shown in all of the major stages in Stockholm. In the last years she has also made extensive work in the public space, using both dance, music and visual art as part of the performances. Her work contains a wide range of forms, from solo pieces in silence on stage to choreographies for 20 dancers outdoors in the city center of Stockholm. She collaborates frequently with other choreographers and artists and she has also worked as a dancer with some of the most interesting Swedish choreographers. Fahlin has worked and performed in USA, Moldavia, Cambodia, Norway and Brazil. She has also worked twice in Hanoi, Vietnam, with both solo (extended to a duet together with the head of the VNOB Mr. Pham Anh Phuong) and a group piece performed at the National Opera. Fahlin is also a curator and producer of festivals and artistic development projects within choreography.
Kim Ngoc
Kim Ngoc is Hanoi-based composer. After study tour to CologneGermany, Kim Ngoc develops her own language by lots of interdisciplinary live-performances and her music-theatre compositions. Her recent works include The Absence which was commissioned and produced by 10th Munich Biennale Festival 2006; What Makes The Spider Spin Her Web – Euro-premier at Ultima Festival, Oslo, Norway in October 2008; Together Alone – at Mehrklang Festival,Freiburg,Germany in May 2010…
Movement is a recent collaboration of her and The Six Tone within the frame of Music Gesture project.
Free entry.
| Kim Ngan Temple 42 Hang Bac Str, Hanoi |
Review: Gestures – The Six Tones in Hanoi.
The title of this work, and the manner in which it was described is a thing at once extremely rare to see in Hanoi, and then very familiar to me. I’m also pretty sure that the intentions and aspirations of this group are unfamiliar to Hanoi residents, being at odds with both the contemporary popular music scene in Vietnam and the current experimental music scene here. However much at odds with the audience this kind of performance might be, they presented it with no condescension or any attempt to simplify the concepts, an approach close to my own heart. The evening performance was set in the Kim Ngân temple on Hàng Bạc, a perfect, atmospheric setting. The huge wooden columns bearing up the immensely heavy layered tile roof and the hefty stone tiles bore a great contrast to the ethereal music that emanated from this group of musicians.
The only unnecessary (but also necessary, as I’ll explain in a moment) part of the evening was the first one. A lengthy explanation and discussion of the history of the group, along with a discussion of the development of the performance itself ensued. All of this could just as easily have been provided in the (already lengthy) programme notes, or … left out altogether, to nobody’s detriment. However, once a performance/project receives support from an institution – in this case the Swedish Research Council and the Malmö Academy of Sweden – it is suddenly required to produce a body of documentation, and justify every movement with sentences like “…music that aims to reach beyond a mere collage-like superimposition of elements…”. The reason I’m criticising this will become clear in a moment.
Three parts – three contrasting, but linked performances – split up the evening nicely. It began with a piece for đàn bầu (Ngô Trà My), đàn tranh (Thanh Thủy), and electric guitar (Stefan Östersjö). Single notes pierced the evening air amidst the wafting hubbub of Hanoi traffic floating in from the street beyond. Their gestures carefully extended the sound beyond the realm of hearing, visually tricking our ear through the gesture which so closely mimicked the method of sound production, or equally it could be describing the shape of the sound inscribed on paper.
A careful crescendo led to the second half of the first part which incorporated traditional Vietnamese melodies – Stefan Östersjö changing to đàn tỳ bà, the culmination of which led into a careful breaking down of the constituent parts and continuation of the sound world through fragmentation, and returning again to a ensemble restatement of melody.
The đàn bầu and đàn tranh performers then moved under the gateway, and the performance continued, beginning to incorporate more performer choreography, with them facing one another, turning to face away, replacing the instruments and incorporating mirrored gestures and more musical interaction.
After this all the performers moved outside to begin a joint performance. Marie Fahlin (dancer) and Kim Ngọc (composer/performer) joined, along with a drummer (no performer details, sorry), beginning gentle movements in the courtyard space, freely moving around and interacting with one another. There was so much to follow in this part of the performance, with gesture, movement and sound all interacting, that this could have become a entire performance of its own. As such, it was a perfectly timed concentration of collaboration and interaction, each performer perfectly at one with surroundings, instrument and sound. This was the most sublime moment of the performance, and it was the perfect culmination of the evening. To return to my original gripe, this is the reason that a programme note isn’t needed – the music speaks for itself. Why try to explain something that speaks louder than words?
I don’t think I have ever seen such an impassioned, considered performance in Hanoi. I’m looking forward to their November collaboration ‘Inside/Outside’, and hope we see a lot more of them in Hanoi.
They have a myspace page(!) with more information and a recorded track of their performance, but I’d strongly recommend you wait to hear them live if you didn’t see the performance last night.